Features

Lotus: Electronic Flower Power

Photo by Tobin Voggesser

The city of Lakewood, Colo. is about 12 miles from Red Rocks Amphitheatre if you take Route 6 to the interstate. But the journey from Point A to Point B took the Miller brothers about 12 years to complete, and the road that they took was much more arduous than some of these Rocky Mountain back roads in the dead of winter. Twin brothers Luke and Jesse play guitar and bass, respectively, in Lotus, a band that Luke first formed in 1999.

On July 2, 2011, in front of an 8,000-strong audience that included many of their childhood friends and family, Lotus co-headlined Red Rocks with The Glitch Mob.

“On the one hand, it felt really good,” reflects Luke. “It felt like a moment that we had been working toward for more than 10 years. On the other hand—I don’t know if this means that I’m jaded or something—but it almost felt like it was just another day on the job.”

Now, before you judge him as ungrateful, consider his earnest explanation: “I enjoy every concert and I try to put 100 percent into every show.” Luke concedes that the band has, by now, played to audiences two or three times larger than Red Rocks thanks to the ever-growing festival circuit. “But it did feel really good being up there—it felt like a kind of milestone, for sure.”

Especially given that the Lakewood natives nearly played the iconic mountain venue at the end of their senior year of high school when their graduation was held there. They figured that their band at the time—the only one in their class —was a shoo-in. When it didn’t work out, Luke “vowed to make it back to Red Rocks the real way.” Consider it a promise kept. But, for Lotus, it’s just one step higher on a ladder that they intend to continue climbing for some time.

Indeed, with s decade now behind them, Lotus’ best days are yet to come. But before we look at where they’re going, let’s first assess where they’ve been.

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The Lotus story begins in Lakewood, when Luke and Jesse were adolescents forced to take piano lessons once a week at the insistence of their mother. By the time that middle school rolled around, however, they dropped the lessons because, according to Luke, “it didn’t really seem cool at that point.”

Fast forward a few years to high school, when someone left an acoustic guitar at their house, and the brothers begin what would become their lifelong love of making music. Luke bought a better guitar, Jesse bought a bass and the brothers jammed. They formed a ska band and even worked on horn charts together until college when Jesse went off to study music performance at St. John’s college in Santa Fe, N.M. At night, he tinkered around in jazz ensembles and bluegrass bands. Luke, meanwhile, went off to Indiana to pursue a double major in music performance—and peace and justice—at Goshen College.

Luke formed Lotus with fellow guitarist Mike Rempel during his freshman year. At the end of that first summer, and unfulfilled by his musical pursuits at St. John’s, Jesse made the move to Indiana to join his brother’s new band. Whatever Lotus turned out to be, was better than playing bluegrass in New Mexico.

During Lotus’ first few years, they were a band in search of an identity. Instrumental by choice—they sang a couple of songs at first but made the conscious decision to become all-instrumental by 2001—and jammy by nature, Lotus almost sprouted as musician’s musicians from the get-go, aided and abetted by the raw talent of Rempel’s sometimes jaw-dropping guitar playing.

“I don’t think anyone in the beginning said, ‘This is going to be our sound’ or ‘This is exactly who we want to be,’” says Jesse. “We always looked forward and looked at how to evolve the sound.”

Granted, his bands before then—going back to the high school ska band that almost played at Red Rocks—were always clearly defined by genre. It was ska, jazz, bluegrass or punk. “When you set out with a genre like that, it’s kind of limiting,” Jesse explains. “I feel like you can do something as far as you can take it and then it’s kind of done. But with Lotus, we’ve always set it up as something that can continually evolve and where we can try new stuff. And that’s a big part of the reason that we’re still going 11 or 12 years after we started this off.”