A Conversation with Laura Veirs (continued)

PM: I see you have a rash of solo shows coming up. What prompted that, and how you do you like gigging solo?

LV: Well, Slim Moon, my manager, he runs this label called Kill Rock Stars. And he knows Colin [Meloy], from The Decemberists, who are on Kill Rock Stars. Slim asked Colin, "Can Laura do the shows?" And Colin said yes. So I'm doing these solo shows, opening up for Colin. And he's playing really big places, and it's going to be nerve-wracking for me, because I don't play by myself very often, and I use my band as an emotional support on stage.

PM: Yeah.

LV: But I did start off on my own, and I've done lots of solo gigs. And I've been trying out the songs solo on this tour--like I do two solo songs a night on this current tour just to try them out.

PM: That's smart.

LV: It'll be fine. It'll kind of be hard for me, I think, in some ways, but playing solo can be really fun, too. You can twist the song a little bit more, or improvise within the song because you're not having to keep the part steady if you're working on an harmony with someone or something like that.

PM: Hell yeah. You can stop in the middle and start talking if you want. It's a whole different thing.

LV: Yeah.

PM: I love the way you do the lyrics in your liner notes. I don't have to put my reading glasses on. And everybody gets that wrong, they print them way too small.

LV: Uh-huh. [laughs]

PM: But in your albums, they really look good, and they're big enough, and I really appreciate that.

LV: Thanks. Yeah, I like to do that, because I write all the songs in this little journal of mine, and it's the same handwriting, and it's kind of nice to give the listener a little glimpse into the inner workings of me, like writing lyrics in books.

PM: Right. And that is special. Are you a spiritual person?

LV: I don't think of myself that way so much. But I feel like music does bring that side of me out. I come from a very intellectual, scientific sort of teacher-type family.

PM: So I understand.

LV: I think my tendency is to be in my head, and I think it gets me in trouble a lot, but music helps me get to more of a spiritual place, and also more of just a place of listening to my heart and my gut, which is not my natural state. Well, that's not my upbringing. My upbringing was to deal with things in a very intellectual way. I got into music because I was trying to get away from that and look at things from another side. And I think that it helps me access that more spiritual side of myself, which would otherwise probably be buried.

PM: For lack of a better phrase, does it feel like, as far as your musical approach goes, that you're more equal parts head and heart there?

LV: Yes. It's a way for me to synthesize them.

PM: That's a beautiful thing. Have you read something lately that turned you on, or around?

LV: I'm reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. He's a great Japanese writer. I love it--I'm in the middle of it and it's going really fast.

But another book I read recently that struck me was Blindness by Jose Saramago. He's a Portuguese writer. He won the Nobel Prize in 1995. And this book is intense. It gets down to the heart of the matter of the human spirit. And basically these people, the whole town--actually, the whole world--gets overwhelmed by this strange white blindness disease that's communicable.

PM: Wow.

LV: It's not that you see black, you see white. And there are just some incredible scenes of people basically descending into total anarchy when this blindness epidemic hits. And then--I won't tell about the end--it turns around, but--

PM: Oh, yeah, because I'm probably going to go out and buy it today. [laughs]

LV: You have to read it. It's intense stuff, though. It's not light. It really makes you see things differently, like it allows you to realize how essential it is that we can see, and how screwed up everything would be if we couldn't, if everyone couldn't. Actually, one woman is able to see throughout the book, and that's--the story is really about her and what she suffers by seeing all this stuff.

PM: Oh, my Lord.   continue

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