© 2025 WSHU
NPR News & Classical Music
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

The Lumineers explore the ups and downs of lifelong friendship on 'Automatic'

Bob Sweeney
/
WXPN

For two decades, Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites have been writing songs, recording and touring together as The Lumineers. But, as Schultz says, their relationship goes way beyond that.

"It's 20 years, and we also grew up in the same hometown, where he was friends with my younger brother," Schultz says. "I was friends with his older brother, so it's, like, I remember family trips where you and your brother came with us."

In this session, Schultz and Fraites talk about the latest journey they took together: making the new Lumineers album, Automatic. They'll perform songs from it live, including a song about their friendship.

"['You're All I Got'] kind of talks about the struggles of literally, like, if I go this way, he feels it with this, like, rope," Fraites says. "Sometimes, it's almost like the rope has, like, a barb in Wes' stomach and vice versa. He wants to go left and I wanna go right."

The band also talks about self-producing Automatic and the way their songwriting has changed over the years.

Set List

  • "Same Old Song"
  • "So Long"
  • "Stubborn Love"
  • "Gloria"
  • "You're All I Got"
  • "Gun Song"

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod and Will Loftus. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams and our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson.

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).