‘It sounds terrible but I listen to it 30 times a day': how the Lumineers made Ho Hey

The Guardian

10-03-2025

After growing up in Ramsey, a small town in New Jersey, we moved to New York to try to make it in music but found it a very difficult circuit to break into. Bars would let you play because they wanted your friends to buy drinks, but then they'd kick everybody out to get the next group in. Whenever I would meet people, I'd tell them, 'I'm a waiter but I play music,' and they'd go, 'Yeah, so does my cousin.' The prospect of playing somewhere like the [iconic New York venue] Mercury Lounge felt about as likely as playing a stadium.
I wrote Ho Hey about these experiences. I had the beginnings of another song that was going to be called Everyone Requires a Plan, but it had no words or melody. Once I started strumming it again, Ho Hey just poured out of me. Looking back, I was writing about two heartbreaks at the same time. A person had recently broken up with me and I was also leaving New York and moving to Denver – breaking up with the city that I thought held all my dreams. I felt steamrollered by both events.
The opening lines are me trying to convince myself that striving to become a successful musician was a noble pursuit: I had been 'trying to do it right' and 'living a lonely life'. The hook is pure defiance: you might have broken up with me but 'I belong with you, you belong with me'.
It's an unconventional song in that it doesn't have a chorus. We made numerous attempts to record it. We even tried recording it in the bathroom to get natural reverb. The song needed a kind of looseness. When producer Kevin Augunas stepped in to finish it, he pointed out that a lot of our favourite records had been recorded without using a click track, or metronome, so suggested we try that. Suddenly it worked. The bit where it goes 'one, two, three' is a cue for us to slightly speed up.
I came up with the 'ho hey' chant after listening to the Felice Brothers cover the old railroad song Take This Hammer and wanting something similar. We were moving away from bar band covers to doing our own songs, so shouting 'Ho hey!' from the stage got people's attention. We were shouting to be heard. Then suddenly everyone started listening.
A little bar in New York used to pay us $100 and give us cheeseburgers and beers to play. Whenever we'd do a Bob Dylan or Coldplay song, all ears were on us. But when Wes would say, 'Here's an original,' everyone would flee for a cigarette break or to play billiards.
After we moved to Denver, we would do 14-hour drives to play in New Mexico or Nebraska. The journeys were killing us and we were losing money on gas, so we needed songs that could really grab people. Because Ho Hey was acoustic, we could unplug our instruments, physically leave the stage and go out into the audience.
Initially, Wes created a fragment of it, then we worked on the song in my parents' attic like crazy. At one point it was heavier, like a White Stripes version with driving guitar. At the same time, I was learning about home recording, so we burned a raw version of Ho Hey and six other songs on to 200 CDs. Our friends would say stuff like: 'You should rerecord it. It sounds like shit, but I listen to it 30 times a day.' So we knew it had something.
After we got management, we recorded a studio version in some woods north of Seattle, trying to recreate the sound of my boots stomping on a wooden stage, which we had liked at an open mic. There's no bass on Ho Hey: it's a cello pizzicato which we made much louder. The song is like Italian cooking – there are so few elements that every ingredient needs to be perfect. When Kevin remixed the entire album, he pared everything back: the version of Ho Hey that became a hit is very similar to the one on that first burned CD.
Initially, it charted at No 90. Then a TV show called Hart of Dixie played the whole song at the end of an episode and immediately people were asking: 'Who are the Lumineers?' A DJ in Seattle started playing it back-to-back and then it just took off.
The Lumineers' new album, Automatic, is out now. The band play Utilita Arena, Cardiff, on 22 May, then touring