A Conversation with Laura Veirs (continued)

PM: The traveling in the early part of your life seems to have served you very well. Would you tell us a little bit about your time in China, and studying Chinese?

LV: I took a year off before college and went over to Malaysia to live with my family. This was the second sabbatical year that my dad had taken. He was teaching in Malaysia, and so my whole family went. My brother had just graduated from college. That was the second sabbatical--we did the first one when my brother and I were 11 and 14, and we traveled all around Central America and Mexico and the U.S. that first year. But this was the Asian year.

During that time, my cousins were studying Buddhism in China, so I went to visit them when I was 18, and got really engaged with that, with Buddhism, and thinking about Buddhism. I also just became fascinated with the beauty of the Chinese written language, and with the sound of it, the tonal quality. I didn't really know I was into music then, but I think there was a connection there between music and Chinese that is tonal, and you can't really do it unless you can hear pitch, you can't get--

PM: Oh, yeah, it's all about pitch.

LV: Yeah. Studies have been done, and they've found that China has the highest percentage of people with perfect pitch. I think that's directly related to their language. It may also be related to the fact that they take a lot of pride in being good at music, and especially classical music, violin playing and piano playing.

PM: Absolutely.

LV: But anyway, I became really interested in Chinese, and then went to college and studied it for two years, and went back to China and studied it, and then ended up switching over to geology as my major. I took all the classes I could in Chinese and Chinese history, and wanted to study science because I was having trouble with the realities of Chinese history, which are really quite brutal. If you look at the history of that country, there's some really brutal stuff that's gone down. And I just couldn't handle it anymore.

PM: Understood.

LV: So I switched over to science and studied geology, and then went back to China to synthesize those two pursuits in this bizarre situation of being a field assistant and translator for this group of geologists in the Taklamakan Desert, which is near Pakistan.

PM: Whoa.

LV: I actually got really depressed there and had a terrible time. But it was the pivotal moment for me when I realized I didn't want to do science, and I was more interested in these topics of the heart after all, and in writing, in particular, and using words to describe things. So I switched over to being interested in more poetry. And I was writing a novel at the time, and then got going with songwriting from there.

PM: It's an amazing story, really.

So one last question, if I may: What's on the music system in the road vehicle today?

LV: Well, the main thing we've been doing is this iTrip thing, where you can dial into a radio station and run your iPod off of the radio. So we've been doing mixes. Each person has been a DJ. And we have four iPods, so we have an incredible amount of music to go through.

PM: And can you plug in all four iPods, or just each person takes an hour, or something.

LV: Each person takes an hour.

PM: Ah.

LV: And so it's really hard to describe what we've been listening to, because it's probably every kind of music. But what have we been listening to? Ry Cooder in Japan, and Kraftwerk, and this funny underground band from Olympia, and David Bowie, and Joni Mitchell, and Jauna Molina, and Doug Marsh, and Karl Blau and Steve Moore [laughs] and Serene Peterson, our tour manager--she's also a musician [plays solo and with others as Your Heart Breaks], she lives at my house--and oh, God, just everything under the sun.

PM: Well, it's kind of you to take time with me today. We sure look forward to having you on the cover of Puremusic.

LV: Okay, thanks a lot, Frank. I appreciate it.

PM: Take care, Laura. Hope to see you soon.

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