Lost Leaders

The two longtime friends have been making music together since 1998, cycling through power pop and alt-country before landing on the Americana-rooted songcraft of Lost Leaders, a sometimes-band with an acclaimed discography that exists in orbit around myriad other creative projects. And between albums, Cole and Isaacs have added "film scoring" to the list.

Run, an upcoming indie feature starring Sarah Levy (Schitt's Creek) and Phillipa Soo (Hamilton), features Lost Leaders on both the soundtrack and the score. "Atalanta," which features vocalist Amy Helm, is the splended new single written for the movie, the result of an unfamiliar and challenging process that unlocked things they wouldn't have found on their own. Now Cole and Isaacs are hoping future film work joins the list of creative plates they're already spinning—in addition to touring gigs, session work, co-writes, and, of course, more Lost Leaders songs.

Analogue: You both spin a lot of different plates. I wondered how that informs Lost Leaders—does the freedom of not depending on it creatively liberate you, or does it limit what you can do together?

Peter Cole: The Lost Leaders thing, at least for me, exists in its own lane. The other things that I do, and I imagine the things Byron does, are in their lane. I don't believe those things particularly influence what we do.

Byron Isaacs: Although they could inform what we do.

Peter: Yeah. You have to suppose that whatever you absorb in your life somehow finds its way out in whatever you do. But there's certainly no conscious, you know, sort of—

Byron: When Pete and I first met, we just immediately had a musical chemistry, and we've had many different projects over that time—that was like 1998. Each time we got together, it was to make music that we wanted to hear that nobody else had made. We had a power pop band in the late nineties, early two thousands, a real alt-country project for a while, and then we started Lost Leaders.

Each time it was because we felt like there was a hole in our own record collection. As far as pressure from other outlets, I don't know that that's ever really come into play artistically, because there's always a wellspring that ignites us when we come together. Logistically, certainly it throws a wrench into things.

Analogue: Are you ever frustrated by the limitations, wishing you could lean more fully into Lost Leaders but can't?

Peter: Yes and no. There are times where it is frustrating. Last summer we were offered the opening slot for the Wallflowers tour and we weren't able to do it because of the Lumineers tour schedule. However, we are doing some shows with the Wallflowers at the end of May, so it comes around again. On the other hand, the fact that this doesn't have pressure on it—that it doesn't have to provide everything for both of us—in a funny way that gives us a lot of freedom.

Anything that has to perform for you, there's a lot of weight on that, a lot of pressure. And it's easy to get frustrated when things aren't doing what you want. Lost Leaders exists in this blissfully artistic space where we can do what we want, and we get to do it at a really high level. My mortgage isn't dependent on it, and that's cool. I think we've accidentally backed into a kind of perfect scenario.

Byron: We'll take a new set of problems. Why not?

Peter: Rich asshole problems. I'd be a good rich asshole.

Byron: David Byrne did say that success kills creativity. So if nothing else, we are very creative.

Analogue: How did you come to be a part of the new film, Run?

Byron: We were brought in by Charles Newman, who administers our publishing. We had originally signed on with him to license some of our catalog and try to get some commercial work—mailbox money, basically. Nothing came out of that. But then all of a sudden he comes up with this independent film that actually turned out to have a real budget and real actors, and they asked us to do all the music. He delivered when it counted. He got a really good gig and one that really fit us better than any commercial work would have. I don't think we were cut out for that—I don't think it's any accident that none of that stuff worked out for us. But it turned out to be a really lovely group of people to work with.

It was a different kind of collaboration because we were working with one of the producers who had written the book the movie was based on, another who was masterminding the soundtrack album, and the director. The three of them were there for a lot of the process. Pete and I have not really collaborated with outside people that way. We worked with David Baron, who is a genius and a joy, but he's a musician and he just folded into the band with us. This was new—a whole different kind of collaboration.

Analogue: Can you break down what the work actually looked like?

Peter: Our involvement is really in two halves: the score and the soundtrack. On the soundtrack side, they had licensed about ten big hit songs that everybody would know from the seventies through the early aughts, and we did Lost Leaders versions of those—our arrangements, our productions, our performances, except that each one had a different female vocalist. There are two original songs in the soundtrack, one of which is ours, sung by Amy Helm. And our song is actually the title of the whole soundtrack: "Atalanta."

On the score side, there was a lot of back and forth. We would cut music to a scene and they'd want certain things to happen with certain events, and then they'd come back with another edit and it would throw everything off. There was one particular scene they kept recutting and they wanted it to have a groove, and every time they made an edit, it threw the groove off. We had to keep rethinking it. That was pretty mind-bending.

I understand now why a lot of interstitial music is very droney and doesn't have much of a groove—it's just a lot easier to edit. We learned a lot about process from that. If we encountered it again, we'd start by preparing for the music to be flexible from the outset.

Analogue: What was it like to finally see the finished film with your work in it?

Peter: Even during the process, when we were writing music to a scene—working in Pro Tools with the video clip right there—we'd come up with something, put it under a scene, and you're like, wow, that's fucking cool. The whole thing really works. And then to see the final cut in a movie theater, on the big screen with a full sound system—yeah.

Byron: To hear that stuff on the sound system after working on it in our little home studios with our little monitors, and then to hear it coming at us from these giant surround systems, it was pretty viscerally awesome.

Analogue: Is there further interest in that kind of work?

Peter: Yeah, on our part, absolutely. If something like this came along, I'd do it in a minute. Challenges are great. It's always good to find adjacent experiences that overlap with what you do but aren't quite what you do, stretch a little outside your known thing. That's just good for you.

Byron: If there hadn't been challenges, it wouldn't have been nearly as fun. We learned new skills, and that in itself is just exciting and invigorating.

Analogue: Where does Lost Leaders go from here?

Peter: We've always been kind of a leaf on the water. You can't really control the path that much. Maybe the Wallflowers stuff leads to other openings and we follow that. But the truth is Lost Leaders has been able to operate really well for a long time, so I'm not concerned.

We want to make another record maybe later this year. The last album came out in 2025, so if we wrote and recorded a new one this year, it'd come out in 2027. That feels about right. And more touring if possible. The Lumineers tour will probably end this fall, so presumably 2027 we'll have a little more room to operate without having to Tetris the schedule quite so much.

VISIT: Lost Leaders