Lotus returns to Madison this Friday night with a date at the Barrymore Theatre. This week we asked Lotus guitarist/keyboardist Luke Miller to share with us some important or influential tracks to him and to his bandmates. Please find the Spotify playlist below along with Luke’s thoughts, and jam out to them before the show on Friday.
1. Talking Heads – “Crosseyed and Painless”
“When asked what my favorite band is, the Talking Heads is always my answer. They were one of the first bands I got into. ‘Crosseyed and Painless’ throws chord changes out the window and puts groove paramount. The forward momentum and collage/layering of this song was and is highly influential on Lotus.”
2. Herbie Hancock – “Hang Up Your Hang Ups”
“Mike Rempel, Lotus’s guitarist, showed me this song just before we headed to college where we started Lotus together. It was the funkiest thing I had ever heard. The way the bass and drums worked in syncopation, instead of playing on the same beat as most traditional songs do, influenced the way Lotus tried to compose parts for the rhythm section.”
3. James Brown – “Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine”
“Lotus covered this song at the first concert we ever played. The way the guitar works as a chugging hi-hat, more of a drum than an instrument to play chords, influenced the way I try and play guitar on improvisations. We all bought wah pedals because of James Brown. At one point we had a song where both guitar and bass played wah, but we realized that was overkill. One wah is generally the maximum number that sounds good.”
4. St. Germain – “So Flute”
“The combination of house music with jazz instruments flipped my brain switch. I had heard house music before, but hearing it with more organic elements like flutes, pianos, and jazz guitar was very influential. This song was a big touchstone for our first album Nomad.”
5. Underworld – “2 Months Off“
“I first heard Underworld in the movie Trainspotting. But this song, ‘2 Months Off’, has such a hypnotic effect. The way it shifts between major and minor tonalities and often hovers in between the two gives it a shimmering, uplifting effect with darker under tones. This influenced the way I try to approach tonality in many compositions.”
6. Johann Sebastian Bach – Prelude in D minor from Suite 2 for Unaccompanied Cello
“In college I studied classical guitar. Putting Bach’s music under the microscope while learning a song made me learn how melody and rhythm can arise from harmony. Bach’s compositions are almost like magic even hundreds of years after they were written. I still use some classical guitar finger picking techniques on a few Lotus songs.”
7. A Tribe Called Quest – “Can I Kick It”
“ATCQ is a very approachable hip-hop group for a kid that grew up in the Denver suburbs being that they use jazz samples and not much slang. But their groove and flow still holds up today as some of my favorite hip-hop. This song influenced me while working on a Lotus hip-hop album that is coming out later this year. While we weren’t able to work with any of the ATCQ guys, we did work with their contemporary Doodlebug from the Digable Planets on a track.”
8. Explosions in the Sky – “Your Hand in Mine”
“Hearing the cinematic emotional climax that Explosions in the Sky creates with just guitars, bass, and drums was a revelation. We try to have an element of beauty and emotion at some point during a Lotus show. While our primary goal is getting people to dance, hitting the heart as well as the body makes the show more of a journey.”
9. Tortoise – “Seneca”
“Tortoise’s way of combining obtuse sounds into incredibly unique and singular sounds is unparalleled. The use of distortion on ‘Seneca’ and heavy gating on the drums and instruments like vibraphone and analog synthesizers influenced some of our experiments on the production side of things. We’ve produced all our own albums and have tried to experiment with different production techniques both analog and digital.”
10. Wilco – “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”
“There was a point in my life when I fell asleep every night listening to the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. At first I didn’t get it, so I forced myself to listen over and over. Eventually I couldn’t stop listening to it. This song’s use of collage and way of using musical subtraction to expose various parts is amazing. Musically, it didn’t really influence Lotus in many areas, but it’s just a modern American classic.”