Here is a sentence you are not supposed to say about a stomping, clapping, sing-along folk single: it is secretly about the horror of being loved by strangers. But that is what “Ophelia” is. It sounds like a hootenanny and it behaves like a warning. Released on 5 February 2016, it was the first new music The Lumineers had put out in about four years, and the band was in a strange position. Their breakthrough had turned them from a small Denver outfit into a global sensation, and now they had to write about the sensation without sounding ungrateful. So they wrote a song about a woman, and the woman was fame.
The long road to the hook
Context matters here. The band’s breakthrough single, “Ho Hey”, had been inescapable in 2012, the sort of song that turned up in adverts, television dramas and shop speakers, and the people responsible suddenly found themselves with an audience that had never existed before. Schultz has talked about how hard it can be to feel connected to a song after playing it thousands of times, sometimes dozens of times in a single day. That is the experience hiding behind this record: not the glamour of fame, but its repetition.
The history of the song is a story of difficulty. It started as a slow instrumental demo, a piano idea that Jeremiah Fraites sent to his partner Wesley Schultz back in 2011. Schultz liked it enough to keep it. While playing at the back bar of a Los Angeles venue, he came up with the hook, and that, by the sound of things, was the easy part. He could not write verses worthy of it. The whole project stalled and was shelved for years, a perfectly good chorus with nothing around it, sulking in a drawer.
It came back to life in January 2015, when Schultz returned to it with a clearer idea of what it might be about, and it ended up as the lead single from their second album, Cleopatra. There was also a naming problem. The Band, those venerable Canadian-American roots heroes, had recorded a song called “Ophelia” on their 1975 album Northern Lights – Southern Cross, and The Lumineers worried about stepping on it. They tried other names. Schultz decided nothing else had the right musical shape, five syllables of vowel and breath. The title stayed, and so did the girl.
Hamlet, with something else
Schultz has said he considered writing a version of Hamlet combined with something else, and then the something else turned out to be the thing that was actually happening to him. That is how a lot of the best songs are written: you set out to tell a famous story and discover you are telling your own. In the end he told Entertainment Weekly the song is a vague reference to people falling in love with fame, and he told Billboard that the words began as stream of consciousness but may have meant more than he first thought.
That is a typically modest description for what is actually a rather sharp piece of writing. The song treats fame as a woman with whom you have a brief, intense, slightly toxic affair. She is thrilling, she makes you feel enormous, and she does not stay. The narrator watches her arrive, enjoys her, and then senses that she is already looking over his shoulder at the next person. It is not bitter, exactly. It is more like the stunned politeness of someone whose date has just left the restaurant without finishing dinner.
What I like about the writing is how little it explains. There is no villain, no scorned rock star railing against the industry, no sermon about authenticity. The song simply watches someone falling for something that cannot love him back, and refuses to sneer at him for it. Fame, in the song, is not evil. It is indifferent, in the way weather is indifferent. You can enjoy the sunshine and still be foolish to build a house on it.
Why Ophelia, of all names
It is worth asking why the girl is called Ophelia. In Hamlet she is a woman destroyed by forces larger than herself, men who use her, a court that discards her, a madness she did not choose. You can see how that fits a song about fame, which also chews people up while pretending to adore them. But a line in the song suggests the roles are reversed: here, the narrator pities the fool who falls for her, and Ophelia, the glittering, drowning, irresistible thing, is the one doing the damage. The tragedy has been turned around so that the victim is the person who believed the attention was real.
And there is a darker joke inside it. In Shakespeare, Ophelia drowns, sinking under the weight of her own sodden clothes. In the song, the people who fall for fame also sink, only more slowly and with better lighting. The name suggests flowers, water and beauty, and it hides the idea of a trap. If you wanted to design a perfect label for the thing that flatters you into forgetting who you were, you could do worse than a drowned girl floating among lilies.
The sound of a stomp with a bruise
Now the music. The stomp-and-clap folk style that made the band famous is still there, and Schultz himself described Cleopatra as a heavier record than the debut. The track credits list tambourine and stomping, which tells you something about the method: the rhythm is made by bodies, not machines, with feet banging on boards and a piano pushing everything forward. It is a very physical sound, joyous at first hearing and then, on closer inspection, a little frantic, as though the band is dancing faster to outrun the thing the song describes.
The video makes the same point. Directed by Isaac Ravishankara, who also made their earlier “Stubborn Love” clip, it has Schultz dancing in the streets, which is as good a picture of sudden celebrity as any: exposed, exuberant and slightly out of control. The song can be a party and a warning at once, and the joke is that the party is the warning. Nobody at the party can hear it.
It is also worth noting how short the thing is: two minutes and forty seconds, over before it has time to wear out its welcome, which is, if you think about it, exactly how the song’s heroine behaves.
The moral of the stomp
So what is the meaning? It is that the glamour you chase is not looking for you. It is looking for whoever happens to be standing in front of it, and it will leave as soon as someone shinier walks in. That is not a reason to despise fame, and the song does not despise it. It simply notes the cost of mistaking attention for love. When the music thins out and the narrator is left with something plain and heartfelt to say to a real person, you can hear what the whole record has been missing. After all the noise, one honest sentence is still the loudest thing in the room.