The Lumineers – Ophelia

Song

"Ophelia" is a song recorded by American folk rock band The Lumineers. It was released as the lead single from their sophomore album, Cleopatra on February 5, 2016.

As of March 2020, the song has garnered over 389 million streams on Spotify.

Background

The song started out as a slower instrumental demo that Jeremiah Fraites, (one third of The Lumineers), sent to Wesley Schultz (lead vocalist of The Lumineers), in 2011. According to Schultz, the demo generated enough excitement to work on the project. While playing at a backbar in LA alongside The Lumineers, Schultz wrote the song's hook:

"O-o-phelia, you've been on my mind girl, like a drug. O-o-phelia, heaven help a fool who falls in love."

Soon after, The Lumineers felt they needed to find a proper substitute for the name Ophelia, due to the fact that a song of the same name had been released years prior by the band, The Band. Nevertheless, this issue reached its end after Schultz decided that no other name had "the right musicality to it."

Subsequently, Schultz had trouble writing "good" verses to carry the hook he wrote, which made the songwriting process so difficult that the project was completely abrogated until four years later. In January 2015, when it came time to work on a new record, the defunct "Ophelia" was resurrected.

"I remember thinking, 'Oh, it's so Ophelia.' So maybe I'll go back and rehandle it, and I'll figure out how to tell the story of Hamlet combined with something else."

— Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers

Album

Cleopatra è il secondo album in studio del gruppo musicale statunitense The Lumineers, pubblicato l'8 aprile 2016.

Artist

The Lumineers sono un gruppo musicale statunitense, formatosi nel 2005.

Il gruppo si è formato nel 2005 dall'incontro tra il chitarrista e cantante Wesley Schultz (1982) e il batterista Jeremiah Fraites (1986). I due, cresciuti a Ramsey, un sobborgo a sud di New York, avevano già suonato in diverse band.

Schultz inoltre era stato il migliore amico del fratello maggiore di Jeremiah, Joshua Fraites, morto all'età di 19 anni per un'overdose di farmaci, e con questi aveva condiviso diverse esperienze musicali in vari gruppi dell'ambiente newyorkese.

Poiché la vita nella costa orientale degli Stati Uniti era diventata troppo costosa, decisero di trasferirsi a Denver, in Colorado; nello stesso periodo pensarono che per il tipo di musica che avevano in mente sarebbe servito un violoncellista. Conobbero così Neyla Pekarek (1986), con alle spalle studi classici in vari strumenti, e da quel momento il gruppo è divenuto stabilmente un trio.