Thriving Roots: A Virtual Music Conference being put on by the Americana Music Association will include a conversation with acclaimed film director M. Night Shyamalan, and Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites from the Lumineers. The conversation will take place 4:45 PM Eastern time, on Wednesday, September 16. Passes for the conference are available here.
WATCH PREVIEW OF THE CONVERSATION HERE
Shyamalan is somewhat responsible for the sound of the band’s most recent album III. Sometime after meeting the director backstage opening a stadium show for U2 in 2017, the director asked them to write a song for the end credits to the film he was working on, Glass. After getting some direction from him on the band wrote and submitted “Salt and the Sea,” which was not like any song they had done before. “It broke down some doors for us, creatively,” explained Fraites. “It’s a darker song, very cinematic. It still sounds like a Lumineers song, but it’s far different than the previous two albums.” Schultz adds, “We initially had no plans to put that song on the album, but once we’d written it for him, I said to Jer, ‘Man, I really hope we can put it on our record’. We liked it so much. And then, as luck would have it, he told us it didn’t work in the movie, and that was more than fine for us. We accidentally got pushed into that direction, and I think ‘Salt and the Sea’ fits well with the energy of the rest of the album.” Shymalan, calls the song “insanely beautiful…one of my favorite songs.”
In conversation the three will discuss among other things, the importance of retaining creative control.
