Erick “Jesus” Coomes on Lettuce’s New Record, ‘Elevate’

Erick “Jesus” Coomes is the bassist for the titanic funk group Lettuce. Sharing the stage with Adam Deitch (drums), Adam “Shmeeans” Smirnoff (guitar), Nigel Hall (keyboards, organ, piano, vocals), Ryan Zoidis (saxophone), and Eric “Benny” Bloom (trumpet), Lettuce has been tearing up stages and bringing their colossal, earth-shaking grooves to venues near and far since 1992. Recently I caught up with Coomes as he made his way through John Wayne Airport in California. We talked briefly about their new album, why Lettuce’s music is so intoxicating, and more.

So tell me a little bit about this new album Elevate. Any big differences or similarities between this and earlier Lettuce albums?

It’s incredibly different in every way from all of our other records to be honest with you. Starting at the point where the Russ Elevado, the engineer, the recording genius guru, got involved and said he wanted to be part of our recording and mixing process, him coming on board was a dream come true that we had had in the works for years. We were hoping to do a record like this. It really is set apart from all our other records. It’s extremely organic. One thing I will tell you about Elevate is you will want to turn that volume up a lot. You can listen to it quietly of course too obviously, but you should turn it up.

So with Elevate, the concept is really to get the real feeling that we all get at these concerts, when you see a Lettuce show live. It’s the same kind of feeling, where we’re just feeling the music all the way, like when we first met in college dorm rooms, the feeling we’ve had. It’s really cool to get that onto electromagnetic tape recording, and get real analog sounds. There are lots of things I could talk about specifically that make it different, but that’s a little too much.

How do songs come together in a band like Lettuce with that organic feeling in mind, and how has that approach to songwriting changed over your career?

I think our songwriting process is an ongoing love affair with the art of writing songs. It definitely changes throughout the years. You’re always trying to get better and better at songwriting all the time whenever you write. You’re just trying to learn and listen, be a better listener to the music. It changes a lot. When you go to write something, you might start with a different instrument every time, some people do things a certain way, but for us it’s different every time. Sometimes you’re using your cerebral mind and thinking of writing a song for specific instrumentation, so when we’re writing newer stuff, we’re writing for the exact band, the six of us now. So generally when we put down a song, we want it to be able to sound like that live.

In the press release for this album, you mentioned that playing in Lettuce is like painting live with five other people. Can you sort of elaborate on that and how that approach informs the way you play with Lettuce?

I would say it’s just meant to be. It’s its own alive entity, the music of Lettuce. We’re following it together. So when we start to play together, we start to follow this music that’s coming from somewhere, this groove, the pocket, and the synchronicities of the music, which in turn, to get a little metaphysical, lets us study the intricacies of unity and pocket and the way things can work together to make forward motion. It’s hard to say! I think it’s just meant to be. Make yourself, your environment, and the people around you better in their best natural way.

So there are a couple covers on Elevate, and you’ve done covers in the past. Do you ever find it difficult to find the balance between making a cover song your own and maintaining the spirit of the original?

You really gotta find your own heart of the song and make it your own, try as hard as you can to feel what you feel. If you’re playing a really classic track like Miles, you’re gonna have respect for that original artist and what they felt, but really make it your own. I feel like that is the key to keeping it Lettuce for us, to really feel it in our own way. I’m trying to speak for all six of us too. We’re all getting together, and if we’re all in agreeance on what’s feeling good and making the music pop, it’ll all be good.

Adam Deitch, the way I understand it, has quite a bit of influence over the songwriting process in Lettuce. Can you talk a little about that and what he brings to the band?

I can tell you right now he’s always been this way. His parents are diehard, old school, real, raw, dirty funk fanatics. They like a lot of other music too, but those three, Adam and his parents, their love of that funk….he has a lot of different writing styles, like he has Break Science and all these things. So he writes a lot of specific stuff, but I think the funk jams just come to him. They come to all of us really, but especially him, and he gets inspired, he wants to hear these things live. That’s kind of why Lettuce is a thing, because he wanted to hear these funk rhythms and things played correctly, with real horns.

Adam’s been working on little sequencers and keyboards all his life, making really cool instrumental funk jams with horns, so he gets inspired that way, and the greats like Earth Wind & Fire all of course influenced him as well. All that old school stuff like Herbie Hancock, that inspires all of us, but him specifically. He works really hard and wants to make those things come to life, and that’s what pushes us and drives us as Lettuce. Like he’ll come to us on the road and be like ‘Guys I wrote this last night, check out your horn and bass parts,’ and we’ll play it for sound check.

What’s really important to Adam as a drummer in a band that features horns is to have written more than just the drum parts. So it’s cool for him to hear me playing his bass or the horns or Shmeeans playing his guitar parts. So when you’ve composed a song at your house, and then you get your band together and hear it played live, it’s just dope. Deitch has a really cool way of coming to each one of us and breaking down the bass or guitar or horn lines and we all get together and play it, and it’s really cool. We all learned to do that from him. At least I did!”

Jesus had some parting words for the fans as well:

I just want people to love the album and have it speak to them and have them really feel it. I hope it heals them.

Elevate from Lettuce is currently available at local record stores, and all streaming platforms. The band is currently touring the U.S. for dates and tickets, click here.