Episode 15: Jefferson Waful!

Bub & Pop | Episode 15: Jefferson Waful (recorded March 3, 2026)

Our guest this week is Jefferson Waful: lighting designer, video director, and the person responsible for how Umphrey's McGee looked for eleven years.

If you have been going to jam shows for any length of time, you have seen Jefferson's work. Eleven years lighting Umphrey's McGee, moe. before that, something like two decades of it all told. He is a video director at On Location these days — Super Bowls, Coachella, Daytona — but the reason I wanted him on is that lighting a band like Umphrey's is a musicianship problem well before it is a technical one, and almost nobody talks about it that way.

He does. He learned to count odd time by overhearing his Berklee-educated roommates rehearse in the basement of the house they shared. He watches a guitarist's foot drift toward a sustain pedal and knows to get ready. He hears the drummer say "off on one, in on two" into a talkback mic in the middle of a jam and blacks the stage out on that exact beat, so that it reads to everyone in the room as telepathy.

My favorite thing he said is about restraint — that what a young lighting designer has to learn, and what takes years, is to put his hands behind his back and do nothing for twenty seconds. It is the same lesson musicians get about the space between the notes, arriving from a completely different door.

There is also Farm Aid in 1998, and Neil Young walking out to sit in with Phish on "Down by the River," which happens to be the song Jefferson's dad taught him when he was seven. The two of them still watch webcasts together.

Down the shore with the family this week so keeping the update light. But I should have some exciting updates next month, so keep an eye out!