Our Saturday Pick...The Lumineers (Get Tiny).

Given how fast they got blow-out big I do realize that it is now easy for some to slag them.

But, regardless, they are good enough, in my estimation at least, to justify all that bigness.

Plus, I still really dig a small, but important, chunk of their origin story, as distilled and retold by Matt Driscoll in Seattle Weekly some time  ago now:

At 4:30 a.m. on a January morning in 2012, KEXP’s John Richards was looking for something awesome. As usual, a stack of CDs sat by his desk waiting to be scoured for songs that might fit on the indie radio station’s airwaves. KEXP estimates it gets 200 CDs through the mail every week, roughly 500 songs via e-mail, and about a dozen albums hand-delivered. That morning, one of those hand-delivered CDs came from Onto.

“Every once in a while, it happens,” Richards recalls of hearing “Ho Hey” for the first time. “I put it in and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘This is one of the catchier songs I have ever heard, and it has the perfect formula of what’s kind of been building in the music industry.’”...

{snip}

It was Richards’ decision to play “Ho Hey” not once, but twice—back-to-back—that morning that many mention as a turning point for the Lumineers. Richards would repeat his double play of “Ho Hey” throughout the week. “It’s maybe a few times a year you get something this tremendous,” he says. “As it’s playing I thought, ‘I’m totally playing that again.’ For some reason, it touched a nerve with people, in a good way.”...

That said, it turns out that an even bigger part of the band's origin story was the recording of a home video in 'this girl named Tracy's house' in Denver Colorado two years earlier:

On a snowy November day in 2010, Isaac Ravishankara went to see a band in Denver at “this girl named Tracy’s house.” After hearing one song, Ravishankara was so moved by the impromptu vibe of the moment and the rapt attention of the couple dozen people in attendance that he ventured to his car to retrieve his video camera.

“You can just feel it sometimes,” Ravishankara says of the performance. “It was very spur-of-the-moment.”

The band was young, not long removed from the New York music scene from which it had escaped to Denver. There was little footage of the band online. As a favor, Ravishankara uploaded to his YouTube page...


Of course, as you may have guessed, an A&R guy saw the kitchen party video of 'Ho, Hey' and the rest is history.

Here is that video...

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