Laura Veirs: “Motherhood has widened my lyrical scope”

“I don’t think it’s so parent-oriented that you need kids to relate to it. I think younger people will still be able to get into these songs.”

I would say that the past few years have seen a lot of personal and professional development for Laura Veirs, but she approaches her work in such a manner that it’s hardly as if the twain are destined never to meet. After giving birth to her first son, Tennessee, in April of 2010, she turned her attention to slightly more esoteric releases than usual, releasing a covers record of children’s songs, Tumble Bee, in 2011, as well as providing the soundtrack for Hello I Must Be Going last year. Last month saw the arrival of Warp and Weft, her first original full-length in over three years, and an album produced by her husband, Tucker Martine, and made for the most part with Veirs heavily pregnant with baby number two.

“I brought out July Flame in 2010, and then I did the kids’ record for fun the year after. It was just time to go back to plying my trade, I guess. It’s really my calling to be a songwriter and spend my days figuring out what I want to say and how I can best say it. I’ve spent years and years writing songs, and I write a lot more than I keep. After a couple of years of working on this record, I had enough to book some time with Tucker and get everything finished.”

Given Veirs’ honesty as a songwriter, it’s hardly controversial to expect her new-found motherhood to have weighed heavily upon Warp and Weft‘s lyrical content. “It sure has. I mean, first of all, my time is much shorter than it was, and I seem to have very little time to do things; I could have full time childcare, but I keep it part time because I want to spend time with them – I don’t want to have somebody else raise them. That means that I have to be very disciplined with the time that I do have. That’s the practical consideration I have to deal with, but I feel like the topics that I’m dealing with in my songs have changed too.”

“I think my scope has gotten wider now, and I can look at things with more compassion, and more empathy,” says Veirs. “As a mother, you’re looking at the world that you’re bringing your kids into, and trying to look for how you can make it better, and then you also have that typical parent’s fear of something going wrong; you get these haunting fears, because there’s more at stake now. I guess you come to realise the enormity of having these two people that you’re basically responsible for, for the rest of your life. I’m looking at the world now as if the camera’s panning wide, and I think you can hear that in the lyrics.”

Veirs has lived and worked in Portland, Oregon for the past seven years, and is insistent that the city lives up to the all the right parts of the bohemian image that the likes of Carrie Brownstein’s comedy Portlandia have broadcast around the world. “I think the main thing is just that the town itself is really a liveable city. It’s not that expensive yet. It’s getting worse in that respect, but it’s nothing like as bad as New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles. In those towns, you pretty much have to have a day job too, unless you’re some rock star who can make all their money through touring. I guess it’s smaller here too, especially compared to Seattle; we don’t have the big industrial side of things here, whereas up there there’s Amazon and Boeing and those kinds of things.”

“So, it’s a simpler place in practical and financial terms, but of course there’s also a lot of kindred souls around, and it’s fairly easy to get other musicians involved with your record; I think it affects Tucker more than me, because more people want to come to him to have him produce their albums now because Portland suddenly has these international hipster connotations – he’s worked with Camera Obscura and Beth Orton recently. Some of the guys from My Morning Jacket played on my record, and I think that’s partly because the idea of coming out to spend a few days in Portland is pretty appealing these days.”

One of Warp and Weft‘s most obvious sonic facets is the clear shift towards an electric guitar sound, something that Veirs has touched upon fairly sparingly in the past. “It was just something I was feeling in the studio. I have kind of a garage studio set up, and I just found myself drawn to it again. I think my pendulum pretty much swings between the sparse, acoustic aesthetic and the rock, electric aesthetic, and I was swinging back towards the rock thing this time. I toured, for years, as a trio, with a real stripped-down thing going on, no drums or anything, so it was nice to be able to say, ‘OK, let’s put a band together and put on a rock show.’ I mean, not necessarily a rock show per se, but a full band show where we can try to recreate some of the denser tracks on the record.”

“I’m lucky to play with musicians who are skilled on multiple instruments; they can jump in between things and try to represent some of the album’s more complicated tracks. There’s this one song, “White Cherry”, that I have no idea how we’re going to pull it off, but we start rehearsals tomorrow, and I think with four people – which seems like a pretty luxurious number to me – we’ll be able to figure it out.”

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There seems to be a little bit of a disconnect between the instrumental diversity often prevalent on Veirs’ records, and the stripped-back approach to writing she tends to take. “I don’t ever write in the studio. Tucker’s so busy these days that I just have to get in and out, really; it’s not a luxury that’s afforded to me. I’d love to do things that way, but because I can’t, I generally have things set before I go in; everything’s totally structured, all the melodies and so on are in place. I try to keep the demos that I take in fairly minimal, just so we can see whether the song seems to be working at the core; you can trick it out with bells and whistles and so on, but why bother if it isn’t really working?”

“I tend to write a batch of five or so at a time, and then take them to Tucker and run through them,” Veirs elaborates. “I wrote a lot of songs on this record just purely on the electric guitar. I did a handful on the piano, too, just because it’s fun because I’m not a great player; when you don’t know an instrument very well, it really lends itself to experimentation because you can use your ear to find sounds. I can’t really manage that on guitar because I’ve developed a bit of a muscle memory over the years. I wrote “White Cherry” that way, and “Make Something Good” on the last record. They’ve ended up pretty special to me because they came from an intuitive place; it’s not like you’re going, ‘oh, I should do a minor seventh here because that’s good technique.’ You’re focused purely on what flows, and if you keep the demos stripped back, you can avoid wasting too much time.”

Veirs has toured the UK and western Europe extensively over the past few years, and not without reason; it was on this side of the Atlantic that she first made her breakthrough, around a decade ago. “Back in 2003, I was working with Tucker – we were just collaborators at that point – and he sent my third record, my second with him, over to Simon Raymonde at Bella Union. They’d met once before, at South by South West, but for all intents and purposes, it was basically a cold call. He loved it and put it out, and that was a pretty rare thing, for him to release something he’d kind of been blindly approached with.”

“I got some good press around that time, and things picked up a little. My next record, Carbon Glacier, did pretty well on both sides of the Atlantic, and ended up signing with Nonesuch, who were basically a major at the time. I guess I first kind of broke through in the UK, which was great, but pretty frustrating at the same time – you know, why couldn’t I get that kind of foothold in the US? I think, in retrospect, you’ve got to realise that over here, everybody and their mother is in a band, and it just makes it difficult to get noticed. It’s hard to tour because of the sheer size of the country, so that’s another consideration. I think my audience size between the UK and certain parts of Europe and the States is pretty well matched now, though.”

As much as the more grounded nature of Warp and Weft sees Veirs wrestle with topical lyricism less obviously than in the past, there’s still an issue-driven track in the form of “America”, which deals with the thorny issue of gun violence with impressive nuance and empathy. “I didn’t struggle with the actual song – that came out easily – but it really is difficult not to beat people over the head with a certain message when it’s a topic as sensitive as this. You know, it’s something that’s on everybody’s minds all the time, and I feel like, if I’d tried to write something like that and didn’t quite hit the mark, I probably wouldn’t have bothered putting it on the record. It’s not like I’ll shy away from it, it’s not that I’m a wimp, but I definitely didn’t want to come across as condescending in any way. We have a video coming out at the end of the month that I think addresses the topic really well, with black humour and satire. We’re hoping it’ll be attention-grabbing in all the right ways.”

Looking forward, Veirs concedes that her career will need to make concessions to her personal life in future, with motherhood, not music, beginning to take over as her day job. It shouldn’t, however, dent the prospect of new material in the near future. “If I was the sole breadwinner and my career was the only one happening, I could go out and tour and not really worry about it, but with Tucker having his own thing going on and with two young kids, the logistics get really hard. I’m just going to bring the baby out on these upcoming tours, and my other son will stay at home with Tucker and my parents. I know I can’t tour six months a year like I used to anymore.”

“It’s probably going to be a month or two a year, maximum. I hope it gives me the chance to write and record more; the risk you take is that you’re not touring as much, so there’s less income, and you’re not getting the word out about your record. I’m fortunate that I’ve got Tucker and I don’t have to worry about spending a fortune on making an album, but I hope I’ll have the time to get heavily back into songwriting again. That’s what I love the most; touring’s fun, but at this point in my life, it seems like everything I love is at home.”

Warp and Weft is available now via Bella Union (read the Best Fit review here). Laura Veirs will tour the UK in November.