A year ago, standing in the backyard of his immaculately manicured backyard in central Denver, Wesley Schultz engaged me in a lively exchange about the urgent need to destigmatize mental-health therapy in this country.

The co-founder of the Grammy-nominated band The Lumineers and his wife were hosting a book launch for a friend who had written a harrowing memoir about scaling Mount Everest without oxygen – and with raging bipolarity.

On this subject, we were each other’s choirs. I started a nonprofit that makes affordable mental-health-care available to Colorado theater artists. Schultz and his band actively use their platform to address mental health, particularly addiction, and they have partnered with multiple organizations to support the cause.

Schultz was talking about how Kanye West selling 40 million albums did not cure his depression or alcoholism when we were politely interrupted.

“Oh, hey,” Schultz said to me, “meet my brother, Sammy.”

Sammy shook hands and apologized, but he was off to pick up his two young kids. They hugged. “Good night, brother,” Wesley said. Sam was out. The interruption was all of nine seconds.

“Accomplishing monumental things doesn’t fix a problem like mental illness,” Schultz resumed, without missing a beat. “That’s why, if you want to fix your car, you don’t run a marathon. You feel productive for doing it – but that doesn’t do anything to address the real problem.”

We’d be cut in on a couple more times over the next few minutes. When you are invited to Wesley Schultz’s house for a bona fide garden party, you don’t leave without saying goodbye. But Schultz stayed affably dialed in on the topic at hand, emphasizing the need for approaching the subject openly and with brutal honesty.

“Most people try to cover up their deficiencies by saying, ‘Look what I achieved,” Schultz said. ”Believe me when I say, ‘Doing well in anything does not escape you from having problems.’”

Schultz knows. The Lumineers have produced 24 No. 1 songs. Their 2022 world tour sold 1.1 million tickets. The band is clicked 20.7 million times every month on Spotify. That doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. Their catalog delves deeply into themes of struggle, addiction and sadness. They just have their way of turning laments on self-destruction – like, say, “Gloria” – into infectious, danceable scream-alongs.

Schultz knows first-hand the value and importance of mental therapy. His dad, who died in 2007, was a psychologist. He never got to see his son’s band become an international sensation. He never saw this house, with its designer pool and backyard grass as green as 1956. He never met Sam’s kids – his grandkids. 

“My dad was a tough dude,” Schultz said. “He’d be the guy in town you’d send over to fight the dude from the other town.” But a funny thing happened on the way to the brawl, he said: “My dad turned into a listener. And he helped people heal.”

Like many, Wesley once judged those who sought mental health services. After all, “there’s a level of painful self-reflection that most people just avoid,” he said. “But my dad taught me what I would call emotional literacy,” he said. “The idea of a man expressing emotion in a genuine way? He taught me that. And now I’m in a band where we all see a band therapist together when we can’t talk to each other on our own terms.”

Wait … the band does what?

Yes, Schultz said, The band retains a therapist to help everyone on the team navigate the stresses, the exhaustion, the conflicts, the loneliness and the real-world invasions that inevitably come with relentless touring. It’s particularly useful, Schultz said, for he and co-founder Jeremiah Fraites, who are the only permanent members of the band. Schultz loves it. 

“It’s like having a referee,” he said. “We are essentially a couple and, as a couple, sometimes we try counseling together. It’s useful. And I think talking about that out loud with you right now is a good thing. It’s shining a light on something that needs to be dried out in the sun.

“We need to understand mental health more and normalize the conversations around it.”

But a touring band therapist? I was so intrigued by the idea that I immediately asked if we could arrange to more deeply explore the topic for a fuller column, like, say, this one. Schultz was all in favor. After all: More talking equals less stigma.

We would target the story for when The Lumineers next played in Colorado. But that would not be for another year – its coming world tour in support of the new record “Automatic.” The tour would launch April 23 in Vienna and run pretty much uninterrupted through October 2025.

The key date, now long-circled in red, was Aug. 3. That’s when The Lumineers and co-Colorado musical buds Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats will join together for a historic concert at Empower Field. It is believed this will be the first time any Colorado band has headlined a concert at Mile High Stadium (or its predecessor).

So, we made a date. Talk to you next year.

Then came May 28. The hardest day of Schultz’s life. The day life picked up his compass and smashed it with a hammer.

“Home is where I want to be. Pick me up and turn me ’round.”

Schultz was waking up in Birmingham, England, for a concert scheduled that night when he took the call from his sister-in-law, Lily, back in Denver. The news was unthinkable. Sam had died unexpectedly the day before. He was only 39, three years younger than Wes, who was taking all this in 4,700 miles from home, cut off from family and (it felt like) oxygen.

He didn’t know what to do. Should he cancel the tour or play through the pain?

Wesley no doubt heard his father’s voice in his head: “Music is a form of therapy.” So he did not bottle up what he was feeling at that moment. He talked about it with 16,000 of his closest strangers that night at the Utilita Arena in Birmingham.

Twenty-two songs into a 26-song set, Schultz stopped the show and opened up his soul.

“I think one of the luckiest things I’ve been able to tap into in my life is I found something that really allows me to turn all this pain I’m feeling into something real and put it out into the universe,” he told them through tears.

“I’m over my head,” he admitted. “You guys, have you ever been over your head? You don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do right now. I love my brother. I miss my brother. He’s my best friend. I call him for anything. And I don’t have him anymore.”

But there was one thing he could do. This. Sing for him.

He told the crowd that when Sammy married Lily, he asked Wesley to play the song that would be their first dance. “It was a song that my dad used to play for us all the time when we were kids,” he said. It was “Naive Melody,” the Talking Heads’ aching ballad about missing home.

“And I kind of want to play it today to remember him,” he told the Brits.

“And you love me ’til my heart stops. Love me ’til I’m dead.” 

The crowd galvanized around him, singing along with full-throated abandon as if the band were actually playing The Lumineers’ call-and-response anthem, “Ho Hey.” Schultz was sobbing by the end of it.

The fans, he later told me, “they really just cradled me in their love.”

“Thank you guys for lifting us up in my time of need,” he said to them. “I hope to do the same for you. That’s what music is all about.”

It had been a remarkable display of what his dad would call emotional literacy. And it got him through the night. And the next night in Glasgow. And two nights after that in Dublin. Mile High – home – was still another two lonely months away.

Time to fully process the enormous loss – and introduce his brother to his fans. “Sam,” he shared on Instagram, “was someone who always lifted up a room. I really admired him in so many ways, especially how damn funny he was – and I always felt lucky that he was forever stuck with me as a brother.”

Schultz posted a video of the brothers sledding as children and another of Sam toasting Wes at his wedding. One of many family photos showed Sam and Wesley as boys dressed as Game of Thrones characters for Halloween.

The boys grew up together in New Jersey. Schultz moved to Denver in 2009 just as the rocket ship Lumineers was blasting off. “I recruited my brother to come live out here,” he told me back at the book party. Grandchildren followed – two from each son – so naturally, their mother was not far behind. “But Sam used to tease me because I did the thing where I bought my mom a house,” he said with a laugh.  

He also shared, “because people would wonder,” he said, that Sam’s passing was natural causes, meaning some sort of health emergency happened. He was found in his car parked but still running – so I’m praying that it was painless and that he didn’t suffer.”

He certainly left a lot of love behind. A GoFundMe created by “Sam’s Fan Club” to support his wife and two children already has raised $63,000.

Send it off in a letter

When I reached back out to Schultz to make plans for this story, I had not yet learned of his loss. He emailed back, filling me in. He was now navigating shifting and unstable sands, so, of course we would have to table this idea for another time. I offered what little consolation I could. 

His response to that was one of the most remarkable emails I’ve ever received. Schultz had somehow picked up on something in my response that I had not explicitly shared with him:

“I can tell by your words that you’ve lost someone important to you too early as well,” he wrote to me, a practical stranger. “I hope that you are holding up OK, too.”

In the email, Schultz went on to share that, as a kid, he remembered Dave Matthews talking about his sister, who years before was murdered by her husband back in South Africa. “When Dave heard the news, he said he didn’t know what else to do with himself except play his show that night, because he had all this emotion trapped, and he was in shock, and maybe playing music was the only way he knew how to move through it,” Schultz said.

“The same thing, in a different way, happened to me.”

When he first heard about Sammy, Schultz continued, “I wept uncontrollably for a couple of hours. I talked to my mother and sister. And I remembered hearing Dave Matthews talking about his beautiful tribute to his sister.”

And so, the band played on in Birmingham.

Schultz told me that he now plans to sing “Naive Melody” again on Saturday, with Sammy’s wife and kids invited to join him on the stage.

The first opportunity for a proper celebration of life with family and friends all gathered in the same city will finally come on Sunday, the day after the Denver concert. “So it’s gonna be an emotional weekend in the middle of a long, 16-week (U.S.) tour,” he said. “But my brother Sam was such a music fan that he’d be happy so much music was involved in this celebration of him.”

He finished by saying, “Sorry for the rant,” which was anything but, and emboldened me to share with him that his empath instincts were, in fact, totally dialed in. I, too, lost a brother under mysterious and still unresolved circumstances. He was 41. So, yeah. I did understand.     

He emailed back once more, and what he said is the only reason you are reading these words right now.

“This might be a terrible idea,” he said, “but, who knows? Maybe there is a story about all this somehow. A REAL story about how music heals us in our time of need, and in ways we often fail to appreciate because it’s on everywhere else – the dentist office, the Target runs we make, Whole Foods.

“But music is medicine for so many including me, and this has been confirmation of that.”

I told him in return: “I think that story might already be contained in the thread of our emails.

He agreed.

‘Feet on the ground, head in the sky. It’s OK, I know nothing’s wrong. Nothing.’