Late in the Lumineers’ concert at the Smoothie King Center, singer/guitarist Wesley Schultz memorialized his younger brother. Samuel Schultz died of an apparent heart attack at age 39 in May 2025 in Denver while Wesley was on tour in England.
As the Lumineers’ March 26 New Orleans show wound down, Schultz spoke at length about how fans have helped carry him through his grief on the tour. He extolled the healing power of music. And then he demonstrated it.
When he and Samuel were kids, he said, Billy Joel cassettes were often on the car stereo during family road trips.
And so Schultz — wearing a vintage Joel T-shirt beneath his white jacket — led his band in a cover of Joel’s “New York State of Mind.”
The Lumineers singer/guitarist Wesley Schultz makes his way through the audience during a concert at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans on Thursday, March 26, 2026.
At first glance, Joel’s solidly constructed pop-rock rumination on the Big Apple would seem to have little in common with the Lumineers’ largely acoustic folk-rock, which typically travels the same sonic terrain as Mumford & Sons and the Head and the Heart.
But given the musicians’ ability to largely replicate Joel’s original arrangement — with Lauren Jacobson’s violin substituting for a saxophone — and the context provided by Schultz, it worked. It was, in fact, an unexpected highlight of the two-hour show.
Circle Bar memories
The only official members of the Lumineers are Schultz and drummer/keyboardist Jeremiah Fraites, childhood neighbors in New Jersey who found success after moving to Denver. Last year they celebrated 20 years as musical partners. Onstage, they surround themselves with five supporting musicians, most of whom have been with them for a decade or more — long enough to forge a band identity.
The Automatic World Tour has included stadium stops in the band’s strongest markets. New Orleans isn’t one of those markets. The Smoothie King Center wasn’t full, with part of the upper level hidden behind black curtains.
But the Lumineers have come a long way since their first New Orleans gig years ago at the Circle Bar, a hole-in-the-wall tucked along what is now Harmony Circle.
“It couldn’t have been hotter,” Schultz recalled of that long-ago night. But by playing the Circle Bar, he and Fraites thought, “This is it! We’ve made it.”
The Smoothie King Center house lights went down to start the show right after a recording of “Turn the Page,” Bob Seger’s early-‘70s look at road life, blared from the PA system. It’s a life the Lumineers know well. They arrived in New Orleans after more than a year of globe-trotting. The New Orleans date concluded the American leg of the Automatic World Tour, but more dates in Central and South America, Europe and Canada loom through the summer.
The Lumineers’ Stelth Ulvang performs a handstand atop a piano during the band’s concert at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans on Thursday, March 26, 2026.
The two dozen-plus songs in the setlist spanned all five Lumineers studio albums. They went to work with “Same Old Song.” Acoustic guitar, bass, violin, accordion and a tambourine/kick-drum combo populated “Flowers In Your Hair.” “Angela” instigated the first of many singalongs.
Schultz offered a lengthy explanation of the song “Ass****.” He is an understated frontman prone to measured movements and banter. But there was constant motion around him. Crew members swarmed to rearrange the placement and mix of the instruments after every song as the musicians alternated between the main stage and an anchor-shaped runway that jutted out onto the floor. All that movement sometimes made sustaining momentum between songs a challenge.
Schultz even stayed composed as he strolled the perimeter of the arena floor, calmly reaching out to fans’ outstretched hands while singing “Brightside.”
Meanwhile, Stelth Ulvan, the band’s barefoot, hyper-animated multi-instrumentalist, was a show unto himself.
When he wasn’t collapsing onto his back while strumming a mandolin during “Gloria” or sustaining a long handstand atop — or somersaulting off — a piano, he was exhorting the audience to have as much fun as he was. Ulvan, too, made a lap around the arena floor, lingering among the fans in the standing-room-only pit area before climbing back onto the stage.
Husband and wife duo Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst of opening act Shovels & Rope returned to add their voices to the Lumineers’ “Gale Song.” The Lumineers themselves, joined en masse by the audience, provided the harmonies for the hit “Ho Hey.”
They fired off confetti cannons mid-show during “Sleep On the Floor.” The big tom-tom drums of “Where We Are” gave way to the moody “Salt and the Sea,” which Schultz dug into.
The musicians detoured into the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” to usher in their own “Leader of the Landslide.” A kick drum propelled “Slow It Down.”
Schultz sat alongside Fraites on a white piano’s bench for the “Automatic” title track, reaffirming the partnership at the core of the band. Fraites, in his trademark suspenders and hat, stayed at the keys for the subsequent “Ophelia.”
Jeremiah Fraites, left, and Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers in Los Angeles.
Allison Dinner | Invision/AP
During “Big Parade,” Schultz introduced the other musicians as they each took a turn singing a couple lines. “Cleopatra” came with Egyptian-themed décor on the stage screen.
Following a final “Stubborn Love,” Schultz and company spent a long time embracing one another.
Maybe they were acknowledging the end of another long leg of the tour.
Or maybe they were acknowledging that the healing power of music often extends to the people who make it.