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Jeremiah Fraites, co-founder of The Lumineers, says he’s not a lyricist. Yet he matches me quote for quote as we discuss creativity, grief, and giving up control. The conversation takes us a lot of places – like to the free-throw line, and to church. As a fellow father and musician, it’s a treat to see so many sides of Jeremiah, as is getting to reference Spielberg and Metallica in one sitting.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Jeremiah Fraites, David Duchovny

 

David Duchovny  00:00

Yeah, one of the things I am interested in talking to Jeremiah Fraites about is, and we talk about a little in the interview where you’re talking about how people get trapped by success, and that success itself can become kind of a failure. In their case, in the Lumineers case, you got this huge song Jorge in 2012 it’s just ubiquitous, an unknown band that just takes over the world for a few months. And I just began to think about that, you know, in terms of, how do you react to that? How? How do you create after that? And personally, you know, I have some, I think, some ability to relate, because the X Files to me, you know, it’s one of the biggest television shows of all time. So am I after that point, after that huge success, am I going to chase that same success? Am I going to try and do another science fiction show. Am I going to try and do another huge network show? Or am I going to try to create in a different vein? And I think one of the ways to get at a conception of failure, aside from, you know how hard it is in the beginning to make it in the arts or wherever it is these people are trying to make it, is, what do you do once you do succeed? You know what? What happens when success starts to feel like a straitjacket or a prison or a failure, when you become a brand, when your band becomes a brand, when you become a brand, these are very interesting questions for a creative soul like like Jeremiah to kind of consider, I think.

 

David Duchovny  01:48

I’m David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are.

 

David Duchovny  02:00

Jeremiah Fraites is a founding member and songwriter in the band The Lumineers, alongside his childhood friend Wesley Schultz and I’m a big fan. He grew up in the suburbs of Jersey, eventually relocating to New York and then to Colorado. Their song Jorge became a mega hit and catapulted their careers to new heights in 2012 since then, they’ve continued writing and touring, performing for a really loyal fan base. This year, Jer has a solo album out called Piano. Piano two, another thing to know is that Jeremiah lost his brother to an overdose back in 2001 and this has had, as you might expect, a deep impact on his life and on his music, which is what we can talk about. In 2016 Jeremiah decided to get sober himself after his own struggles with alcohol, and we talk about this too. He married his wife, Francesca in 2019 and they have two children together. She’s Italian, so they split their time between the US and Italy, where I’m talking with him now.

 

David Duchovny  03:02

Nice to meet you, Jeremiah. How are you?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  03:10

Likewise, nice to meet you. I’m doing good. How are you doing?

 

David Duchovny  03:13

I’m great. Where are you?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  03:14

In Turin, Italy, where I live.

 

David Duchovny  03:16

Okay, yeah, I was just in Greece for about six weeks. We should have done this. Then we’d be in the, same kind of time of day.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  03:23

Yeah, I’ve never been to Greece. How is it over there?

 

David Duchovny  03:26

You know, it’s for me. It was the home of all those myths, you know, that I that I read about when I was a kid. So I, I kept on seeing that everywhere, you know, I just kept on imagining, you know, this is where, for better, for worse. This is where our culture came from. You know, I don’t know maybe I wasn’t in Greece. I was in my head the whole time.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  03:46

Yeah, obviously, that’s cool too.

 

David Duchovny  03:48

Did you find that, you know, being in Italy, do you find when you relocate, or when you go to a new place like that, how, how has that kind of major brain and soul adjust, you know, coming from Jersey, which I want to talk about some from New York. But, you know, that kind of dislocation, I think, is, is a real spur to creativity into new thought.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  04:12

Yeah, big time. I mean, we were actually me and my partner, Wes Schultz, the singer of The Lumineers. We started the band almost 20 years ago, back in Jersey, and I was still living in Denver at the time, and I moved to Italy about four years ago, and about a week, a few weeks before I actually left, we were working on our album four called Brightside. And this song lyric, I usually help write the music, drums, piano, guitar, some melodies, all that stuff. But not I don’t, you know, submit too much lyrics, but this one stuck. And it was this lyric that where we are. I don’t know where we are, but it will be okay. And it sort of came out of me. I think in the moment. It was just the subconscious dribble that came out. Yeah, and I liked the meld, and I liked the refrain and the simplicity of it, but I think it was post covid, and I was moving from Denver, Colorado. And even moving from Jersey to Denver felt like a big jump. But from Denver to Italy, you know, a country where I knew I wasn’t going to be able to speak the native tongue. I was going to be very far from my parents. All the things that excited me about the move equally frightened me. And I think that your question is perfect, because, like, yeah, when you as an artist, too, when you’re on your bed playing your guitar in the house grew up in, there’s a certain like staleness to that, you know. And I think when you move to a new zip code and even a new country, especially where they you don’t speak the native tongue, the creativity just is, you know, through the roof. You see people waiting for a bus. They look different. You see people in the park. You get a coffee. Culturally, it’s different, you know, they take the espresso and they go on their way, just the whole nine yards. I think it’s been one of the best things for me.

 

David Duchovny  05:59

But it’s interesting for me, you know, just traveling, forget about getting up and moving, that would be amazing. But just traveling, your antenna just goes up, because everything, all of a sudden is new. Everything is landing, you know, in a way that’s different. And I think your mind tries to make sense of it by your own homegrown, you know, sense, whatever, like, oh, that’s like that guy from Jersey, that’s, you know, that this is, like that town in Jersey, whatever. And it just sends you into this kind of associative creativity that, I think is really, it’s, it’s rich, you know, as and also to be isolated, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re a big rock star, you know, it’s hard for you to get isolated in America. You know, that’s always like. The tough thing about getting famous is you stop being able to observe because you’re changing the room when you walk into it, people are now observing you. And I think such a smart thing for you to do as a creative person, to get out of that and make yourself isolated in a way, with your own thoughts, with your own associations.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  07:06

I think, I think the isolation is really good, and I think Jeff Tweedy Wilco said this, that young artists, you know, wait to be inspired, and older artists, you need to go out and find it. And I relate to that so dearly. You know, I’m only 38 but I mean, the first, you know, from 15-14 when you start to pick up that first drum set and guitar and piano, everything’s new, and your brain is just approaching the creative, you know, room, so to speak, in such a brand new way. And that’s why a lot of artists, you know, they tend to break out young, and maybe they’re, you know, early to mid 20s, they interpret the world in a different way. Inevitably, you get older and you start to lose that profound insight that maybe you once had, and sometimes it’s hard to get back, and sometimes you never get it back. And I think I just love that quote. And I think, you know, moving to Italy has sort of been a part of that journey for me where it’s true. You just can’t wake up and be like, oh, I’m so inspired right now, sometimes that happens, but I do find every year that passes, you need to find new ways to really, you know, sit in front of the piano or pick up a guitar and to feel that. And whether that’s an isolation, whether that’s an anonymous walk along the river, a number of things. Having moved out of the United States, it’s really been, I think, helpful for my, you know, creativity.

 

David Duchovny  08:27

I myself have, like, started very late in life, writing fiction, but also learning an instrument and making music. And I’ve found that, you know, you talk about the young inspiration, and that’s for sure, a thing, but an older inspiration. I value that as well, because I think it’s coming from a different place. But I also found that when I was doing new things, I got access to that young inspiration again, in a way, because my brain was like, This is fucking totally new. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just a kid and I’m 55 or whatever when I’m doing it, or 50. And I think when I look at you, and I look at you, you know, not only doing some solo stuff out of the comfort zone, out of whatever you’ve been doing since you were young, but also branching out into other instruments, I wonder if you feel that kind of, I don’t know if you call it plasticity, but I call it like Zen Mind, beginner’s mind. It’s just like, wow, this is all so new, and it’s making me think a different way, making me think like a young like a baby.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  09:30

Yeah, I think that’s the key for me and my longevity in this in this profession. I think that, you know, in addition to Lumineers, I’ve released, I think, technically, three solo albums, all instrumental. You know, I’m looking into scoring and composing for films. That’s another huge passion project of mine. And, yeah, I think that it’s the irony of branching out and doing other projects. And I think this has been the fall of some really great brand great bands like I watched this Metallica. Documentary called some kind of monster.

 

David Duchovny  10:02

I love that.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  10:03

Yeah, that’s just.

 

David Duchovny  10:04

I’m Dr, Bob.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  10:06

Kudos to, you know, the Metallica band, particularly James Hetfield and Lars, who don’t really come across as, you know, nice, peachy dudes. They’re sort of like Jason, I think the bassist. They’re like, yeah, you’re either in Metallica only, or you’re out, and he’s like, I’m fucking out. I’m just like, This is crazy, how can you walk away from that band, and how can you also put on an ultimatum that really, at the end of the day, really wouldn’t have made? I think it would have made him a better Metallica member. And I think that was the the nearsightedness and the mistake of of maybe James, and probably stemming from fear of insecurity. But I think for me, doing these side things actually makes me stronger. To go back to the Lumineers, and then when you finish the Lumineers project or tour, I’m doing something new. And I think that you know.

 

David Duchovny  10:56

In what way do you think it makes you stronger? Can you elaborate on that?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  11:00

I’ve always thought about this. I’ve always thought particularly two bands. If you’re in Rage Against the Machine or Metallica, you’re constantly having to come up with these insanely badass heavy riffs all the time. There’s not really much room for experimentation, per se. There’s not really much room for hey guys, let’s get really quiet on the song. It’s just constant bombardment of, like, it’s got to be heavy. It’s got to be this brand. Yeah, it’s a brand. And I think that that’s really difficult to do, you know, alternatively, maybe even James Taylor, maybe he wanted to write a really hard rock riff, and just felt, you know, every great artist feels inevitably trapped.

 

David Duchovny  11:35

Well, he did do steamroller blues, didn’t he?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  11:38

That’s true, yeah. So that was his, that was his rebellious age. And I think that that like, you know, it’s like when you work out and your muscles, quite literally rip and break and you get stronger. I think mentally, it’s sort of like running these marathons or these triathlons where you’re trying new things. And I sometimes think about this with actors, like with musicians, we get to write our stuff, and we’re just in total control. We write it, we produce it, you know, we mix it. We’re like, that’s the thing. I imagine sometimes with actors, you guys have an idea of this is what I want to do in this take. I want to cry, or I want to kind of cry, I want to scream. And you have, you know, maybe you do two takes, or maybe you do 20 takes, and then the director is going to use, maybe not the take you wanted. But I sometimes wonder, you have this expectation as an actor or an actress, and you want to hit this sort of, you know, not objective, but the subjective, like thing in your mind. And if you don’t hit that, you almost might look at it as a failure, but in the end, you might actually see that take and be like, Oh, wow, I actually beat the thing that I thought absolutely, does that ever happen?

 

David Duchovny  12:44

It happens all the time. And first, I just want to respond to what you’re saying about, you know, with Metallica, and that, what I would call, like, the failure of success in a way, you know, where you get locked in to not wanting to grow in certain ways, or take chances, and that that success can become a kind of, almost like a spiritual failure, not saying that those guys are failures in any way. You know, I love their stuff. When I hear saying, you can get into, like, even when you start thinking about brand or, you know, how do people perceive me? And I gotta, like, tick that box. No, that’s, that’s kind of a death right there. But when you’re talking about acting, not only are you not in control of the take that gets used, but you’re not in control of what part of that take you’re actually going to see in the movie, because there’s all these cuts around it, right? So if we’re doing this scene together, you know, the editor is going to choose when to use you and when to use me. And there could be moments that I fucking loved that are on you right? You know, because that’s just the rhythm of the cut, or the editor saw it a different way. You know, he the editor liked when you scratched at your nose a little bit better than what I was saying. You know, my face when I was saying what I was saying. So there’s, there’s hundreds of movies that could be cut from the movie that you see, there’s like a ghost that exists. There’s 250 ghost movies out there that exist from this movie that I’m showing you. And it’s all very much to taste, it’s to skill and it’s to the tone that the the editor and the director are going for. So the actor really has very little, very little power at that point, or very, very little kind of control, and all you can do is try to be as present and as as kind of focused and playful as you can.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  14:31

I mean, as an actor, I imagine maybe that makes it liberating to an extent too, that you’re like they might not use anything I like, so fuck it. I just need to do my thing.

 

David Duchovny  14:41

Yeah, and, well, that’s what happens. You kind of have to fall in love with the process. But as an actor, there is something liberating about I’m just gonna do what I do. And, you know, trust these people that I’ve thrown in with to take care of me or to take care of the project.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  14:57

I just heard this quote, and there’s. So many quotes these days that are misattributed to the wrong people because of internet.

 

David Duchovny  15:04

Let’s just say that now, yeah.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  15:06

Let’s just say Steven Spielberg said this because it sounds very Steven Spielberg. So Steven Spielberg, I read, said, if you made the movie you set out to make, then you failed somewhere along the way. And I just, I really love that because, you know, we’ve made a handful of albums Lumineers, and I made a handful of albums myself. And I just love the idea that if you you have these ideas of, I want to make a happy song or a sad song or a fast song, like inevitably, somewhere along the way, there will be a crossroads of, don’t keep going. This idea sucks, please stop, please change. And Tom Waits talks about that a lot too, where he says, every song, every idea, is sort of like a person. Some people, they want to sit on a bench with you and wrap their arm around you. Some of them, you got to, like, get into a corner and, like, beat them up and put them in like, a choke hold and pin them down. And I’ve seen that so so many times with songs that you think, oh, this one’s going to be a piece of cake, and it just becomes your Mount Everest. And I think that if you don’t pivot at some point, then it doesn’t make any sense to just blindly keep going ahead. And I really love that quote that will say is said by Steven Spielberg.

 

David Duchovny  16:23

It is now. It is now said by Steven Spielberg.

 

David Duchovny  16:51

You know, I know that you were, you know, kind of raised in a in a church musical setting, right? Your dad was, was involved with that. So I think that you, of all people, could relate to this, or I see in you, in your musicianship and in your changing your instrument, a search for a different mode of expression. You know, just talk about transcendence through like spiritual or religious transcendence through music, not specifically Christian or no.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  17:20

Yeah, whatever, yeah, no, it’s funny. I’ve always thought of the Lumineers as my church without religion, as you sort of alluded to when I was younger, growing up in New Jersey, grew up in Ramsey, New Jersey, North New Jersey. My mom and dad sort of forced me and my brother to go to church. It was about 30 minutes away from our home in Wayne, New Jersey, at this church called St Michael’s, and for me as a kid, it was just sort of the bane of Sunday. You know, it’s like, you knew you had school the next day and you were going to church, and they made you with these nice clothes. And I think the biggest high me and my brother would get, would we would try to get, like, dirt on the clothes we played soccer before and, you know, get yelled at, but, and there was, like, free juice after the sermon, but it just sort of all went in one ear out the other. And I’m not anti religious by any stretch of imagination. It just didn’t work for me, right? I’m deeply spiritual, but not with any specific name to it or denomination. And I think that for me, music, you know, I still can’t get over like goosebumps. We take that for granted, like you’re listening to some random concoction of frequencies that are making the hairs on your arms and sometimes even your chest and your sternum, like you must have these full body goosebumps. And that’s such a an amazing feeling. But I’m like, what is that that’s so crazy that we’re listening to this seemingly arbitrary like, you know, salad of these notes and these frequencies, and they make us shed tears, and they we dive back to summer her childhood memory. The whole thing is such a trip for me, and I think that it’s been, it’s been incredibly spiritual For me, music, and it’s, it’s given me so much back. And I think I feel like I’ve made, I’ve made my offerings back to music. I feel like I’ve given a lot to music as much as I can. I’ve definitely put in my 10,000 plus hours, which probably 8000 of those hours is failure. But then the rest is, uh, sometimes you strike something cool. For me, I it’s even deeper that I just love being around patch cables. I love touching knobs. I love having blisters and calluses on my fingers. I love picking up a guitar, and sometimes not even playing it, just holding it and palm muting it, and like watching the TV in a hotel bed. So it’s a little bit of a selfish endeavor too, that it helps me feel better. It helps me feel good.

 

David Duchovny  19:40

But I wonder, like your, your your work ethic, you know, the way you’re describing a lot of your music, or your your practicing, is like, Yeah, I like calluses on my hands. I like, I like shredding my muscles, you know, like, if there’s a lot of, you know, hearing a lot of the athlete, I come out. And I think it’s important, you know, to kind of honor that that work ethic, you know, even, even in a artistic enterprise like making music or acting or anything like that.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  20:11

Yeah, that’s interesting. You you connect those two dots. I never did until now, and I think that’s actually kind of makes sense. I mean, I, my mom always said I started touching a soccer ball when I was three, and then I was, I was quite good in our team, our little town of Jersey and Ramsey. I was, like, picked first, and I was on the Select soccer team where we traveled to Dover, Delaware and Connecticut, which, at the time, it felt like, holy cow, we’re going across state lines for the sport. And it felt like a big deal at the time, you know?

 

David Duchovny  20:39

Yeah, sure.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  20:40

And that was my dream. I want to be, wanted to be the number one soccer player in the world, and which now is insane thinking that as an American, you know, I guess at around age 14, getting that first drum set on summer from eighth grade in the freshman year of high school. And as like Shin splints started to increase, and discovering marijuana and different genres of music, and starting to play with other people music. And for our small town, there was a lot of a lot of creativity. There was all different types of genres. There was everything from like heavy metal to rock to progressive to weird time signatures, jazz, really, everything under the sun. And a lot of people, you know, a year or two below me in my graduating class, than a year or two above me, even years above me. You know, me and my brother, we had about a three or four year age difference, so even he played a lot of guitar, my dad sang in the choir. My mom was a nursery school teacher. She sang every day to the kids, playing that acoustic guitar. She was like, Raffy playing with the kids.

 

David Duchovny  21:47

What’s, what songs did she she play you?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  21:50

She showed me wish you were here by Pink Floyd.

 

David Duchovny  21:54

Really?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  21:55

So props, Mom, that’s pretty cool. Yeah.

 

David Duchovny  21:58

That’s, that’s a cool mom.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  21:59

Yeah, and she showed me Credence Clearwater Revival. Have you ever seen the rain? You know, that’s just a great, great, great strumming song, right?

 

David Duchovny  22:09

Whose idea was it to give you drums? Or was it something you asked for?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  22:13

The drums? I think was inside my inside my blood. I have vivid memories of being in math class or English class, and just like Jared, stop banging on the, you know, the desk, and just having my pen or pencils just banging away, um, little bit hyperactivity back then, I think, and right, I literally made a drum set, you know, like Folgers Coffee cans, the empty Folgers Coffee can. So had that as, like a kick drum, and then it had this old school plastic Tupperware that was in her house. And I took some chopsticks and I made a little drum set out of this Folgers, coffee cans and Tupperware.

 

David Duchovny  22:50

Have you ever tried to record using that, that rig?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  22:53

I should bring it back. Yeah, bring it to the band. Lost my mind.

 

David Duchovny  22:59

It’ll be different.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  23:00

It’ll be different, great idea. Yeah, for me, it’s, it’s kind of in a full circle realization, where, when I started drums, it was very complex beats, it was like tool and Dream Theater and Planet X, like had to be in seven, eight. Had to be crazy time signature, it had to be fast and difficult. And then, you know, probably wrote, I don’t know, between 50 to 100 songs with West before even that first debut Lumineers album came out. Right then, by the time that first album comes out, anybody that knows that album, it’s just like some simple kicks and some tips, simple, I think there’s like three crash cymbal hits on the whole album, and I think for me, it was, I think for me, it was an ego check at the door, because I was like, Man, I could play some pretty sick beats, and nobody knows that, and they think of me as just like, How do y’all like this tambourine guy? Just like, and that was fine.

 

David Duchovny  23:56

So your ego got involved at that point.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  23:58

No, it honestly didn’t, I think for a brief split second once, there’s always like, how I could, you know, I wish I could show people that, but then that would quickly dissipate into, like, we always talk about serving the song. You know, you got to serve the song. And sometimes, you know, not performing on a track is equally as important to to perform. It something on the track that’s a keep or take.

 

David Duchovny  24:19

So, yeah, it’s, it’s cool for the ego to get involved and show off, but it can kill the song. You know, it often happens, like, in my mind, with demos, you know, like you fall in love with a demo and you’re trying to get that feeling that the demo has, which is often because it’s not played that well. You’re tentative with it because you don’t know it that well. You’re really just creating it in the moment. And there’s something about that flirting with the failure, which is what I see in demos.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  24:47

It’s a weird connection for me where, you know, we call that demo-itis, and it’s the worst thing in the world. And, you know, you make a demo like you were talking about, you’re in your bedroom, you’re not really thinking about what you’re doing. You. You record a voice memo of you singing and playing guitar. You’re not really thinking about the context or anything else, and you listen back to that, and you fall in love with that idea so deeply the way you played it, that’s the way the sound of the guitar.

 

David Duchovny  25:13

Usually their mistakes too. In there there’s some.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  25:15

Mistakes the way you enunciated a word, the way you didn’t enunciate a word, somehow, the way the mix of the guitar is perfectly with your voice, and now you’re recording it with quote, unquote, better mics and sounds, twice as shitty. Somehow none of it makes sense, I think it is funny. I think I’ll probably say eight or nine times out of 10. There is something in that demo that everyone in the room is like, yep. Demos great, we don’t know what you were doing, man, but it’s just, you know, even it’s so funny, like with a guitar, the setting, and you plug it in with the guitar, and then you you change location, and he’s like, Do you have a photo? You’re like, I got a photo. Volume was seven, reverb was two, Bass was four. And it’s like, it’s identical. It still sounds completely different. You’re like, this was the pick, this was the setting of the pickup. I was like, you know, on the couch with AMP and same mic.

 

David Duchovny  26:06

Just legs crossed.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  26:08

Were you set? Yeah, how much coffee did you have? What color shirt was? Were you wearing? It’s, it’s, and it just doesn’t sound right. And it’s, it’s probably, honestly, one of the most I’m getting, like, tense just imagining, because it’s a recurring thing, and it sucks.

 

David Duchovny  26:23

Well, as an actor, I have, I have this, I like to rehearse like, way before I’m going to shoot. Like, if I could get rehearsals a month before we shoot, that’d be great. But I don’t like to rehearse right before we’re going to shoot, because something might happen that I really like, and then I’m going to be chasing that in a conscious way, rather than allowing it. It was unconscious until I just did it, and now it’s, I’m fucked, because now it’s conscious, and my consciousness is going to ruin everything, you know, because the instinct did that, and now I’m going to try to repeat instinct. That’s, that’s a ridiculous that’s a notion that that’s a way to fail is like trying to make something seem instinctual. So I, I totally relate to that.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  27:07

Yeah, and I’ve heard that where basketball players shooting free throws, or people golfers when they’re putting, as soon as they start to think about what they’re doing. I’ve heard it called, what is it called? The Yips, maybe.

 

David Duchovny  27:22

Yeah, yeah, the hips sure.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  27:24

You know, you could do like, swish, swish, swish. And then, oh, what are you doing shooting free throws? What? Like, what’s the position of your right elbow?

 

David Duchovny  27:32

Are you breathing in or breathing out when you’re doing that?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  27:34

What? No, shut up. I mean, getting to that flow state is sort of the mecca of our craft. And I think that’s probably, you know, that’s we just, we just solved the puzzle. I think that’s why the demo itis occurs.

 

David Duchovny  28:15

If you don’t mind me referencing your brother, let’s just touch on that for a moment, like, you know, the beginnings of your musical kind of interest and career, literally, by meeting west through him. Is that right? Like they were, they were, they were friends as well.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  28:31

Yeah, essentially. So yeah, I would say, if I have one, this is probably my, my superhero origin story in 2001 my older brother, Joshua, he died of heroin drug overdose. He was 19. I was, I think, 15 at the time, I was just going I was a freshman in high school, and me and my parents, we knew that he had problems with drugs, and we knew that that that that he had been having trouble then with heroin, and he had gone in and out of rehab, and then, you know, just one of those tragic things, you know, relapsed and took too much, overdosed, passed away, uh, brutal, brutal time in my life, obviously, for my parents, too, is it was their first born son. He was my older brother. You know, there’s a lot of, you know, we talk about Greek mythology. There was a lot of mythology I put stock into that. He’s my older brother. You know, this is now in my mind. This is now my introduction to the world. It’s like, life sucks. There is no God. You know, the worst thing that you were worried about happened for I remember telling myself for the last six months to a year of his life, oh, you know, we’ll, like, we’ll be drinking a beer about this, like, we’ll be cheers in the beer. Like, because I was so ignorant and naive and young about what is truly what he was dealing with, sure. And so my brother, Josh, she was friends with, uh, with, Wes. Him, and they were, I was friends with Wes, his younger brother, and we sort of all grew up together, you know, he was like, Oh, my older brother’s friend. And they had lost touch after probably the last few years of his life. But, you know, when he had passed away, years later, Wes had actually come back from finishing university, and oddly enough, want to start a band with a mutual friend of ours. And the mutual friend said, not without Jer. And that was sort of how me and Wes then reconnected and we started making music. But in some way, I’ve always thought about joy and happiness in terms of mileage. You know, you don’t get that much bang for your buck you get, you know, I don’t know, five miles per gallon when you’re in a good mood, happy, I think, in a weird way, grief and sadness and depression and anxiety. If you know how to use it correctly, you get so much mileage out of that in a creative sense. You can use that to when you get to the bottom of yourself emotionally, and you feel completely carved out and just really at a low point, I’ve sometimes thought of almost like a visualization. You’re going down deeper, deeper into the ocean, and sunlight starts to go away, and you feel very sad and very depressed when you get to the bottom, truly to the bottom, to the ocean floor, you can use that to push off of and head back towards the light. And, you know, I think that it took me years to make sense of my brother’s death. And I think, you know, I think if I was a religious person, for me personally, I sort of like, wince or cringe at the idea like, oh, that’s just, that was God’s plan, you know, like, he took my brother, that was like, you know, part, like, part of God’s plan. And I just, for me, I just, I can’t, I can’t go there. I can’t get down with that mentality of something like, sort of categorically bad happening. But I think that in my own, you know, religious, spiritual way of looking at it, yeah, I guess I hope that his suffering had ended, and that he was so uncomfortable in his body and that type of addiction, specifically, you know, opioids and heroin. It’s just it’s so brutal. It’s so it’s just, it’s wild. It’s just, you know, ravages people.

 

David Duchovny  32:29

So of course, I mean, without having access to, you know, God’s plan or whatever, me looking at you, and the story that you write after this makes me see a plan, but it’s it’s really you kind of making your own sense of your brother’s death. And the fact that you know, I think I saw in one interview, you talked about something Stephen King had said, where a person dies twice, once when they die and once, when his name is spoken or her name is spoken for the last time. And what I see I mean, is somebody who really starts to embrace the infinite at that point, which is music. You know what we’ve been talking about, like you, become a musician at that point. And I mean, maybe not literally, you know that that’s the response, but this is what I see looking back. And then, you know, every time and you you do literally start making music with your brother’s friend. And you know, it seems to me that the grief that you’re talking about every is just encoded into the musical experience for you, it’s just part of it. You’re not going to write. Don’t worry, be happy, that’s not that’s not the plan for you, and that every time you write a song, it’s like you’re saying your brother’s name to me. You know, if, if, if one knows your history as you’re telling me it, you know.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  34:04

No, that’s that’s beautiful. And it made me think of two different moments relating to the craft of of music. Is that the first time I wanted to play drums was when I think I was in sixth grade, middle school, and I saw an eighth grade band cover airplane, but by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it just blew my mind watching this drummer, and that made me want to pick up the drumsticks. But, you know, sadly, what really made me want to become an artist was my brother had already passed away, and then I think within a year or two of that, a friend of my brother, his mom passed away, a kid named Patrick, his mom passed away of cancer, and I remember driving down the main street. I was a passenger. My mom was driving, driving down the main street of our little hometown, and hearing that news that she had passed. Passed away. It really was like I became possessed for a brief moment in time, and that car ride that I wanted to write a song about her. I wanted to write a song about making sense of that. So it was this sort of interesting two things, of like, I want to pick up the drumsticks because I’m I’m just enamored with that. I’m attracted to that. It’s like a, there’s an attraction here. It’s like a, you know, a beam lasering me in on like a physical, visceral level. But then there was this other element that had almost nothing to do with music and or drums, but everything to do with I want to heal that family that lost their mom, and I want to make sense of my own confusion, probably, again, a lot of it comes back to my brother, I’m sure, as a psych 101, you know, would would tell us. But I think, yeah, I found that really interesting. And I think.

 

David Duchovny  35:52

Well, how old were you when you had that car ride?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  35:56

I mean, it was probably just a year or two later. It’s probably 16 or 17. And just having these sort of complex thoughts, and I didn’t, it was like, I knew where I wanted to go emotionally, but had no idea how to play piano yet. And I think even from that, I was like, Man, you like, don’t just be a drummer. You’re really, you’re really gonna limit your options, man, like, play the piano, learn chords, learn melody, play the guitar, learn production, blah, blah, blah, like, you know, don’t just be a drummer. And that was something that I just instilled in my head so.

 

David Duchovny  36:32

I read an article recently that struck me. It was talking about grief. And, you know, I’ve always thought about grief as well a loss, really. I mean, it’s dealing with a loss, and you’ve got to kind of go, you have to go through it, you know, if it’s something that you need to grieve, you know, you can’t kind of take a shortcut. And it takes time. It takes the time that it takes. But this article was saying how grief is actually a relearning and it’s actually your brain grows during grief, whereas I always experience grief as a diminishment, right? It’s like, oh, I no longer have that thing. But what the brain does is it, it learns the world again, according to this study, with the loss of the thing like it now. Needs to see the world as it is without that thing in it now. And that’s actually not a diminishment. It’s a growth, wow, you know? And I thought that’s, that’s right. Grief is actually a way of learning, and that’s what I hear when you’re talking about, you know, your brother and and all that. And I and I think, Well, I hope, I hope that’s true. You know, I hope that’s true.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  37:48

Yeah, no, I like that. I think that certainly gives some greater context to instead of just, oh, I have a I’ve had a shitty day. I’ve had this shitty thing happen to me. I feel terrible blah, blah, blah. I think, you know, and anyone listening giving yourself some leeway with those intense, hard feelings, and just go easy on yourself and, yeah, relearn how to do it. Because I think at the end of the day, you must confront that it happened and you can’t change it. And there’s that stark, objective reality you know, that you must come to terms with, but then how you deal with it emotionally, and how, in the worst of it, it doesn’t feel like you’re dealing with it feels like it’s dealing with you. And just, you know, run in circles and just messing you up on like, a anatomical neurological level, where you, you know, everything is just a blur and but I think, yeah, that’s some great context.

 

David Duchovny  38:47

I mean, I wonder, I want to get back to something we touched on earlier, which is, you know, you speak so kind of eloquently about these states of mind, and yet you say, again, I said it earlier. You say you don’t want to write lyrics. And I wonder, and I wonder where that comes from. Is it like I don’t want to try to limit my feelings into these words, or I think.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  39:12

I think that the lyrics just being humble, no, not being it’s not a false, humble moment, I promise you, I think that it’s not something I’ve I’ve spent probably literally decades working on piano and guitar and melodies, and I think that I’ve tried to chip away at lyrics. I just think that the cool thing about my brain, I guess you could say, is that when lyrics come that I think are good, then it’s like, oh, that’s a cool lyric, because it’s, it’s, it’s simplifying a complex thought. But I think sometimes I just will write something, and you’ll see, like, the word hat, and then you like it with cat, or like, you know, when you start to get in that very. Uh, intense rhyme scheme, and you start to, you know, stray away too far from something cool or something profound. So I don’t, you know, I I try to chip away at lyrics every now and then, and I’ll sometimes some cool stuff comes out of me. But I think for the most part, I’m a musical man and but I’m going to take, I can tell you, want me to write more lyrics. I’m going to take.

 

David Duchovny  40:26

A stab at speaking of which I want to just end on kind of, you know, those two kind of cliches about creation of, you know, when you when you’re if, and you’re sober now. So, like, there’s, there’s a difference between creating when, when you were drinking, and creating now. But also, not only that, but the other cliche is that it’s very hard to create within a family. You know, like you need to be, I need to be alone. I need to and you’ve, you’ve not only kept creating within a family, but she went through a pandemic and created a solo album, you know, with a family underfoot. So I wonder if you if you could speak to those kinds of misconceptions or fears, sure failure in that sense.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  41:16

I’ll respond backwards. For me, I’m the type of person when it comes to creation and being around people. I can’t tell you how many Voice Memos I have where I’m quite literally standing up, maybe even holding one of my children when they were very young, an infant, and playing the piano, and there’s like, maybe some crying going on in the background, or I’m in a green room backstage with tons of people, and I’m like, the notes are a C, sharp D, like the right hand is doing this, hit the E at the last check it out. And then I think that that’s probably more just stemmed out of necessity. Because, you know, being having to be alone when you travel as much as we do, and you know, too, like being alone is is a commodity, or is a it can be a rare thing when you’re bouncing around a lot. And I think that with, yeah, with regards to substances and drugs and stuff, I have sort of, you know, now that I’m a parent, I have sort of conflicting thoughts on it that don’t that are not really harmonious, because I’m terrified of my children using drugs in a bad way, you know. And I think that. But anyone that says drugs are bad categorically, you know, you’d have to take every great album you’ve ever listened to and throw it in the trash, because, I mean, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and that’s where you I’m not saying that they made those because they were high on drugs, but it’s a very complex issue in my head. And also it’s a, you know, in the world, every country has their own ideology about drugs, but I think for me, I was probably at a young age, maybe like 1314, I was prescribed something called Adderall, which I’m sure many people know what that is in America, you know, and it’s, it’s quite literally, it said, like, salted amphetamines on the bottle. I’m not kidding, yeah, I don’t know why, but it said salted amphetamines.

 

David Duchovny  43:20

Like your cocktail, yeah, cured I cured me with your almonds.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  43:23

Yeah, and so, you know, quite literally taking an amphetamine. And I think that’s how it probably helped me learn how to play the piano. I commuted when I went to school, so I didn’t, I wasn’t living away, you know, I was at home with with my parents, very uncool, taking my Adderall. I was a sociology major, but I was playing the piano an inordinate amount of time, same with the guitar, same with working on music, getting into production, all that stuff. And eventually, I think that that caught up with me, and so did drinking. And you know, when I was 20, when I was 27 I knew that I had an issue.

 

David Duchovny  44:01

aAnd how much of, how much of the memory of your brother was coming back to you at that point?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  44:05

A lot, yeah, a lot. I was like, you know, when he died when I was 14 or 15, oh, I’ll never touch a drug, you know, I’ll never smoke weed again. And I don’t know if it was six months later, you know, a year later, it’s like, oh, just stick to weed. You know, just bong hits as my or whatever, you know, add it all and prescribed it from a doctor. It’s not for me, alcohol, social thing, or now I’m a musician, successful musician, you know, it’s, uh, I think a lot of us, we loved the lifestyle, you know, it’s, it’s a cool lifestyle to, to summarize it very lazily, it’s, you know, you feel like, oh, backstage, you’re in the band and hotel, and it catches up with you. And I think for me, it just stopped, stopped working for me. So when I was 27 I probably knew it was time to quit. And then probably took me two years to actually come to terms with it. And I think the Adderall was the hardest thing to give up. I think that I was really. Word that it was a crutch of my creativity.

 

David Duchovny  45:03

That’s what I wanted to get. I was like, was there a fear at first about, well, am I going to be able to write the songs that I want to write without this?

 

Jeremiah Fraites  45:11

Oh, I was, I was terrified. I was terrified to write anything, you know, without the drugs. You were terrified that you you wanted to make something good or great, you know? And then I think all I know now, and I’m about to celebrate eight years of sobriety in August, on August 27 I’ve, I’ve never been more creative in my entire life. And David, I promise you when I say that, that was the biggest, that was the biggest thing I was so afraid of. I Right? I went to a few AA meetings. I hated them. It felt like if I disliked religion. As a kid in Wayne New Jersey, I really disliked the AA program. I won’t go on a tirade about that, but I just was not for me. It was not my vibe and but I had met with a sponsor for like one day, and he said, Jer, when you get sober, you’re gonna become even more creative. And I remember looking him in the eyes and thinking, man, what a crock of shit. This is like a dare officer being like, Hey, son, don’t smoke. Crass like you can just, you can do it yourself. You know, reach for the sky. You can do it. And I just so, you know, not thinking that that was going to happen. And I got sober, and then we made our third down with Lumineers, and then I jumped right into my first piano, piano album I’ve I’ve never been more prolific in my my creativity, my connection with music, my connection with my wife, my connection with my two kids, has never been stronger again. This is not me preaching to get out there sober. It doesn’t sound but man.

 

David Duchovny  46:46

It just the part where you hit AA, doesn’t sound like preaching at all.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  46:51

I think it’s hard to sum up in words, my but I still have bad days. I still have, you know, your head still goes to those bad places. But I think that the leaps between, you know, elation and joy and going down to that, you know, salty the bottom of the Mariana Trench, yeah, it’s less and, yeah, I’ve just, I’ve never been in a better, better spot,

 

David Duchovny  47:21

All right, well, thank you so much for talking with me today. It’s been, it’s been a real pleasure.

 

Jeremiah Fraites  47:26

Yeah, likewise, man.

 

David Duchovny  47:28

Thanks for being open and willing to talk about some difficult things and have some fun as well. I really appreciate it.

 

David Duchovny  47:48

One of the things I’m thinking about most after this discussion with Jeremiah is where we got into grief, grief over the loss of his brother to an overdose, and I think about failure in the sense of grief, and that failure feels like a diminishment, failure feels like a loss. And in many ways, it can be yes on the surface yes, but maybe the brain grows through failure just like it grows through grief. Maybe the brain has to now readjust to world in which that failure happened. I think grief and failure are very closely related, and that’s something that I’m glad we got to in this discussion, and something I’d like to continue to talk about more.

 

CREDITS  48:36

There’s more Fail Better with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like more of my behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Subscribe now and Apple podcasts. Fail Better as a production of Lemonada media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Dani Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neil. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Karpinski and Kate D. Lewis, the show’s executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova, Kramer and me, David Duchovny, I mean, the company dammit. The music is also by me and my band. Lovely Colin Lee. Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian […]. Special thanks to Brad Davidson. You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia and you can find me @DavidDuchovny, you know what it means when I say at David Duchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.