The Lumineers Stelth Ulvang talks with Brett Newski about Dahmer, band feuds, weezer, end of music journalism, replying to emails, myspace and the over-abundance of competition in America. Dirt from the Road podcast…
Stelth and Newski live
EXCERPT:
Brett: We actually know each other through our friends in South Africa, The Shabs. They’re some of my best friends, and your best friends, and I had heard them talking about you for years. Every time I went out there to tour I’d have missed you by just a week or two.
Stealth: Yeah, they kept trying to make us into nemeses. They’d be like, “Stealth, you just missed your nemesis,” and I’d be like, “Hitler? Who are you talking about?” and they’d say, “No, Brett Newski,” and I’d respond, angrily, “Newski!”
Brett: Yup that’s me, I’m pretty horrible
Stealth: It was apparently only you they did this about, and I looked up your track record, and you didn’t seem to have murdered anyone or done anything too terrible.
Brett: Well I do live 30 blocks from Jeffrey Dahmer’s old apartment. I do think there’s something about rivalries in music. Though is that still a thing? Like hip hop rivalries, or Indie rock hipster doofus rivalries?
Stealth: Well, for those of you who don’t know, I’m Stealth Ulvang, and I play with a band called The Lumineers…
Brett: Never heard of them.
Stealth: Just a folk band that plays in very large stadiums, in case there are people listening who are unfamiliar. But if you know the band Mumford and Sons, people really want us to have a rivalry with them. More than we do ourselves. If a track of theirs comes out, articles will use us as a reference point, like, “Man, this blew the new Lumineers record out of the water.”
And then there’d be a write up about our album and would say, “Wow they really showed Mumford and Sons on this one” and we think, “Who’s making this rivalry happen?”
Brett: Well they’re not really doing the folk thing anymore, so maybe you guys need to go more garage rock or something.
Stealth: We haven’t been doing the folk thing that much for the last two records. You know, people would do write ups where they would ask, “What inspired you all to use a banjo in your music,” and we’d be like, “There’s no recording, ever, of us playing a banjo.”
I mean, I play the banjo, and sometimes we’ll tinker around on a banjo. They exist in the practice room, but they’ve never been filmed or recorded with our band.
Maybe that’s just to keep that sweet buffer between us and Mumford and Sons.
*More on Stelth: http://stelthulvang.com/
