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

‘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 doing it to be heard. Then suddenly everyone started listening’

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. 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. 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.

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