“Look at what just happened outside. Literally in seconds.”

Jess Wolfe reverses the phone’s camera, pointing it to her Nashville backyard. The downpour is torrential.

“It’s a monsoon,” says Wolfe.

“Oh, wow!” exclaims Holly Laessig, also on our Zoom call, but in a different locale. A few moments later, Laessig apologizes for “feeling a bit discombobulated” due to a summer cold. As such, she lets Wolfe take much of the lead during the conversation. Still, their opinions on matters of music and society coalign. And why wouldn’t they? After all, these two 38-year-old singers comprise the pop group known as Lucius.

Close friends since college, Wolfe and Laessig quickly discovered they produced unique, compelling vocals when they sang in unison. They are prone, as they both say frequently, to juxtapositions, and to that end are constantly changing their style, often from song to song on any given album. Their voices are bright, soulful, and sweet, and their songs are intimate, profound, and personal, crafted from the moments of their lives.

The pair’s latest album, Second Nature, released in the spring of 2022 and produced by Dave Cobb and Brandi Carlile, is the band’s watershed moment. It’s a luxurious piece of work, playful and poignant, filled with catchy melodic hooks and soaring vocal tapestries that range from ballad-driven folk to disco-fortified dance bops.

The pair will appear at Wolf Trap’s Out & About Festival this Sunday, June 25, in the massive Filene Center, just ahead of Carlile, a longtime supporter and friend.

“Wolf Trap is amazing,” says Wolfe. “We’re looking forward to being with our friends, collaborating, and being in a beautiful space. It’s going to be really special, and the lineup’s incredible. But we’re biased because it’s all our friends.”

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The Out & About Festival is Wolf Trap’s first attempt since the pandemic to create a major musical event, this one specifically geared toward the LGBTQ community and its allies. (Metro Weekly is a media sponsor of the event.) The two days will utilize the park’s full area, including the Children’s Theatre-in-the-Woods and the Meadow Stage. Festivalgoers will enjoy not only Lucius, but Rufus Wainwright, Yola, Brandy Clark, Bad Moves, Oh He Dead, Jake Wesley Rogers, and more.

“There’s a lot of new amenities at the park,” says Wolf Trap’s President and CEO Arvind Manocha of the decision to mount the festival. “There are some new outdoor pavilions and spaces, and the park’s looking great. So we thought, ‘What if we put something together that utilized more of the spaces out at Wolf Trap?’ We have a beautiful meadow and a lot of nature that surrounds us. We have a couple of other stages at Wolf Trap that are less widely known to our evening Filene Center audience. We were thinking, maybe it’s time to put something together that gets people to spend more time to really explore the park a little bit more broadly.”

Wolf Trap approached Carlile, who agreed to headline the two nights, and was instrumental in helping gather fellow artists — both LGBTQ and allies, such as Lucius — for the event.

“The wonderful woman who runs my programming department, Sara Beesley, said, ‘I think we should do something that really speaks to who Brandi is as an artist,'” says Manocha, an out gay man. “Both musically and in terms of her ideals and what she stands for. She’s obviously one of our most visible LGBTQ icons of the moment. And then it all kind of fell into place after that quite organically. We wanted to do something special with Brandi and make it bigger than just a regular concert. Something that was a little bit more all-encompassing, both thematically, artistically, and also geographically.”

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Manocha notes that the festival is “the biggest thing we’ve done in a long time…. I’m really looking forward to people just having moments of exploration. Part of what Wolf Trap was created to do was to be a natural oasis. When you leave your car, and you come up the hill, and you cross over, you’re no longer seeing Tysons or the city around you. You are very much enveloped in that natural landscape. And I think having people out for much of a day — or two, if people are coming to both days — is going to be just a little bit of a spiritual — or a natural, I should say — reset.”

METRO WEEKLY: Jess, let’s start with you. What got you interested in music when you were young?

JESS WOLFE: I grew up in Los Angeles, and my dad and I used to take long road trips to visit his parents. Well, what felt like long road trips at the time, having done many long road trips by this point in my life, they were actually quite short. [Laughs.] But I was a young girl and he would play all of his favorite tapes: Elvis and Sam Cook and Roy Orbison and The Beatles and Linda Ronstadt. Those were the artists I first fell in love with. All of those people had different types of voices, but such incredible voices and theatrical voices. I just really took a liking and an obsession with listening and singing along. It was also a way of bonding with my dad, so it was also very sweet in that regard.

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MW: Holly, what about you?

HOLLY LAESSIG: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and I first became interested in music because of my grandmother. She was a singer from a long line of singers and piano players, mostly in the church. She was the first one to be interested in pop music, pop music being very different back then, but I got into her Reader’s Digest piano books and they had all The Beatles songs and things. And me and my dad used to also listen to oldies channels in the car. That was one thing that me and Jess connected over early on. The arts scene was not that happening in the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio for me at that time, and so it was also a little bit of an escape, I think, my way out. I just decided that music was what I want to do and that’s what I did.

MW: How did you two meet?

LAESSIG: We met at school in Boston. Our roommates were friends first, and then we became friends through that. Then there was the one fateful night, Jess was having a house party with her roommate and we just got to talking about our musical influences and how we used to listen to oldies. We decided to do a cover show of The Beatles White Album, a girl group version, which, of course, never happened, but it was enough to get us together to start working on our own stuff.

MW: Where did you come up with the name Lucius?

WOLFE: My dog was Lucius — he was an English bulldog with an underbite that was crooked and jagged, and he was just such a character. He had this juxtaposition between goofy, silly, and just very handsome in his goofy silliness. We were writing a list of 500 names and checking which ones were taken, and somehow Lucius wasn’t, so we picked it.

We also thought it had a sixties ring to it when you said the name. Later on, we found out that the name actually means to come from light. Obviously, it’s also the root of Lucifer, so the idea that it’s both coming from light and the devil is a fun juxtaposition. And we like juxtapositions. So that’s where it landed and we stuck to it almost 19 years now.

MW: When you first sang together was the chemistry instantaneous, or did it take time to develop?

LAESSIG: We had two very different voices and we decided to do this cover of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” We both wanted to sing lead. At one point we started singing the melody at the same time, and it was because we had two different voices, when they were together, it sounded like this other thing that was neither one of us. It was like, “Oh, that’s cool. We could do that live and it’s like a double-track vocal.” It was an instant thing that we recognized and then honed in on over the years. Now, at this point it’s very, it feels like second nature, you know what I mean?

WOLFE: Yeah, it’s almost weird to sing without the other now.

MW: I’m the kind of person who gets stuck on songs and plays them on repeat for hours. One of the songs that I got stuck on from your latest album was “The Man I’ll Never Find.” Just an incredibly beautiful song, moving and deep. I have read that when you create your songs, you start with what you call “coffee talks.” You discuss what’s going on in your lives and write from there. What a fascinating way to develop songs — and that song in particular feels so personal.

WOLFE: We spend so much time together, and our lives are so intertwined — we’ve really been witness to each other’s life for such a long time — that when we get together to write, a lot of times it starts with just catching up on what’s going on. It often leads to ideas and thoughts on what it is that we need to write about. Not just what we should write about, but what we need to write about.

During the writing of Second Nature, I was going through a full-blown divorce — not that there’s a partial divorce — and so this was the first song that really paved the way for the themes of the record. It was the song that needed to be written first so that we could find the light in the darkness.

We were in Nashville writing before the lockdown was announced, before we knew there was going to be a worldwide pandemic, and we sat at Sheryl Crow’s piano, and it honestly just poured out. We wrote it in half a day with our friend Trent Dabbs. I think our best songs have been like this. They just come out, it’s like they were always meant to be. That’s one of them.

LAESSIG: We had been writing some other things, but it was the first one that was like, “Yeah, that definitely needs to be on the record. Let’s write around that.” Which produced some really fun dance songs, because, like we say, we like juxtaposition. We were like, “Okay, now we need some balance. Let’s do some really fun dance songs.” The lyrics will still be depressing, but the mood will be upbeat.

MW: The album does shift tones dramatically — especially songs like “Next to Nature” and the title track. They are essentially get-up-and-dance songs.

WOLFE: I think [writing them] was a coping mechanism. We’re locked in our houses, we’re not able to see our community, a lot of our family members. How do we find the light and the darkness going through these painful things alone? And I think it was our goal, for lack of a better word, to try and find something spirited to almost fake our way to survival. Fake it till you make it.

LAESSIG: Yeah.

MW: Was it a challenge recording the album during the pandemic?

WOLFE: It was delayed twice because of restrictions. Holly was also pregnant, so it was like a double whammy, being careful. People were still on heavy lockdown — less so in Nashville, which is where we made the record — but we were on heavy lockdown and we were still testing three times a week and weren’t seeing any friends. I think we had maybe two friends visit us in the studio and they were tested as well. We were very, very cautious. Nobody was touring yet. It was nothing like that. We were still in the heavy zone.

MW: What I love about Second Nature — all of your music, really — is that while there are similarities between certain songs, there is no similarity within your overall catalog. You constantly pop the bubble on each song. You don’t know what you’re going to hear next from Lucius, what style it’s going to be, what production approach it’s going to take. You decide to take your songs in whatever direction suits you.

WOLFE: It’s been a blessing and a curse. I think sometimes it confuses people, but also the artists that we’ve loved the most in our lives are the ones who took those risks and almost reinvented themselves every album. Look at David Bowie, he’s probably our number one and he was constantly reinventing himself, re-imagining the world in which he wanted to live in and whatever he was inspired by in the moment. We’ve always wanted to do that. Different phases of your life are filled with different colors and textures and meaning and depth, and why not honor that? I also just don’t think we know how to do the same thing over and over. Thanks for noticing that.

MW: I don’t know how you can’t notice.

LAESSIG: We see each song as its own world. I think songs have siblings, but with each one, we’re like, “Oh, let’s create this world for this song because that’s the emotion we want to convey.” And then we end up with all these records with totally different things all over them, but luckily a lot of people appreciate that. Like Jess says, I don’t think we know how to do the same thing over and over.

MW: You’ve set up the dynamic for us to expect the unexpected. You want a Lucius album to take you in different directions, and so I think that’s a strength. There are times you remind me of one of my favorite bands, The Roches.

LAESSIG: We love The Roches.

WOLFE: Yeah. We really should cover “Hammond Song.” We’ve talked about it like 50 times and we should do it.

MW: Do it, do it, please do it! Speaking of covers, you have a version of Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line” and recreate it in such a gentle, beautiful way — it changes the nature of the song entirely. Can you speak to the power of a cover song, of bringing your aesthetic to someone else’s hit?

WOLFE: We grew up listening to great singers re-imagining other songs. I always appreciated the way that someone else could reimagine a great song, and that a song can breathe many lives.

I think when we started singing together it was, we loved these classic songs, and let’s breathe new life into them. They’re such great songs already. It was always a fun way to, I don’t know, do something different in our set, and also to try and do something that people knew already while we were trying to bond with new fans, but give it a new spirit. We’re singers and we love singing beautiful songs. Not that that’s particularly deep, but it’s true.

LAESSIG: That was a great answer. The only thing that comes to my mind, and I don’t know how to really attach this, but Jose Gonzalez does really beautiful covers. We used to listen to him a lot when we were in our early days and just loved how he reinvented songs, and I think that is something that stuck. Maybe if you’re going to cover a song, why do it exactly the same way? Take some liberties and make it into a different feeling, or stretch the feeling.

MW: You spent a few years away from the band and did backup vocals for other artists, including touring with the legendary Roger Waters. Are you part of the creative process in terms of what you do with supporting vocals?

LAESSIG: Usually people are calling us because they like what we do, and for the most part they’re very loose with it. They’re like, “You do what you want to do on this. I just want you on this.” And because it’s not our thing, I think there is less pressure. And we do experiment, so we usually end up just tracking a bunch of stuff. We’re like, “Here’s a bunch of options, and you take what you want and leave what you want.” Occasionally in sessions that we go into, they’ll have a rough idea of what they want us to do, but we always stray, and only because they’re allowing us that freedom to experiment.

WOLFE: With Roger Waters, he really wanted us to be us on stage with him. He didn’t want us to be Clare Torry. He didn’t want us to be somebody who already existed in that band. He hired us because he wanted Lucius, and he really let that shine in his show. I don’t think we’re the type of singers that someone would hire unless they wanted it to be us, because we don’t know how to do anything other than ourselves. Even though we are very experimental and we know how to paint with our voices, there’s definitely a very Lucius thing that happens when the two of us sing together, and that’s the thing, luckily, that people have wanted to include in their own work. It’s been really fun and really creative to work with so many different types of artists.

MW: What was it like to work with Waters?

WOLFE: It was amazing. He invented rock and roll theater. He’s the one who really put on a rock and roll show where every minute and moment was thought about — the visual experience, the auditory experience, and the message. I think we learned a lot from being a part of that.

But we’ve learned a lot from all the different artists we’ve worked with, and how it is that they create and how they shape their art, and including us in that journey. Brandi, obviously, we’ve worked with a ton, and she’s always lifting up — not just us, but everyone in her community.

MW: Brandi is remarkable. The Out & About Festival was her brainchild. Neither of you are LGBTQ, but you are vocal allies. So let me ask, what does it mean to you to be an ally to the LGBTQ community these days?

WOLFE: I think showing up. I think being… I want to be really precise with my words, so I’m going to take a minute. It’s not just about vocalizing, it’s about being present. I think it’s about doing something that makes people feel included. Holly and I both grew up in situations where that wasn’t always the case, and it was really challenging to not be included as a young person and to feel different. As a non-queer person, that’s the way that I feel I can best understand what it feels like to be in the times that we’re in. And so I think being an ally is doing everything we can to make people know and feel that they are welcome, that they are loved, that they are supported — and the things that we do will always show that.

LAESSIG: That’s a beautiful answer. I agree with that, and I would just say staying present with the community, staying informed, being educated in what’s going on in the history of what’s been and teaching our children about it, and lifting and celebrating our friends in the community.

MW: Brandi Carlile is such an important person to you both. What is she like as a person, as an artist?

WOLFE: Oh, my gosh. I feel like she’s pretty open about all the things she loves and all the things she hates. I feel like she really shows herself through social media, which is why I think so many people are drawn to her — there’s a transparency there.

She shows her beautiful relationship with her wife and their family. She shows her love for the great outdoors and for building and getting in the dirt and boating and fishing, and her love for her idols and her heroes, and how proactive she is as an activist for those with lesser means. She is the hardest working person I have ever seen. She is nonstop. If you think like, “Wow, I can’t believe she’s doing this and that,” she’s doing more. She’s always 10 steps ahead and thinking about how to make it better. She’s a total force of nature, one in a zillion. And she’s talented to back it up. She shows up. She shows up.

LAESSIG: And she sends us flowers after every single performance.

WOLFE: She does.

LAESSIG: I could open up a stand at the farmer’s market with all the vases that I have from the flowers she’s sent.

Out & About Festival is Saturday, June 24, and Sunday, June 25 at Filene Center, 1551 Trap Road, Vienna, VA. Lucius performs in the Filene Center on Sunday, at 7:35 p.m. Tickets start at $75. For lineup and festival info, visit www.wolftrap.org.

For more info on Lucius, please visit www.ilovelucius.com.

Follow Lucius on Twitter at @ilovelucius.