Rock Band Lit Taps Country Influences on New Album

Remember "My Own Worst Enemy?" 

Rock Band Lit Taps Country Influences on New Album
Lit; Photo credit: Filthy Mouth Creative

As lines between musical genres continue to blur, there are more rock bands finding that country fans embrace their music too. That’s definitely been the case with platinum-selling rockers Lit. The band has been performing to both rock and country audiences on their current tour and are growing their country fan base with the new album These Are the Days, which released July 13.

“We’ve been doing country festivals and rock festivals and we don’t really change our set too much,” Lit lead guitarist Jeremy Popoff tells Sounds Like Nashville. “We play the old hits that people expect from us and then we play a handful of new songs and we mix it up depending on how long we are playing. It’s a good mix of old and new and just the vibe coming off the stage is very much the same. It’s still a high-energy rock and roll show. It’s not like we put our guitars down and pick up our banjos.”

Yet for fans who identify the band with such hits as “Zip-Lock,” “Miserable” and “My Own Worst Enemy,” which spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the rock charts, their first question might just be “Why?”

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say we asked ourselves that along the way too,” Popoff admits, “but I know that right now if we sit down to write a song, this is how it sounds. We could beat our heads against the wall and force ourselves to try to write songs that we wrote 20 years ago, but that’s not why we got into this business to begin with. That’s not why we started playing guitars and writing songs. We did that because we wanted to do our own thing and not be in some sort of a box, so it’s not weird to us at all. It’s not weird to our friends in town and it’s not weird to people who have known and have been doing this with us for so many years. We understand that there’s going to be some people that are scratching their heads, but then when they see it live, they’ll understand it.”

Lit’s current tour has been interesting because they are playing to different audiences, sometimes at the same venue on different dates. “We did a show a few months ago in Wisconsin and we opened up for Eric Church, Jamey Johnson and Cadillac Three and then we went back two weeks later and opened up for Megadeth and Rob Zombie,” he laughs. “It was the same festival grounds, same promoter. We played the exact same set and the crowd was great for both shows.”

Popoff says country and rock audiences have a lot in common. “When I’m on stage looking out at the crowd, the crowds don’t look that much different,” he says. “People are people. People like good songs and like to get out with their friends and be entertained. They like to hear a band that gives them an escape from the real world.”

Popoff says the band has been encouraged by response to their shows. “It’s been fun to see the country audience digging what we’re doing and vice versa. We’ve been getting a ton of people after the shows that say they just love it already or they’ll go, ‘You know I wasn’t sure what to expect. I heard you guys were doing some country stuff, but wow what a smooth transition. It makes sense and I get it now and I love it.’ That’s the vibe we were hoping to get from people,” Popoff says. “A lot of fans grew up with us. If we go down Broadway [in Nashville] right now I guarantee you we’d hear a cover band play our songs. I think that people that liked our music 20 years ago like country music now and I feel like country music today is sort of the new rock and roll.”

Over the past two decades, Lit has built a successful career, selling more than 2.5 million albums, scoring 32 million views on You Tube and attracting 1.9 million Spotify listeners. Since dipping their toes in the country music pool, their single “Fast” hit No. 1 spot two times on CMT Music’s 12-pack Countdown and the video for “Good Problem To Have” landed in Top 6 first week out.

Exploring country music is a natural step for Popoff and his brother A. Jay, Lit’s lead vocalist. “My first heroes were Glen Campbell and Charlie Rich,” says Popoff, who grew up in Southern California. “I used to try to comb my hair like Glen Campbell. I thought he was the coolest thing ever. Dad was a DJ on country radio and brought home tons of albums all the time. When we were kids, that’s what we played with. Then he moved to LA and went to top 40 radio, but back in those days top 40 was the top 40 songs in America so we had Kenny Rogers’ records and Dolly Parton and Boston and Led Zepplin records. We really didn’t know that there was a difference [in genres].

Popoff says their musical education extended beyond country and top 40. “Our grandfather was a jazz musician post-WWII during that big band era, so we were influenced early on by a lot of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and that kind of stuff,” he notes. “So it really ran the gamut from Frank Sinatra to Metallica and from Waylon Jennings to Lionel Richie. We just loved good songs. That was our upbringing until we hit our teen years and then we were just rebellious heavy metal kids.”

When he’s not on tour, Popoff divides his time between his native California and a home in East Nashville. He began coming to Nashville to write songs in 2005 and later signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing Nashville and has penned songs for Jamey Johnson, Colt Ford and other country acts.

In working on the new album, he says they enjoyed working with Nashville writers. “‘Someday Maybe’ was written with my brother and John Singleton. We’ve written several songs with Singleton and love his style,” Popoff says. “I love ‘These Are The Days’ as well. It’s another one we wrote with Singleton. When we first wrote it, it was just kind of beachy sounding and we took it in the studio and [producer] Corey Crowder helped us tear it apart a little bit. It sounds like we poured a bunch of whiskey over it and now it has that real heavy thump and slide guitar. We’re playing that one live as well and love it.”

Popoff says many songs on the album are a reflection of their real life. “Probably the most autobiographical song is ‘Fast,’” Popoff reveals. “That is one that’s very close to us. We wrote that with Jeffrey Steele and it’s literally describing things that have happened to us. That was an emotional song to write for the three of us. And there’s a song called ‘California Sun’ that is literally a page out of our childhood where it talks about getting home before the street lights come on. It talks about building jumps with wood that we stole from a construction site and building them as high as we could and not thinking about how we were going to land. That is really symbolic of how we’ve lived our life—starting a band and just going, going all in with it. That’s kind of how we’ve always been.”

Popoff says he and his bandmates are excited about this next chapter in their career and creating new music that taps into their roots and varied influences. “It feels right to us,” he says. “We’re excited to get this record out. We’re excited for our old fans to get it and hear it and hopefully dig it, but we’re excited to get it front of the country music fans that are so awesome and supportive that like our old songs and will hopefully like these new ones too.”