Jeremiah Fraites Isn’t Just The Tambourine Guy

You know, talking about how people get trapped by success and that success itself can become kind of a failure. And in their case, in the Lumineers case, you got this huge song, Ho Hey, in 2012.. It's just ubiquitous, an unknown band that just takes over the world for a few months.

And I just began to think about that, you know, in terms of how do you react to that? How do you create after that? And personally, you know, I have some, I think, some, ability to relate, because The X-Files to me, you know, it's one of the biggest television shows of all time. So am I, after that point, after that huge success, am I going to chase that same success? Am I going to try and do another science fiction show?

Am I going to try and do another huge network show? Or am I going to try to create in a different vein? And I think one of the ways to get at a conception of failure, aside from, you know, how hard it is in the beginning to make it in the arts or wherever it is these people are trying to make it, is what do you do once you do succeed? You know, what happens when success starts to feel like a straitjacket or a prison, or a failure? When you become a brand, when your band becomes a brand, when you become a brand.

These are very interesting questions for a creative soul like Jeremiah to kind of consider, I think.

I'm David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are.

Jeremiah Freights is a founding member and songwriter in the band The Lumineers, alongside his childhood friend Wesley Schultz. And I'm a big fan. He grew up in the suburbs of Jersey, eventually relocating to New York and then to Colorado. Their song Ho Hey became a mega hit and catapulted their careers to new heights in 2012.. Since then, they've continued writing and touring, performing for a really loyal fan base.

This year, Jer has a solo album out called Piano Piano 2.

. Another thing to know is that Jeremiah lost his brother to an overdose back in 2001.. And this has had, as you might expect, a deep impact on his life and on his music, which is what we can talk about. In 2016,, Jeremiah decided to get sober himself after his own struggles with alcohol. And we talk about this too.

He married his wife, Francesca, in 2019, and they have two children together. She's Italian, so they split their time between the U.S. and Italy, where I'm talking with him now.

Nice to meet you, Jeremiah. How are you?

Me and my partner, Wes Schultz, the singer of the Lumineers, we started the band almost 20 years ago, back in Jersey. I was still living in Denver at the time. I moved to Italy about four years ago.

A few weeks before I actually left, we were working on our album, 4, called Bright Side.

This song, lyric, I usually help write the music, drums, piano, guitar, some melodies, all that stuff. I don't submit too much lyrics, but this one stuck. It was this lyric that, where we are, I don't know where we are, but it will be okay. It sort of came out of me, I think, in the moment. It was just the subconscious dribble that came out.

I liked the melody. I liked the refrain and the simplicity of it. I think it was post-COVID and I was moving from Denver, Colorado. Even moving from Jersey to Denver felt like a big jump, but from Denver to Italy, a country where I knew I wasn't going to be able to speak the native tongue. I was going to be very far from my parents.

All the things that excited me about the move equally frightened me. I think that your question is perfect. As an artist, too, when you're on your bed playing your guitar in the house, you grew up in, there's a certain staleness to that. When you move to a new zip code, and even a new country, especially where you don't speak the native tongue, the creativity just is through the roof. You see people waiting for a bus, they look different.

You see people in the park, you get a coffee, culturally it's different. They take the espresso and they go on their way. Just the whole nine yards, I think, has been one of the best things for me.

Like, oh, that's that guy from Jersey, this is that town in Jersey, whatever. It just sends you into this associative creativity that I think is rich.

Also, to be isolated, you're a big rock star. It's hard for you to get isolated in America. That's always. the tough thing about getting famous, is you stop being able to observe because you're changing the room when you walk into it. People are now observing you.

I think such a smart thing for you to do as a creative person, to get out of that and make yourself isolated in a way, with your own thoughts, with your own associations.

Maybe they're early to mid-20s. They interpret the world in a different way. Inevitably, you get older and you start to lose that profound insight that maybe you once had. Sometimes it's hard to get back, and sometimes you never get it back. I just love that quote.

I think moving to Italy has sort of been a part of that journey for me, where, it's true, you just can't wake up and be like, I'm so inspired right now. Sometimes that happens, but I do find every year that passes, you need to find new ways to really sit in front of the piano or pick up a guitar and to feel that. Whether that's in isolation, whether that's an anonymous walk along the river, a number of things having moved out of the United States, it's really been, I think, helpful for my creativity.

Yeah, it's a brand, and I think that that's really difficult to do. Alternatively, maybe even James Taylor, maybe he wanted to write a really hard rock riff and just felt, you know, every great artist feels inevitably trapped.

I imagine sometimes with actors, you guys have an idea of, this is what I want to do in this take. I want to cry, or I want to kind of cry, I want to scream, and you have, you know, maybe you do two takes, maybe you do 20 takes, and then the director is going to use maybe not the take you wanted, but I sometimes wonder, you have this expectation as an actor or an actress, and you want to hit this sort of, you know,

not objective, but this subjective, like, thing in your mind, and if you don't hit that, you almost might look at it as a failure, but in the end, you might actually see that take and be like, oh, wow, I actually beat the thing that I thought I was. Does that ever happen?

So if we're doing this scene together, you know, the editor is going to choose when to use you and when to use me, and there could be moments that I fucking loved that are on you, you know, because that's just the rhythm of the cut, or the editor saw it a different way. You know, the editor liked when you scratched at your nose a little bit better than what I was saying, you know, my face when I was saying what I was saying, so there's hundreds of movies that could be cut from the movie that you see. There's, like, a ghost that exists. There's 250 ghost movies out there that exist from this movie that I'm showing you, and it's all very much to taste, it's to skill, and it's to the tone that the editor and the director are going for, so the actor really has very little, very little power at that point or very little kind of control, and all you can do is try to be as present and as kind of focused and playful as you can.

And Tom Waits talks about that a lot, too, where he says every song, every idea is sort of like a person. Some people, they want to sit on a bench with you and wrap their arm around you. Some of them, you've got to, like, get into a corner and, like, beat them up and, you know, put them in, like, a chokehold and pin them down. And I've seen that so many times with songs that you think, oh, this one's going to be a piece of cake, and it just becomes your Mount Everest, and I think that if you.

don't pivot at some point, then it doesn't make any sense to just blindly keep going ahead. And I really love that quote that was said by Steven Spielberg.

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You know, I know that you were, you know, kind of raised in a church musical setting. Right? Your dad was involved with that. So I think that you, of all people, could relate to this. Or I see in you, in your musicianship, and in your changing your instrument, a search for a different mode of expression.

You know, just talk about transcendence through, like spiritual or religious transcendence, through music. Not specifically Christian or Jewish or whatever.

Michael's. And for me as a kid, it was just sort of the bane of Sunday. You know, it was like, you know, you had school the next day, and you would go into church and they made you wear these nice clothes. And I think the biggest high me and my brother would get, we would try to get like dirt on the clothes. We played soccer before and, you know, get yelled at.

And there was like free juice after the sermon. But it just sort of all went in one ear, out the other. And I'm not anti-religious by any stretch of the imagination. It just didn't work for me.

But I'm like, what is that? That's so crazy that we're listening to this seemingly arbitrary, like, you know, salad of these notes and these frequencies, and they make us shed tears, and we dive back to our childhood memory. The whole thing is such a trip for me, and I think that it's been.

incredibly spiritual for me, music. And it's given me so much back, and I feel like I've made my offerings back to music. I feel like I've given a lot to music, as much as I can. I've definitely put in my 10,000-plus hours, which probably 8,000 of those hours is failure, but then the rest is, sometimes you strike something cool. For me, it's even deeper that I just love being around patch cables.

I love touching knobs. I love having blisters and calluses on my fingers. I love picking up a guitar and sometimes not even playing it, just holding it and palm-muting it, and, like, watching the TV in a hotel bed. So it's a little bit of a selfish endeavor, too, that it helps me feel better. It helps me feel good.

I was, like, picked first, and I was on the select soccer team where we traveled to Dover, Delaware, and Connecticut, which at the time, it felt like, holy cow, we're going across state lines for the sport, and it felt like a big deal at the time, you know?

There was all different types of genres. There was everything from, like, heavy metal to rock, to progressive, to weird time signatures, jazz, really everything under the sun. And a lot of people, you know, a year or two below me in my graduating class and a year or two above me, even years above me, you know, me and my brother, we had about a three- or four-year age difference, so even he played a lot of guitar and my dad sang in the choir, and my mom was a nursery school teacher. She sang every day to the kids playing that acoustic guitar. She was like Raffi playing to the kids.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Have You Ever Seen the Rain? You know, that's just a great, great, great strumming song. Right.

It had to be fast and difficult. And then, you know, probably wrote, I don't know, between 50 to 100 songs with Wes before even that first debut Lumineers album came out. Right. Then, by the time that first album comes out, anybody that knows that album, it's just like some simple kicks and some simple... I think, there's like three crash cymbal hits on the whole album.

And I think for me, it was.

. I think for me, it was an ego check at the door, because I was like, man, I could play some pretty sick beats and nobody knows that. And they think of me as just like, howdy y'all, like this tambourine guy. I'm just like... And that was fine.

that's a keep or take.

. Well, yeah, it's cool for the ego to get involved and show off, but it can kill the song. You know, it often happens, like in my mind, with demos, you know, like you fall in love with a demo and you're trying to get that feeling that the demo has, which is often because it's not played that well. You're tentative with it, because you don't know it that well. You're really just creating it in the moment.

And there's something about that flirting with the failure, which is, which I see in demos.

You record a voice, memo of you singing and playing guitar. You're not really thinking about the context or anything else. And you listen back to that and you fall in love with that idea so deeply. The way you played it, the way the sound.

I think it is funny. I think, I'll probably say eight or nine times out of ten, there is something in that demo that everyone in the room is like, yep, demo's great. We don't know what you were doing, man, but it's just, you know, even it's so funny like with a guitar,

the setting and you plug it in with the guitar and then you change location and he's like, do you have a photo? You're like, I got a photo. Volume was seven. Reverb was two. Bass was four.

And it's like, it's identical. It still sounds completely different. You're like, this was the pick. This was the setting of the pickup. I was, like, you know, on the couch with the amp and same mic.

You know, because the instinct did that and now I'm going to try to repeat instinct. That's, that's a ridiculous, that's a notion, that's a way to fail, is like trying to make something seem instinctual. So, I, I totally relate to that.

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If you don't mind me referencing your brother, let's just touch on that for a moment. Like, you know, the beginnings of your musical kind of interest and career, literally by meeting Wes through him, is that right? Like, they were friends as well?

In 2001,, my older brother, Joshua, he, died of a heroin drug overdose. He was 19.. I was, I think, 15 at the time. I was just going, I was a freshman in high school, and me and my parents, we knew that he had problems with drugs and we knew that.

he had been having trouble then with heroin and he had gone in and out of rehab. and then, you know, just one of those tragic things, you know, relapsed and took too much, overdosed, passed away.

Brutal, brutal time in my life, obviously for my parents too. It was their firstborn son. He was my older brother, you know, there's a lot of, you know, we talk about Greek mythology, there was a lot of mythology. I put stock into that. He's my older brother, you know, this is now, in my mind, this is now my introduction to the world.

It's like, life sucks, there is no God, you know, the worst thing that you were worried about happened. I remember telling myself for the last six months to a year of his life, oh, you know, we'll like, we'll be drinking a beer about this, like we'll be cheersing a beer like, because I was so ignorant and naive and young about what, truly what he was dealing with. Sure. And so my brother, Josh, he was friends with Wes, and they were, I was friends with Wes's younger brother and we sort of all grew up together, you know, he was like, oh, my older brother's friend, and they had lost touch after probably the last few years of his life. But, you know, when he had passed away,

years later, Wes had actually come back from finishing university and, oddly enough, wanted to start a band with a mutual friend of ours. And, the mutual friend said, not without Jer. And that was sort of how me and Wes then reconnected and we started making music. But, in some way, I've always thought about joy and happiness in terms of mileage. You know, you don't get that much bang for your buck.

You get, you know, I don't know, five miles per gallon when you're in a good mood, happy. I think, in a weird way, grief and sadness, and depression and anxiety. If you know how to use it correctly, you get so much mileage out of that. in a creative sense. You can use that to, when you get to the bottom of yourself emotionally and you feel completely carved out and just really at a low point, I've sometimes thought of almost like a visualization.

You're going down deeper and deeper into the ocean and the sunlight starts to go away and you feel very sad and very depressed. But, when you get to the bottom, truly to the bottom, to the ocean floor, you can use that to push off of and head back towards the light.

You know, I think that it took me years to make sense of my brother's death. and I think, you know, I think, if I was a religious person, for me, personally, I sort of like wince or cringe at the idea like, oh, that's just, that was God's plan, you know, like he took my brother, that was, like, you know, part of God's plan and I, just, for me, I just, I can't, I can't go there, I can't get down with that mentality of something like, sort of categorically bad happening. But, I think that in my own, you know, religious, spiritual way of looking at it, yeah, I guess I hope that his suffering had ended and that he was so uncomfortable in his body. and that type of addiction, specifically, you know, opioids and heroin, it's just, it's so brutal, it's so, it's just, it's wild, it's just, you know, it ravages people.

and, I mean, maybe not literally, you know, that's the response, but this is what I see looking back. and then, you know, every time, and you do literally start making music with your brother's friend, and, you know, it seems to me that the grief that you're talking about is just encoded into the musical experience. for you, it's just part of it, you're not gonna write. don't worry, be happy, you know, that's not, that's not the plan for you, and that every time you write a song, it's like you're saying your brother's name to me, you know, if one day one knows your history, as you're telling me it, you know.

so it was this sort of interesting two things of like, I wanna pick up the drumsticks cause I'm, I'm just enamored with that, I'm attracted to that. it's like a, there's an attraction here. it's like a, you know, a beam lasering me in on, like a physical, visceral level. but then there was this other element that had almost nothing to do with music and or drums, but everything to do with. I wanna heal that family that lost their mom and I wanna make sense of my own confusion.

probably again, a lot of it comes back to my brother, I'm sure as a Psych 101, you know, would tell us. but I think, yeah, I found that really interesting and I think.

so

right? it's like, oh, I no longer have that thing. but what the brain does is it it learns the world again and again, according to this study, with the loss of the thing like it now needs to see the world as it is, without that thing in it now, and that's actually not a diminishment, it's a growth. you know, and I thought that's that's right. grief is actually a way of learning, and that's what I hear when you're talking about.

you know, your brother and all that, and I think, well, I hope, I hope that's true. you know, I hope that's true.

and there's that stark, objective reality you know, that you must come to terms with. but then how you deal with it emotionally and how, in the worst of it, it doesn't feel like you're dealing with it. it feels like it's dealing with you and just you know, running circles and just messing you up on like a anatomical, neurological level where you, you know, everything is just a blur. but I think, yeah, that's some great context.

but I think sometimes I just will write something and you'll see, like the word hat, and then you're like rhyme it with cat or like, you know, when you start to get in that very intense rhyme scheme and you start to, you know, stray away too far from something cool or something profound. so I don't, you know, I, I, I try to chip away at lyrics every now and then and I'll sometimes some cool stuff comes out of me. but I think for the most part I'm a musical man and but I'm gonna take, I can tell you, you want me to write more lyrics, I'm gonna take a stand at it.

you know like you need to be, I need to be alone, I need to and and and you've. you've not only kept creating within a family, but you went through a pandemic and created a solo album, you know, with a family underfoot. so I wonder if you if you could speak to to those kinds of uh. misconceptions or fears of failure in that sense.

but anyone that says drugs are bad categorically, you know. um, you'd have to take every great album you've ever listened to and throw it in the trash, because I mean The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and that's where you. I'm not saying that they made those because they were high on drugs, but it's a very complex issue in my head, and also it's a you know, in the world every country has their own ideology about drugs. but I think for me, I was probably at a young age, maybe like 13, 14 I was prescribed something called Adderall, which I'm sure many people know. what that is in America, you know, and it's it's quite literally.

it said like salted amphetamines on the bottle. I'm not kidding, salted? yeah, I don't know why, but it said salted amphetamines and uh.

and um, so did drinking. and you know when I was 20, when I was 27, I knew that I had an issue.

you know, just bong hits is my or whatever. you know Adderall prescribed it from a doctor. it's not, it's not a drug. you know alcohol is a social thing. and now I'm a musician, successful musician.

you know it's a. I think a lot of us we love the lifestyle. you know it's a, it's a cool lifestyle to, to summarize it very lazily, it's. you know, you feel like, oh, backstage, you're in the band and hotel and it catches up with you, and I think for me it just stopped stopped working for me. so when I was 27, I probably knew it was time to quit and then probably took me two years to actually come to terms with it.

and I think the Adderall was the hardest thing to give up. I think that I was really worried that it was a crutch of my creativity right.

I've never been more creative in my entire life and David, I promise you when I say that that was the biggest, that was the biggest thing I was so afraid of, I. I went to a few AA meetings. I hated them. it felt like if I disliked religion. as a kid in Wayne, New Jersey, I really disliked the AA program.

I won't go on a tirade about that, but I, it just was not for me, it was not my vibe. and but I had. I met with a sponsor for like one day and he said Jer, when you get sober, you're going to become even more creative. and I remember looking him in the eyes and thinking man, what a crock of shit. this is like a dare officer being like hey son, don't smoke grass like you can.

just you can do it, you know, reach for the sky, you can do it. and I just was so you know, not thinking that that was going to happen and I got sober and then we made our third album, The Lumineers, and then I jumped right into my first piano piano album. I've I've never been more prolific in my. my creativity, my connection with music, my connection with my wife, my connection with my two kids has never been stronger again. this is not me preaching to get out there.

one of the things I'm thinking about most after this discussion with Jeremiah is where we got into grief grief over the loss of his brother to an overdose, and I think about failure in the sense of grief, and that failure feels like a diminishment. failure feels like a loss and in many ways it can be yes on the surface, yes, but maybe the brain grows through failure just like it grows through grief. maybe the brain has to now readjust to a world in which that failure happened. I think grief and failure are very closely related, and that's something that I'm glad we got to in this discussion and something I'd like to continue to talk about more.

we're now in Apple Podcasts. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. it is produced by Keegan Zemma, Aria Bracci, Donnie Matias and Paula Kaplan. our engineer is Brian Castillo. our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson.

our VP of new content is Rachel Neal, special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Krupinski and Brad Davidson. the show is executive produced by Stephanie Whittles-Wax, Jessica Cordova-Kramer and me, David Duchovny. the music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart Davis, Rowan and Sebastian Modak. you can find us online at Lemonada Media and you can find me at David Duchovny. follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership.

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