In April of 2012, I went to Bull Moose Music in Brunswick, Maine, to get the CD of this band I’d been obsessed with since hearing their four-track session on daytrotter. The guy behind the counter looked it up on the computer. “The Lumineers? Hmmm…we should have one.” They’d ordered one, because this was before The Lumineers were The Lumineers. I looked on youtube for clips of shows, and found mostly house concerts in Denver: Jeremiah, Wesley, and Neyla in the middle of a small mob of their already-devoted fans.
Fast forward ten years and they’re playing to a crowd of 20,000 in Raleigh, NC. And unlike many bands that have had this kind of success, The Lumineers have not really transformed their sound. At their core, it’s still about a deep sense of rhythm, understated guitar, and Wesley’s truly captivating voice. The songs on Brightside, their latest record, are the most stripped-down since their first album, and yet they fill a 20,000-seat amphitheater because they are open and vulnerable and true.
It was totally blissful to hear songs like “Slow It Down,” and “Angela,” and “Dead Sea,” in this setting–a big family affair, everyone singing along. And when Wesley jumped down off the stage, belting “Never Really Mine,” in the middle of the crowd, it felt pretty similar to those living rooms in Denver.
But I was actually there to check out the opening band, Caamp. My concert-going chops are a bit off from COVID-times, because even though I gave myself what I thought was plenty of time, I was late. So I missed getting into the photo area for Caamp’s set. F-word.
I remembered the first time I saw Caamp, though–at Newport in 2019. They played a whole bunch of pop-up slots at the Festival, and I caught one where Taylor Meier jumped on a crate and belted out songs to a crowd that went from curious to enraptured in a matter of minutes.
Caamp’s set was fantastic. “Peach Fuzz,” “Moonsmoke,” and “By and By,” drew the audience in. And “Hey Joe” had so much fire in it. But it was the last few songs that sealed this set. There was this moment in “Vagabond,” a catchy song with the refrain, “100 miles an hour in the fast lane,” where the whole band stopped on a dime, paused, then–bam–came back with twice as much energy. It’s not fancy, but it is exactly the kind of tension and release that makes live music amazing.
I was sitting near a few Caamp super fans. They drummed on the seats, sang every word, and hollered. They probably were the first fans to get Caamp’s debut album in 2016, and they’ll be there in ten years, when Caamp is headlining.
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