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Don't Lose Yourself / Bright Glittering Gifts
NONESUCH
Laura Veirs is a singer/songwriter a million miles from the dull warblings of Dido and David Gray, gently blending acoustic folk and subdued beats, her voice a crystalline shimmer that really sets her apart. Following up 2005's mesmerising YEAR OF METEORS, Laura Veirs is back with another record to enchant and delight in the sublime SALTBREAKERS.
Lifted from that record, new single DON'T LOSE YOURSELF sees the Seattle based singer/songwriter dishing out another tale of the strange and the beautiful, a catchy slice of folk resplendent with off kilter production techniques and unexpected nuances; another case of Laura Veirs stretching her musical vision further than before, but without losing that intimate magic that makes her songs so enchanting.
Warm and inviting, DON'T LOSE YOURSELF finds Laura Veirs continuing to charm and enchant as well as mesmerise.
BIOGRAPHY
Laura Veirs' new album SALTBREAKERS will be released by Nonesuch Records on March 26. On her third Nonesuch release Veirs remains fascinated by the natural world, filling her work with images of the ocean and the stars. But she digs even deeper this time, incorporating the turbulence of her own life and the larger world into this collection of songs. The album includes the single DON'T LOSE YOURSELF, which will be released on March 19.
The continuing collaboration with producer Tucker Martine (The Decemberists) allows for experimentation and inventiveness, which according to Pitchfork, showcases Veirs' 'indulgence in flights of verbal fancy'. An example of this is the track TO THE COUNTRY, which was recorded in the Nashville cabin of Johnny Cash and June Carter and which features an eight-person Baptist choir. Veirs describes the experience as 'transcendent'.
On SALTBREAKERS, Veirs is accompanied by her longtime studio and touring band, originally called the Tortured Souls, who now bear the same name as the album. Over the last three years, the band has travelled the world touring in support of Veirs' previous albums CARBON GLACIER and YEAR OF METEORS. "The band has gotten really close," says Veirs. "We've become a family." The group includes Veirs on vocals and guitar, Karl Blau on bass, Steve Moore on piano, and Tucker Martine on drums. The title track of SALTBREAKERS also marks the debut of her fellow players as backing vocalists. Most of the album was recorded in Seattle.
Late August, 2005 saw the worldwide release of Year of Meteors and the record has been attracting some great reviews in publications such as Uncut, Mojo, NME, Q, the New York Times, Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly, Spin.com, the Independent (UK) and many others.
Last year, Nonesuch released Laura Veirs’ Carbon Glacier, her label debut, on August 24, 2004. The New York Times described Veirs’ songs “as poems: they’re careful, word-conscious, narrative, neither foggy nor overwritten, and tend to give you a take on regular life experience that you don’t quite expect.” Time Out New York concurred, saying “Veirs' talent borders on the transcendent.” The album also received extraordinary praise in the U.K., where it was released in February 2004 on Bella Union Records. The Independent called Carbon Glacier the “most enthralling album of the year thus far,” adding “it has the air of an instant classic, a benchmark by which future Americana releases will be judged.” Mojo called the record “incantatory, contemplative, literate,” while Uncut, in a five-star lead review, called Carbon Glacier Veirs’ “first masterpiece…the unmistakable sound of a songwriter hitting her stride, pouring herself into each syllable.”
Seattle-based singer-songwriter Laura Veirs calls her 2005 Nonesuch release Year of Meteors “a road record.” “It doesn’t sound like one,” she says, “but it is.”
Veirs had spent most of 2004 touring in support of the hauntingly beautiful Carbon Glacier, her breakthrough effort and Nonesuch debut. She started out in Europe, where she was greeted with overwhelming critical praise and sold-out houses. Then Veirs worked her way around the States, where she was still just being discovered (though the reviews were also often superlative). The experience was at times heady, other times gruelling, and she incorporated it into her new songs. However, given Veirs’ vividly descriptive yet dream-like lyrics, you won’t learn anything about her actual itinerary. Year of Meteors is no ordinary travelogue, but it will definitely take you on a remarkable journey.
“All the songs are about transportation, motion,” Veirs explains. “If you listen to the words, there’s always some movement happening, whether it’s greyhounds running down a mountainside as mud flows or a person flying off into the sun or someone lurking around the bottom of the sea. I think that’s because I was in motion so much of the year. Somehow I knew that all the travelling would come into the songs, but I wanted to remain focused on the bigger things, not just life on the road, so that’s why there are no direct references to that.”
There are, she hastens to add, “love songs related to that experience, like the struggles of being away from home and your partner. Or having my band and the different relationships I have formulated, many of them very close because of the intense circumstances of touring. So it’s a relationship record too.”
And, finally, it’s a band record: a fertile collaboration between Veirs and her studio band, the Tortured Souls (who often play live with her)—Steve Moore (piano, organs), Karl Blau (bass, guitar, vocals), and producer Tucker Martine (drums, percussion, treatments). Viola player Eyvind Kang, another longtime associate, also sat in. As Veirs explains, “When we talked about making the album, we decided to record a lot of these songs as a band first, then do some more of the solo type of songs. It had always been the opposite before, I would go in and record the more quiet guitar parts and sing. This time, half of the record or more are tracks that we did live as a band first. Then we went in and recorded the quieter ones. We approached this from the beginning more as a band album and it really turned out that way.”
While the songs themselves are linear in structure, the arrangements take off in unexpected, subtly pop-oriented directions. There’s a handclap-filled call and response on “Rialto,” which could be a reverie about a stopover in Venice, and an almost-sing-along chorus on “Secret Someones,” a lilting track that belies Veirs’ reputation as a purveyor of only chilly moods. Lovely countrified strings glide through “Parisian Dream,” while bursts of grungy guitars interrupt “Black Gold Blues.”
A memorable little synthesizer squeal repeated throughout “Galaxies” seems completely off-hand, but was actually a major Rube Goldberg sort of undertaking. As Veirs explains: “It took three of us. I hit the key, then Steve brought the volume up and down, and then Karl did the modulator thing. Karl was trying to do it by himself but it was too much for one person to handle. It’s funny that the three of us needed to be there to make that work. In fact, you can see what we did on our website under the ‘videos’ section. Tucker was making videos with a little digital camera during the sessions so you can see that as it happened.”
Bella Union label head (and former Cocteau Twin) Simon Raymonde decided to release 2003’s Troubled by the Fire after Veirs played at South By Southwest in Austin, TX. Her 2003 performance there prompted New York Times critic Jon Pareles to name Veirs one of the top three finds of the event. Nic Harcourt of KCRW in Los Angeles featured tracks from the disc on “Morning Becomes Eclectic”; No Depression also gave it a rave, but the real buzz started overseas, where Veirs’ stark and surreal take on Americana found a rapt audience. The NME declared, “Laura Veirs fashions a timeless strand of neo-folk and post-country…there’s a spine-tingling magic to these short stories.”
Troubled by the Fire was not officially Veirs’ debut, however; she had self-released two albums, The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae (2001) and Laura Veirs (1999) that had garnered her local press and radio attention. John Richards of Seattle radio station KEXP called Orphan Mae “a gorgeous album of dark indie-folk rooted in traditional balladry…with some exciting experimental effects.” Her earlier self-titled disc was as raw as she would ever be; it was recorded in three hours with just voice and guitar.
Carbon Glacier, named after “a beautiful, dirty black and white glacier on the northern slopes of Mount Rainier,” elevated Veirs further. It recalled the work of various artists—Leonard Cohen, Laurie Anderson, Beth Orton, even Four Tet—while sounding like nothing but itself. Veirs had composed the austere, mesmerizing tracks in the winter of 2003 and quickly recorded them in twelve days with the Tortured Souls and assorted friends. European audiences in particular were enthralled with Veirs’ stirring, quasi-mystical evocation of the natural elements of her Pacific Northwest home. Here was an America they could recognize and still embrace. “Taking the mythically proportioned American wilderness as giant metaphor,” Uncut wrote, “Veirs explores unpredictability, cyclical rebirth and the tortuous scramble for artistic perfection via gently exquisite songs both dark and luminous.”
Veirs, who was raised in Colorado Springs, had studied geology (along with Mandarin Chinese) as a college student in rural Minnesota, and had always been fascinated with nature. As a youth, she was more involved in sports and outdoor activities than music, but the interest was there, waiting to surface, like an object in one of her gravity-defying lyrics. And when it did, the circumstances could have come from a scenario for one of her songs. Veirs was on a collegiate geological expedition in the desert of Northwest China when she had an epiphany, realizing that her future would be in singing, writing, and playing the guitar. The scientist still comes through in her work, though—lending sharp, precise edges to otherwise impressionistic lyrics.
“I love when I can write a lyric that brings a clear image to mind,” Veirs says. “That’s kind of what I’m striving for. This album has a lot of stuff from the sky—stars, meteors, galaxies—and a lot of stuff from the sea: birds floating in the air or on water, eels and sea grass at the bottom of the sea…For some reason, those things don’t sound scientific and removed to me; they sound vivacious and raw and pure and essential to life. Somehow I hope I can gather my appreciation for those things and translate that through myself, through my songs, keeping a reference to the human aspect, the human experience.”
—Michael Hill
LINE UP
Laura Veirs>vocals/guitar/keyboards
Steve Moore>piano/organs/keyboards
Karl Blau>bass/guitar/vocals/keyboards
Tucker Martine>drums/beats/percussion
Eyvind Kang>viola
Keith Lowe>upright bass
DISCOGRAPHY
TRIUMPHS & TREVAILS OF ORPHAN MAE (2002>Bella Union)
Jailhouse Fire
Up The River
John Henry Lives
Black-Eyed Susan
Orphan Mae
Blue Ink
Montague Road
Through December
Raven Marching Band
Movin' Along
TROUBLED BY FIRE (2003>Bella Union)
Lost At Seaflower Cove
Bedroom Eyes
The Ballad Of John Vegelia
Songs My Friends Taught Me
Cannon Fodder
Tom Skookum Road
Tiger Tattoos
A Shining Lamp
Ohio Clouds
Devils Hootenanny
Midnight Singer
CARBON GLACIER (2004>Bella Union)
Ether Sings
Icebound Stream
Rapture
Lonely Angel Dust
The Cloud Room
Wind Is Blowing Stars
Shadow Blues
Anne Bonny Rag
Snow Camping
Chimney Sweeping Man
Salvage A Smile
Blackened Anchor
Riptide
YEAR OF METEORS (2005>Nonesuch)
Fire Snakes
Galaxies
Secret Someones
Magnetized
Parisian Dream
Rialto
Through The Glow
Cool Water
Spelunking
Black Gold Blues
Where Gravity Is Dead
Lake Swimming
SALTBREAKERS (Nonesuch>2007)
Pink Light
Ocean Night Song
Don't Lose Yourself
Drink Deep
Wandering Kind
Nightingale
Saltbreakers
To The Country
Cast A Hook
Phantom Mountain
Black Butterfly
Wrecking
DON'T LOSE YOURSELF (Nonesuch>2007)
Don't Lose Yourself
Bright Glittering Gifts
LINKS
Laura Veirs>www.lauraveirs.com
Nonesuch Records>www.nonesuch.com
FURTHER LISTENING
Kristin Hersh>Hips And Makers (1994>4AD)
Emma Rugg>Isolated Impression (2003>Indreams Records)
Cathy Davey>Something Ilk (2004>Regal)
Review date: February 2007 |
