Lotus jams out new tour, album
Oct. 3, 2008
With Hammerstrike's '70s-style recording, Lotus hopes to blossom into a more full-formed, cohesive band.
(Click graphic to enlarge)
Jesse Miller is living his personal dream as the bass player for the jam band Lotus. Last night his band began its national tour at the Mercury Lounge in New York, a city so full of movement and meaning that it's hard for Miller not to feel excited when he's gotten just where he wants to be. "Earning a living playing my own music is definitely huge - just getting to a stage like that, there's so much energy," Miller said. "Its kind of a rush that I can't get from any other place." Lotus is a five-man parade of intricate electronica laced with overly catchy drumbeats, all the while remaining completely guitar-driven. Similar in style to Sound Tribe Sector 9, the Philadelphia locals are regulars on the festival circuit. "Our biggest influence is Talking Heads, but we all like a wide range of music," Miller said. "We take influence from all types of groups new and old stuff going back to like Kraftwerk and older krautrock stuff, even classic rock and modern electronic stuff like Boards of Canada." Lotus has played the Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival in Lawrence, Kan., for the past four years, sharing stages with the likes of The Flaming Lips, Widespread Panic and Ben Folds. Miller said the festival's connotation with hippies shouldn't be degrading. "It's just a generic term to describe someone that likes a lot of different music," Miller said. "That's one of the defining characteristics, at least if you're looking at the positive. People who attend festivals like that usually have a really open mind to music, and they'll give everything a shot at least once." Even though the opening night of the band's tour hosted a smaller crowd, Lotus has played to upwards of 10,000 people at the All Good and Rothbury festivals. A week after Lotus's Columbia show, the band will release its third studio album, Hammerstrike. "It's quite different than our other two studio albums, but I feel like we try to change something pretty drastically on all of them or at least we have up to this point," Miller said. "It has a very live feel. We did all the tracking at the same time, just old school traditional '70s-style recording, but it still has modern elements. I think it's the most cohesive album we've ever made." Because Lotus is a jam band, recording in a studio is a very different experience. "Ultimately, if the songwriting is good to begin with and compositions are good in the beginning, then expanding something for the stage is usually pretty simple," Miller said. "I think sometimes it can be hard to go the other direction try to cram something that's initially live into a studio setting unless you kind of went at it from the idea of a studio recording first." For Hammerstrike, Lotus has changed labels to SCI Fidelity Records, a major change for the band considering its last few live albums have been self-released. "We do all of the production on the album ourselves," Miller said. "We just finish up everything and send it to them, and they just take care of the business, making sure it's distributed and promoted. We have creative control."
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