Lord Huron's Ben Schneider on ‘crucial weirdos,' cosmic jukeboxes and unanswered questions

Los Angeles Times

4 days ago

Ben Schneider may not have all the answers, but he sure asks great questions. In a song released ahead of Lord Huron's new album, the frontman/guitarist wonders, via impassioned vocals with a tinge of desperation, 'if no one lives forever, who laughs last?' The query is repeated, monotone into a payphone, by actor Kristen Stewart, who appears on the song and in the David Lynch-ian fever dream of a video for 'Who Laughs Last.'
A search of 'The Cosmic Selector: Vol. 1' lyrics reveals 27 question marks across six of the band's 12 new songs. From the title 'Is There Anybody Out There?' to the lyrics 'living infinite lives / are they mine?' from 'It All Comes Back,' Schneider asks ineffable questions in poignant songs often imbued with quirky, understated profundity.
'That's kind of what the music has been about; posing questions and not trying to be the font of knowledge,' the singer says, perched on a stool in his nearly empty house, a guitar case containing his well-used 1991 Gibson Dove acoustic at his feet. While Lord Huron's multiplatinum single, 2015's 'The Night We Met,' is one of Spotify's Top 30 streamed songs of all time and the band — rounded out by Tom Renaud, Mark Barry and Miguel Briseño — will headline hometown arena the Kia Forum in November, Schneider still evinces a believable disbelief about Lord Huron's success, and fans' rabid rabbit-holing into every aspect of the band.
From the warm crackle of the soaring yet intimate and melancholic opening track, 'Looking Back,' to the final notes of 'Life is Strange,' 'The Cosmic Selector: Vol. 1,' released on July 18, is introspective and sometimes offbeat, offering those intrigued fans plenty of fodder. Schneider often writes from the POV of characters, but the lyrics 'life is strange and so am I' seem self-referential.
'All the weirdos out there, I love you. Strange-ers, you too. That goes back to what I was saying about embracing strangeness within and without,' says Schneider, referring to a conversational thread about David Lynch, notably his admiration for the late auteur's outlook on life. 'I think people sometimes bury that part of themselves because they're afraid of how others will perceive them. But they're always the most interesting people. Someone I know calls people like that 'crucial weirdos.' People you encounter in your life who are undeniably strange but have a very positive impact on the way you go through your life.'
Lord Huron may play that 'crucial weirdo' role for some. To wit, the ideation behind the 'Cosmic Selector' — a mysterious, maybe metaphysical jukebox where the punch of a button might bring about alternative life trajectories. It's an idea Schneider returns to often: 'As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that mystery and beauty are so intertwined. I've been thinking a lot about that lately, how the mysteries of the world are really the things I've always been most interested in, whether it's love, cosmos, consciousness; things that have seem to have no definite answer are really, really inspiring and interesting to me.' Not that he necessarily wants those enigmas solved: 'I want there to be some mystery left in the world.'
The Lansing, Mich.-born musician comes from a family of professional wordsmiths — his father, mother, brother and sister have all been journalists; Schneider earned a 2005 bachelor's degree in painting and graphic design from the University of Michigan. He tried unsuccessfully to break in as a painter in New York before moving to Los Angeles. On the West Coast, he found more 'openness' and an 'anything goes' ethos that saw the struggling artist move further into music as a means to elucidate and explore creativity.
Despite his journalistic family, 'I guess I was always more interested in bending yarns than telling traditional truth,' he muses. 'Although, at the end, I think I'm trying to do the same thing with just different means.' Schneider is also possessed of an elegant and prolific literary bent, citing Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' as his current favorite novel.
On tour, Schneider has time to read/listen to books, and an author he's devoured is Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård. So, rather than a boilerplate press bio that accompanies most albums, 'Kind of the spirit of his record, where I was just reaching out to people I admired and seeing if we could do something together, we reached out to a couple authors,' explains Schneider. 'And Karl Ove was the one I thought had the least chance of writing back.' However, the 'My Struggle' author did, and the pair spoke for several hours. Then Knausgård 'kind of disappeared for a while,' but when he resurfaced, his discourse for a band bio captured LH's spirit, the author writing about '…the presence of the past in the present, the trembling afterimage of the dead on the retina, for this is where Lord Huron dwells. … If this sounds like a vague, unclear, diffuse and blurry place — or one of the characteristics of the past is that it lacks clear edges — the music that rises out of it is full of presence, beauty and emotional power.'
'The Cosmic Selector: Vol. 1' is the band's fifth album, and if Lord Huron aren't household names, Schneider has had surreal moments around fame. 'I kind of just assume that nobody has heard of our band; that's kind of my mindset,' he says. But the frontman was at the dentist, and a Lord Huron song came on the office's speakers. 'It was a very odd experience,' he recollects with a laugh. 'I really didn't do anything; I actually did have that little suction thing in my mouth. If someone asks what I do, I tell them. Sometimes they know what I'm talking about. Sometimes they're like, 'Oh, another guy in L.A. in a band. There's tons of them.'''
As the warm L.A. day ebbs, the home's expansive front window frames dense, variegated foliage falling into shadow. Schneider, 42, is clad in several muted shades of green — a short-sleeved work shirt with a Bic four-color ballpoint in the left breast pocket, paint-spattered pants and lighter green socks. The home, like its resident's songs, is sometimes spare, but solid and carefully crafted, full of details redolent of the past, but built to last. It's at once haunting and charming, suitable for Schneider's sometimes-wistful nature.
'[Nostalgia] was a big thing, the last album was called 'Long Lost,' which was kind of about lamenting something that never existed, at least not in the way you think you remember it. There's a mystery to that too that I can't really give up on,' he says with a sigh. 'As much as I know it's not rational to dwell on missing things, there's a beautiful mystery to it that I can't seem to get away from.' He's even nostalgic for 'things I didn't necessarily experience, which is weird.' Yet not so unusual that it's nameless: in more than one language, 'Sehnsucht' and 'anemoia' refer to that feeling.
Despite the yearnings and longings that contribute to Lord Huron's haunted Americana sound, Schneider is glad to live in this moment. 'I do feel very lucky to be alive in a time when making art is facilitated in a lot of ways by technology, and to some extent, social attitudes. I have a lot of old gear, and I love combining those things. That's true flexibility, all the experimentation that technology allows you these days,' he says. 'To be honest, there's a certain aesthetic to digital stuff too that is its own thing, which adds texture and modern color. That's very real to our world too, to recordings these days. I'm not an analog purist; I embrace all the stuff.'
As for living in the literal moment, the 'be here now' of it all, the lyrics 'I sure like the feeling of an endless road / My life is still a tale untold / I've gotta stop believing in a long-gone past' appear to be a gentle reminder to self. 'It was kind of the flip side of that coin of feeling like my choices are limited. You can get hung up on that. Or you can be, 'I don't know how long there is, but at least the next few minutes.' It's about living in the moment, which is such a cliché we've heard all our lives.'
Yet few find that presence easy. 'I'm getting better at it … I'm getting better,' Schneider repeats with bit of resignation. 'It's hard. When you really stop to think about how much time you spend on either worrying about what's going to happen or dwelling on something that's already happened, it's unbelievable. But we're at a point in history now where we don't need to be that way necessarily; we don't need to remember everything that's happened, because we've probably got it recorded somewhere,' he says with a laugh. 'So maybe we could free up those parts of our brain for something else. But it's a lot easier said than done, that's for sure.'