Ladies and Gentlemen, things are about to get heavy. Well, sort of. Please bear with me…
In the world of physics, there are four laws of thermodynamics. You might think those laws would be numbered one through four, but you would be wrong. They are actually numbered zero through three. But I digress.
The second law of thermodynamics (which is actually the third one… jeez!) focuses on the concept of Entropy, which is defined as the measure of disorder and randomness in a system.
Now, you’re probably wondering… WHAT in the world is this fool talking about? Or, more importantly, WHY in the world is he talking about it?
So here’s the deal. (Again, please bear with me. We’ll get there. I promise.)
That whole “measure of disorder and randomness” blah, blah, blah above? You can simplify that down to the idea that everything in the universe eventually ceases to exist. It corrupts. It decays. This is inevitable. This is Entropy.
Back in 2021, a group of five musicians came together with an idea to create music that would bring people together in a spirit of joyfulness and community, allowing them to resist, to the greatest degree possible, the inevitability of entropy.
The group these five musicians formed is called 2LØT, which is short for the 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics. As a group, the members of 2LØT have a defined goal to resist entropy… to use music as a vehicle to help people get through life’s tendency to dissolve into chaos, and to activate and inspire people.
On one level, it’s pretty heady stuff. On another, it’s quite simple. If you believe, as the members of 2LØT do, that music is the greatest unifier of people that exists, then you can use music as a means to bring people together and enhance lives both individually and collectively.
2LØT will be performing live at Denver’s Lost Lake Lounge on Sunday, March 23. Ahead of that show, I sat down with Rudy Love Jr. (vocals/keys) and Sage Judd (keys), as they were putting together final preparations for a tour that kicks off with the gig in Denver.
Rick: Thank you so much for joining me today… I appreciate you carving out some time as you’re preparing to head out for the show in Denver this weekend. Where are you guys calling in from today?
Rudy: We’re at home in Wichita, Kansas.
Rick: Well, that sort of answers the first question I had for you guys. Much of what I’ve read about you suggests your home base is in Wichita. But I’ve also seen a lot of references to Dallas.
Rudy: Yeah, two of our band members are actually from Dallas… (Robert) Trusko (bassist) and II (drummer Omar M. Jahwar II, aka II… pronounced “2”). They stay down that way. We like to say Wichita is our hometown, because that’s where we sort of got our start. But we definitely frequent Dallas as well.
Rick: And am I correct in my understanding that this is the first time you’ll be playing Denver, as 2LØT?
Rudy: That’s right. This is actually our first tour, and our first time playing in Denver. It’s a lot of firsts for us. I’ve played Denver a few times with other projects, and I actually was born there. Wichita, Kansas is my hometown, but I did live there (in Denver) for a couple weeks.
Rick: (Laughing) But I guess you don’t have a bunch of fond memories…
Rudy: (Laughing back) Yeah, none that I can recall, Rick. But no, man, I tell you, I love Denver. Every time I’ve played there, it’s always been an amazing thing. The music scene there is wild. It’s so diverse and interesting.
Rick: I appreciate you saying that, because I think Denver is really underrated as a music city. I mean, it certainly doesn’t have the pedigree of an Austin, a New Orleans, or a Nashville, but in terms of live music, there’s hardly a night when there isn’t great live music going on here.
Rudy: You mentioned Austin, New Orleans, and Nashville. I go to those places all the time, and I’m a huge fan, but I think maybe they’ve just got better PR or something like that. I mean, Denver’s definitely got all the ingredients for a really special scene. So, yeah, we’re excited.
Rick: Let’s talk about your first album, Entropy, which dropped in November. Congratulations on that… it’s a killer record. I know it took a while to get it done, right?
Rudy: Yeah, man, there’s a couple of years from first song written to finally recorded and mixed and mastered and released. You know, it felt much longer for us than I think it did for others who were anticipating it. We’re hoping to get the second one out a little bit faster.
Rick: I’ve heard that you guys are already working on the second one. Tell us about the process you follow to bring new music to life.
Rudy: You gotta love the process, man, because if you don’t, then you’re gonna burn out. I think we all enjoy just spending hours on one thing and making sure that thing resonates with us.
Sage: I think different songs come to life through different processes. As far as our band workflow goes, somebody might come in with an idea seed… you know, something that isn’t necessarily done, but there’s an idea that’s fleshed out enough in a demo or a riff or something that it can be the basis for co-creation. We also try to do writing retreats as often as our schedules permit, so we can be together for a couple days or a week and just make a massive pile. Sometimes that’s a whole group hashing it out kind of thing. Or sometimes we’ll split up into small groups. You three go over there and do this, and you two come over here and do that… you know what I mean?
And a lot of times, for a record workflow, we’ll have different people in charge of different songs in terms of how they get developed, and who has veto power, so we don’t get stuck in subjective opinion purgatory for, like, months.
Rudy: Yeah, it’s the song ownership – that’s what we call it. It’s really like having a producer on each song, being a representative from the band. It usually has to do with one of us having a strong passion about something. For instance, on the album, Sage owned the song “Backwards.” We gave him all of our individual pieces, and he pieced them together in this really beautiful, intricate way that only he can do. So it’s a different personality that really shines through in that song versus, for example, “Call On Me,” which is a song that I owned. I think that helps us to diversify the sound in a way that speaks to all of our strengths and few of our weaknesses.
Rick: I want to talk a little bit about you guys coming together as a band. Your website does a great job of talking about each of the individuals and how you guys came together, but it doesn’t lay out the chronology of the whole process. Can you clear that up for me?
Sage: (Looking to Rudy) I guess this would have been… was it still 2020 or was it 2021?
Rudy: Yeah, me and you met a couple years before that, but we started playing together late in 2020. You introduced me to Chase (Koch) and II… we went to Chase’s house, and we started jamming. II was traveling back and forth from Dallas to Kansas because his father was sick. And I want to say it was April of 2021 the first time you called me and said, “Hey, come to this jam.” And I was about to say no, man, because I was tired, and I was taking care of my pops at that point. But something told me that I should go check it out…
Sage: Yeah, it was me (laughing). I was like, “Shut up, dude, come and hang out, you know?”
Rudy: (More laughter) And I was like, “I don’t know, man… this Sage guy.” But no, we hung out, and we just sort of, like, became inseparable. We just had so much fun together. We didn’t actually end up forming a band until some months later, but we would just get together and jam, you know. And I think we all needed that, because we were coming from some really dark places in our lives, and music was this thing that sort of helped all of us. I’m a professional musician, and so is Sage, so we’re always out playing. But this was a release and an escape like I hadn’t experienced in a long time. We had a bond that blossomed into a beautiful project.
Rick: It’s pretty much obligatory that each time I do an interview with a band, I have to ask about the origins of their band name. We don’t need to go into that too much here, because I’ll cover it somewhat in my intro to the piece. That being said, your backstory is certainly one of the more evocative I’ve ever come across, and what I really want to know is how in the world did you guys even come up with the idea of naming yourself after the second law of thermodynamics? I mean, who even sits around talking about something like that?
Rudy: It all started with our guitarist, Chase, who is just this brilliant guy. We had to be introduced to the concept, but we realized, as we were being introduced to it by him, that it was something we were all doing already through coming together as a band. And so it just made sense. Several of us in the group practice Stoicism and have read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I definitely digest a lot of Seneca’s writings, as well as Chase and II. The idea was to focus on self-improvement. We realized that we’re all getting older, and our bodies will start to break down to where we won’t be able to do the things we thought we could do. But we’re going to keep going until we can’t anymore. And this idea that we are going to push through and try to make our inevitable demise as beautiful as possible… it sort of became this thing where we wanted to inspire others to do the same thing.
Rick: In addition to that self-realization theme, the band is significantly defined by its commitment to social causes. Your website talks about a number of the causes that are near and dear to your collective hearts, including overcoming addiction, helping kids overcome barriers and discovering their gifts, criminal justice, fighting against extreme poverty, and mental health. There’s a lot of talk about the band partnering with organizations that support causes such as these. Can you give me some examples of what those partnerships look like?
Rudy: I’ll say that in that first year, we realized that this was really hard. We all care deeply about specific social causes. And we wanted to activate as many people as possible to bring energy and awareness to these things. We would do shows, and we would find an organization that was doing something cool that we cared about, and we’d invite them to come out. We’d build awareness by talking about them on stage and give our proceeds to them. But we came to realize that we have such a large vision that we had to sort of break it down into pieces. So we started focusing on an organization called The Phoenix for the first album cycle, if you will. It was because of a personal relationship between Chase and Scott Strode (founder of the organization). The whole idea of the Phoenix gym is to build community through activity in order to replace the need to feed addiction. It’s no disrespect to rehab facilities, but I think that a lot of people can overcome what they’re going through by adding positive reinforcement and positive habits.
Sage: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they have, statistically, the best results of anybody in the entire country. They’re just killing it compared to traditional rehab. Scott has managed to find a really clever way to craft a culture using exercise to overcome addiction.
Rudy: As members of the band, we all sort of have our vices in check, if you will. But we all have experiences, and have had relationships, and have family members and friends who have dealt with various addictions. We recognize that addiction is just a piece of a larger puzzle we care deeply about. Like raising mental health awareness. To be candid, my mother struggled with addiction, but the truth is, she had anxiety and always felt that there was something sort of working against her. She’s seven years sober at this point and is doing great.
A lot of our songs are calls to action. As we move into the next album, something that’s heavy on our minds is criminal justice… specifically juvenile criminal justice. You know how the lives of young people can be affected if they fall into this system that doesn’t do anything to actually rehabilitate and help them become adults. There are a couple different organizations we’re interested in partnering with. For the show Sunday at Lost Lake, the DJ that’s doing the show with us, a guy named Gar Den Boi, has a group called Boredom Fighters, that’s all about helping kids and empowering them through music. And so, with the next album, we’re going to sort of move into this zone where we’re specifically focused on that. Not saying that we’re going to cure anything or solve world hunger, you know, but we just want to be people who are trying to set a positive example. I think that art and activism… you can’t really have one without the other. And so we just want to be in that space for as long as we are a band.
Rick: You’re starting off the tour in Denver, and then a couple of days later you have a gig in Salt Lake City. What do days “off” look like while you’re on the road?
Rudy: We’re gonna be pretty busy. There’s actually a Phoenix gym in Denver, so we’re going to go tour that facility and work out there on Monday. Then we also we have to rehearse, because while we’re doing our full, big set in Denver, for Salt Lake City, we’re doing a more scaled-down performance that involves different arrangements. So we need a little bit of time to rehearse that.
Rick: A couple of times during our conversation you’ve made references to a second album. I wasn’t planning to talk about it, but your comments have piqued my interest. Is this something that is eminent? I mean, are we talking about maybe later this year? Or is it too soon to tell?
Rudy: Man, it’s probably just me being like I am. You know, we mentioned earlier how we have song owners for each song? Well, I’ve sort of taken it under my wing to be the album owner of this next project. I’m so excited about it and so passionate about it that I can’t stop myself from talking about it. I love the music that we’re creating so much that I might actually be jumping the gun, you know. I was in the studio doing vocals all this weekend for it, but I might be talking about it more than I should. I should be directing people towards the existing body of work.
Rick: Dang… I thought maybe I’d stumbled upon an unexpected scoop! Oh well, we’ll just leave it at that, and it will happen when it happens. In the meantime, I want to close by giving you an opportunity to talk to the folks who are either planning to be at the Lost Lake on Sunday or might be considering it. Many will be people who know who you are and will be psyched to be jamming with you. But there might be others who aren’t that familiar with you yet. What would you like to say to them that might inspire them to come check you out this weekend?
Sage: I would say that the goal of the show is to bring together the best of the esthetic world of electronic music, visually, in terms of the lights, lasers, and yada, yada, with a real live band performance. I think that’s the thing that makes us different than a lot of electronic DJ ish kind of shows. We’re playing instruments, but we also have the whole Ableton rig thing going on, and we’ve got the cool automation that can sync up with time coded visuals and stuff. And so we’re just trying to be a true hybrid in that sense.
Rudy: And also, I want to shout out sub-ID, who is the bassist for Sound Tribe Sector 9, which we’re huge fans of. They’re pioneers of what we are trying to do. And the bassist, Alana (Rocklin) is going to be playing with her project. We saw her in 2022 at Red Rocks, and I remember thinking to myself that I’d really love to share the stage with her because she was killing it. And three years later, here we are. And there are other DJs performing… Gar Den Boi you already know. And Philia, who is a great buddy of ours, is also performing. And I’m told the venue is something special too. So there’s a lot of reasons to come.
Rick: You’ll love the venue because it’s intimate, and you’ll get to be up close and personal with the crowd, which is awesome. It’s my favorite type of venue to work. The crowd will really bring the energy.
Rudy: Personally, I would always take a show with twenty people that were pushed up to the stage over a show with 1,000 people at a distance. The thing about performance, for me, is I have to feel and see and react. We have to receive the energy that the audience is giving. And I think those intimate, up close and personal shows are the best way to create that vortex… that two-way conversation. I’m excited. You put me in a small room, man, I’m gonna have a good time.
I’m expecting that a good time will be had by all. 2LØT performs at Denver’s Lost Lake Lounge on Sunday, March 23. Doors open at 7:00 for the show starting at 8:00. Get your tickets at https://lost-lake.com/.
Story by Rick Witt www.rickwittphotography.com
Photos used by permission.
