Laura Veirs is learning to trust in human imperfection

After more than three decades of songwriting and thirteen solo albums, Laura Veirs found herself slowly accepting that perhaps this part of her life had quietly come to an end. Yet, speaking to her now, there is remarkably little sense of mourning. During those years she painted, taught songwriting workshops, began writing a book, navigated divorce, remarriage, and the complexities of blending two families – all while building the very studio that her next album, Temple Songs, would be brought to life in.

Looking back, while music had a brief eclipse, creativity never left her. "I think I'm always creative," she reflects. "I've always been creating things... but it is a mystery. Creativity is a mystery, and I don't really understand it. I don't understand where songs come from." Even after thirty years of songwriting, Veirs resists the temptation to explain creativity as something she can consciously access.

She laughs when recounting one of the questions she's asked most often: "'Where do you get your ideas?' I'm like, 'I don't know. They're just there’." That uncertainty became unsettling during the four years she stopped writing songs altogether. "There was a sadness because I was like, I guess I'm not writing songs anymore," she recalls. "It felt like my identity had shifted." For someone who has spent most of her life making music, losing songwriting felt like losing part of herself. It wasn’t a breakthrough that Veirs brought back into making music though, no forcing another record into existence.The return came from accepting what was, and rethinking what creativity actually meant, whether or not it involved writing songs.

That revelation came while teaching at a creative retreat in Mexico. In a hot tub, explaining her frustrations to another teacher, Veirs described herself as being "in a void." The response was immediate: "You're not in a void. You're in a gathering phase." Years later, Veirs still returns to that conversation because it completely reframed those seemingly quiet years.

Rather than measuring creativity by output, she began recognising everything she had been absorbing instead: travelling, painting, writing prose, teaching, listening, rebuilding family life and simply experiencing the world differently. "There are phases in our life where we are not outputting; we are bringing in," she says. Those years weren't empty after all. They became, in her words, "the fruits of the lyrics and the approach to the new album." It's an idea that feels quietly radical in a culture that often mistakes constant productivity for creativity itself.

Not only did her perspective shift, it also changed how Veirs approached making Temple Songs. For the first time in her career, she produced, arranged and recorded the album entirely herself, making almost every creative decision alone. Having spent years collaborating with producers she deeply respected, she realised she'd gradually stopped trusting her own instincts. "I felt that I was giving away too much of my creative decision-making to others," she recalls. “At this age and at this time in life, it was important for me to make those decisions and lean into my own authority and my own taste.”

It sounds deceptively simple, but Veirs admits the process forced her to confront an unexpectedly difficult question: "What is my taste?” Without someone else to validate each decision, she had to become that voice herself. And in that way Temple Songs asserts itself as a reclamation more so than a reinvention of any kind.

“I really like limitations,” she tells me. Speaking about being faced with the “option anxiety” of digital recording, Veirs deliberately narrowed her options. Inspired by her background working with four track recordings, she decided on a smaller palette of instruments and a recording process built around complete performances instead of endless revision. “If you think of the painter's palette of colors, it's very limited. So setting those limitations, both in terms of the instruments and then also the approach to recording, like not using the click or headphones, allowed me to very quickly get into a flow and I really enjoyed the process.”

Those limitations are audible throughout Temple Songs. “Arc Still Bends” opens the record with intertwined guitars and an unvarnished vocal that glides deftly across each other as she muses on the state of the world. On “Golden Seams”, her harmonies sit alongside similarly pared-back instrumentation, while “Pulse” pushes further afield with a loose rhythmic pulse and unexpected (and exceptionally smooth) saxophone. Elsewhere, the songs move between the happiness of new love, reflections on the past, comments on the present, but Veirs never seems concerned with making those ideas fit together too strictly. It is part of what she seems to have given herself permission to do here: follow an instinct, an idea, keep something because she likes it, and resist the urge to tidy everything up afterwards.

After that, the record came together far more easily than she expected. "I was surprised by how quickly it came together," she admits. "I thought, 'You didn't work hard enough on this'." It speaks to a familiar creative anxiety that effort must always be visible to be valuable. Instead, Veirs found herself drawn towards something far less polished. "I like things that are messed up," she says. "I like things that are a little off." Rather than correcting every imperfect performance, she chose to preserve them, allowing the human hand behind the music to remain visible.

That philosophy extends beyond recording techniques. "We hunger for authenticity," she says thoughtfully. "We hunger for connection that is human." It's a sentiment that surfaces repeatedly throughout our conversation as well as the album, not as nostalgia for older ways of making records, but as a reminder that honesty often lives inside the rough edges. She compares music to visual art, where a stray brushstroke or unexpected splotch often gives a painting its character. "I'm not someone very drawn to polish in artwork," she explains, “so I was able to express that aesthetic and philosophy.”

When we spoke, Veirs called from the “Temple of Bloom”, the backyard studio and creative space where Temple Songs was recorded. She told me about looking out the window while she sang and played, about leaving the sound of rain against the glass in the recordings. There is something lovely about that image: after years of wondering whether she would write songs again, she made this record in a space where she could simply watch the world go by, listen to what was happening around her, and follow whatever came next. “Is there a place I can go where I can be myself? / Is there a song I’ll sing that I’ll never sell?” she asks on “Flying Into the Darkness”. Listening to Temple Songs, those questions feel less like a search for an answer and more like the sound of someone finally giving herself room to find one.