Lucero hits the road with new music and purpose

As a band with a quarter-century of gigs to their credit, Lucero have downshifted their touring ambitions in recent years. These days they’re out on the road for a crisp 100 dates or so, a considerable amount by most bands’ count. But for an act that used to eclipse the 200-, even 250-gigs mark, this is a real change.

Ben Nichols, the band’s primary songwriter and founding member, said that Lucero’s career has moved into something of a sweet spot. Though the band’s last album, 2023’s “Should’ve Learned by Now,” is nominally the reason the band’s going out on two significant tour runs this year, the group has always been active on the road, whether they’ve had new material or not. As it turns out, this year the group does, in fact, have newly-released material to introduce to their passionate fan base, and Nichols believes the sound they’ve achieved this time out will please crowds.

“Right now, we’re a five-piece, a stripped-down rock ’n’ roll band, doing the simpler version of what we were doing 10 years ago,” Nichols said in a recent phone interview. “With our last album, ‘When You Found Me,’ we had a darker, moodier record. Synths are all over that album. A lot of fans came along with us for that. I really like that record, it was a fun experiment. But with ‘Should’ve Learned by Now,’ all that is out the window again. We’re back to the classic form of bass, guitar, drums and some keys.”

As has been true for years, Nichols (vocals, guitar) is joined by drummer Roy Berry, bassist John C. Stubblefield, guitarist Brian Venable and multi-instrumentalist Rick Steff. For this round, Nichols notes that some of the extras of recent albums – horn sections, pedal steel players and the aforementioned synths – have taken a backseat to the simpler, straightforward lineup. And there’s more cowbell.

“I had a couple of songs left over from previous albums,” Nichols said. “They weren’t quite serious enough for those albums; those had a darker tone, sonically were a little more intense. I had these upbeat, lighthearted songs floating in limbo and needing a place to live. So I wrote the rest of this record with that intention. It’s a fun, rock ’n’ roll record with catchier songs and our old-school, rock ’n’ roll feel. The first song, ‘One Last F.U.’ has got that kind of attitude to it and it wouldn’t have fit on every album. There is some humor on it that’s not appropriate everywhere, but it sets the tenor of the rest of the album. Lyrically, it’s all pretty straightforward, it’s about rock ’n’ roll-type things, relationships and bars and whiskey and regret and guilt and love. It was written to not be too deep and still offer quality rock ’n’ roll.”