Everybody Loves Lucius

As I mentioned, I've seen, I've had the pleasure of seeing you perform multiple times at the Newport Folk Festival.

That festival, which is sacred to so many musicians, is really a celebration of community, collaboration, the greater good.

And you seem to perfectly embody those values in your own career, in your own lives.

Can you talk a little bit about what Newport means to you and how that spirit of supporting other musicians has carried over into your own work and your own life as artists?

I mean, it's really the most collaborative festival, I think, on the planet.

So I think we're natural collaborators.

We collaborate the two of us together.

And so it's fitting that...

It's sort of a, come sing on this.

Would you make up a part for X, Y, or Z? Or Jay Sweet, who runs the festival, you know, there have been some special guests that have really sort of like changed our lives.

And so there's moments at that festival that even if we were asked ahead of time, like that sort of like shaped our careers and were like some of the most surprising, rewarding experiences of our life.

We sang with Mavis Staples there for the first time.

We performed with Jeff Tweedy.

The first time we sang with Roger Waters before he had even thought to ask us on tour or on his record happened at Folk Fest, My Morning Jacket.

I mean, some of the most special moments of our careers really started there.

And so if you look at the list of all the artists that you've recorded with and that you've, you know, joined on stage and you elevate every set, every song that you become a part of, Did that just happen organically or did it become sort of like sort of a strategic decision like, oh, we can continue to expand our audience in this way because these musicians love you and indirectly, you know, their fans are going to discover you.

And I'm sure that people keep discovering you at this stage in your career because of that approach.

I'm sure that it has brought about a new audience or like different ears to our own band, like having performed with Roger and Joni and all of these just legendary, brilliant artists.

people it's also expanded our musical identity and how we approach music and how we approach a show it's definitely not something that we were like this is a good business decision or something you know like it had to feel natural um honestly at times it might have even hurt us the amount of collaboration because people start to assume that we're background singers and this has been you know and not that there's anything wrong with that but just because we have our own band and we've been working you know for many years to try and grow and build and evolve I think sometimes it confuses people, but all that being said, I mean, we are just natural collaborators.

We collaborate every single day, the two of us.

So it makes sense.

And we're so used to singing together.

So it is an automatic choir of sorts.

It's a, yeah, I think there is a little bit of the blessing and the curse in it, but mostly it's just been such a, you know, again, some of the more special moments of our lives.

Right.