Laura Love
By Alex Teitz
Laura Love’s creative force charges into grand territory with her new CD, Fourteen Days. Love, formerly of Mercury Records, is new to Rounder Records with this album that explores people, the environment and family. FEMMUSIC highly recommends the CD, and was honored to speak with Love. This is the first of two parts. Laura Love
FEMMUSIC: Can you describe your songwriting technique?
LL: Well it’s kinda a mess really. First thing actually is I try to get a groove going, like a bass groove and then once I have a groove that I like I usually start humming some kind of melody on top of it. Once I kind of get the groove and the melody in there I start thinking of what words will fit on that melody and on that groove and that kind of determines what the song will be about. I don’t often go into it thinking well, “I’m going to write a song about this…” Usually the other stuff comes first, and then the song kind of defines itself.
FEMMUSIC: You recently moved to Zoe/Rounder from Mercury Records. How has the experience with Zoe/Rounder been and what caused all that?
LL: Well we got kicked off was the first cause. They didn’t want us anymore. They did a couple of records with us and then a big restructuring when Universal Label Group came in. Seagram’s basically came in, and sort of took over Mercury they fired 80% of everybody associated with Mercury. That’s eighty percent of everyone from mail clerks to their artists. We were pretty sure we were going to get the ax, but the new people kept saying, “We are so committed to keeping you here. You might see a lot of heads rolling but yours won’t be among them.” Which should have been our first clue that we were going to get it. So we were thinking, “Why do they want to keep us?” It’s not like we’re selling records like Hanson or anything. We were pretty baffled by the whole thing, but they kept assuring us they would keep us. Then right before we went on an East Coast Tour they said, “You’re out!”
FEMMUSIC: That’s a hell of a way to start a tour!
LL: Right. It was like, “Wow. Don’t we feel loved.” So our thinking was that we were going to be indie again. Just do it on my own ‘cause that was pretty satisfying. Mercury wasn’t really bad to us, they just didn’t know what to do with us. They weren’t sure how we fit into radio or the big world. As far as I’m concerned we probably don’t fit into the Big World. And that’s okay. It doesn’t need to be superhuge. It really doesn’t. It just needs to feed us all and keep our cats on Science Diet. I don’t need to MacDonald’s or Starbuck’s, I don’t need to be king of the world. And for a big corporation that’s all there is really.
For Rounder their philosophy is much different. They’re not adverse to having a mega-million selling record by any means but they also feel like it’s not all that there is. They really feel like public radio and independent radio, non-commercial radio is well worth servicing and getting a record to. That makes me feel a lot better because Mercury Records didn’t feel like that at all. They were just like commercial radio is all there is. We want a BIG radio hit. And I don’t listen to commercial radio really. Not much. I’m liable to turn the dial to NPR, Prairie Home Companion and The Car Guys and that kind of stuff. That’s really what I listen to. I like the kind of music that non-commercial radio plays. They really are able to program their own music. They don’t get the master list from big brother and then put it on…
With Rounder they have a very different approach. It’s worthwhile if you’re an artist that sells 50,000 records a year, 25,000 or whatever. It’s not necessarily all about sales with them. Definitely they’re not in it to lose money but they pay attention to you even if you’re not Celine Dion or Whitney Houston.
FEMMUSIC: You have a Colorado Connection. Can you tell me about it?
LL: I found my mother there for one thing. It’s also just a beautiful state and we play in Colorado quite a bit. Finding my mother there was a pretty amazing thing for me. So I have a soft spot in my heart for Colorado.
FEMMUSIC: From what I understand you found your mother through the internet. Can you elaborate?
LL: My sister actually did. She’s been pretty much computer illiterate all her life and then she got a computer about two years ago and one of the first things she did was put out a search for my mother. And people have been doing that too for a few years as a result of my asking them too on Octoroon and onShrum Ticky and sure enough one exact match came up and my sister has a real memory for details that nobody would know, just little stuff like she would probably remember somebody’s social security number that wasn’t her own. (Laugh). She was able to get a match, and I wrote that person and it turned out to be my mother. I was amazed that she actually wrote back because when she disappeared years ago she, I think, probably ignored letters of mine before she went completely underground and was unreachable. It was a very sweet thing to get a letter back from her and hear that she actually felt warmth and tenderness towards me. She just been battling with mental illness her whole life and I guess her official diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenic. You really don’t know what that means until you really feel it. For me it really manifested itself in she really felt my sister and I were the enemy a lot of the times as we were growing up. And would blame us, and feel suspicious of us and feel that we were out to get her. From the time that we were little very very young children on. We were always trying to read her and make sure that she was taken care of and not be a burden to her and obedient. People would remark on how obedient and well behaved we were. We didn’t really act like kids. We acted like we were…we were frightened of her and we also knew that she was fragile so we spent really our whole childhood trying not to not upset her. But there was no pleasing and was no way to not upset her because it’s not a rational thing. Mental illness isn’t rational. You don’t follow normal patterns of behavior…It was real hard, but it all kind of worked out.
I moved her from Colorado to Seattle because she wanted to meet her grandchildren. My sister has a couple of kids. For me that was really a huge thing. For the last two years, actually 3 years…I spent a year building her house, a house here and that was a real labor of love. I didn’t know how to do that and I got a lot of friends involved that helped me. So really with our own hands we built her a house. Then went to get her, and put her on a plane and then we drove all her stuff to Seattle. It was just a huge thing for us because here was this woman who, when she first got to Colorado Springs she lived on the streets for a few years. It makes me kind of angry that someone because they’re not able to cope has to live outdoors. She may not be a pleasant person to be around, or she may not make sense and she may sort of…It’s not fun or pleasant to be around her a lot of the time, but she, I think, should have had a home. I think someone should have given her a place to live because she wasn’t able to work or take care of herself. She describes that time. She said it was a lot better than living in a mental institution and I’m sure it was but MY GOD, she described living outside when it’s four degrees and having to sleep in a sleeping bag and being wet and cold and hungry. It just made me really sad. It made me kind of vow to take good care of her. So that’s what I’m trying to do now.
FEMMUSIC: How has your music changed over time?
LL: I think it’s gotten freer. I think I’m less self-conscious. I don’t try to gauge how much people will respond to it as, and I don’t think I ever did a lot of that. Now it’s all about having it feel good, and sound good as we’re making it…
FEMMUSIC: What was the biggest challenge making Fourteen Days?
LL: It all went really easily. There weren’t really any challenges…well the one was we worked with a producer for the first time. Joe Chicarelli and I thought that might be really hard or awful. I thought what if it’s the slavedriver who tries to take all the joy out of making music, or the kind that says, “Why don’t you play it like this?” I didn’t want the producer to be some sort of frustrated writer or singer that was trying to make it sound like him. It was such a relief when Joe Chicarelli came in because he was so great. He had mixed our last record and I really liked that. He had called and said, “I’d love to be involved in your next record and hopefully I could actually be there right from the start to produce it all the way to the end.” And I said, “How ‘bout if you just mix it again?”
I felt he did such a great job on the last record that I should get over myself and see what he could do, and he did great. He did what I really love in my ideal world it I hoped it would be which is he took the decision out of my hands that I didn’t want to make. That I didn’t really care about. Out of Rod’s four solos which one is the best? I think everything that Rod plays is excellent, and I can’t decide….With those things it was just great to not have to be that person. So it worked out really well, I’d work with him again in just a heartbeat.