Continuing on the theme of female artists that I’m secretly in love with, today the focus is on Laura Veirs, a former geologist who now makes amazing music. I know the easy crutch in discussing an artist is the “reminds me of” test, but it sort of breaks down here. I could list some people that I think of when listening to Veirs, but it would probably only mislead. Is it folk, is it country, is it post-alternative, is it neo-folk? Who does she sound like: Suzanne Vega, Beth Orton, Cat Power? Who does she write like: Leonard Cohen, Colin Meloy, Walt Whitman? The answer: a little bit of all, a lot of “none of the above.”
Her voice sounds like pretty much no one else, but feels like either the North wind when you’re alone on top of a mountain in the dead of winter, or like the fire that you huddle near at the end of the day. It is not a musically astonishing voice – her range is actually rather limited. But it is poetic. And, maybe it’s just me, but it has this timbre to it which I’m not sure I’ve ever heard before–immensely strong, but gentle, more a part of nature than a human voice.
This fits perfectly with her subject matter. Her lyrics deal primarily with nature, geography, places, environments. You hear constant references to birds and beasts, clouds, lakes, hills, Summer, Winter, and the stars. It is music that, as Leopold suggests, helps us to “think like a mountain.” Indeed, her songs read far more like contemporary nature writing than they do pop music.
This is not to say that there is no human element. Like all good nature writing, she does not treat nature as perfectly transcendent. She has described her most recent album, Year of Meteors as “a road record,” which I think is true of all of her music. It’s about the sense of place, movement, and the journey. That means a lot of it will be about the environments you encounter, but it will also be about the personal journey. If movement is a constant, it is not just physical movement. That means that her songs are partly about mountains and trees, but they’re also about love and beauty, wherever they may be found.
Once again, this meshes very well with her style, which I would describe as “infinite complexity out of utter simplicity.” Much like any seemingly natural part of life, the path of a stream, a hummingbird flying by, seems perfectly reasonable and simple, the more we investigate, the more we understand how little we understand. What we understand to be natural is really the convergence of millions upon millions of chances and interactions between forces that are fundamentally chaotic and uncertain. I mean, let’s not even get started on Schrödinger.
And yet, we manage to function. Out of multitudes of chaos, we discover order. If I may, let me quote from one of my favorite books: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams:
Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are revealing to us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature – the way that plants grow, the way that mountains erode or rivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve their shapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way the milk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way that laughter sweeps through a crowd of people – all these things in their seemingly magical complexity can be described by the interaction of mathematical processes that are, if anything, even more magical irt their simplicity.
Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word “natural” that we have often taken to mean “unstructured” in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple natural laws at work.
They can all be described by numbers.
We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball’s spin.
And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball. People who call this “instinct” are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything. I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts – it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself.”
Veirs’ music plays around with this paradox. Songs that begin simply build upon themselves. A simple riff is toyed with, placed in different contexts. But she is not creating chaotic noise. The point is not to overwhelm the senses, it is to find sparse melodies and explore them.
She plays around a lot with layers. Many of the songs have an underlying track of feedback and short electric riffs, while above that plays a strong acoustic track. “Secret Someones,” for example, is a rollicking song with a deeply buried feedback track that occasionally elbows its way to the front, and then suddenly there’s a cascade of bells, the feedback surges, and the vocals pile on top of each other. Or on “Black Gold Blues,” when an eerie set of strings is combined with a broken drum track, a fuzzing (almost grungy) guitar provides a secondary beat, and she sings a round with herself.
I haven’t seen her live (May 22 in Cambridge is the next chance), but I get the impression that this layering effect is just as prominent there, even when she plays a solo show. Through use of the looping pedal, she lets the song build and build, as she continues to add to the chaotic mix, holding onto the basic theme, but letting the rest of the sounds swirl around in broad movements.
However, while she does a lot of interesting things with layers of sound, in my opinion, her best songs are the most stripped down. They remain complex, but more subtly so.
This song is almost painfully beautiful. It begins quietly, just her and her guitar. Only in the second half do the layers appear. And even then, it’s only two layers of quietly strummed music, the primary vocal track, and harmonies in the background. Contrasted with the pure simplicity of the rest of the song, it adds some depth, but does not fundamentally change the attitude or feeling of the song., and it’s not until halfway through that the piano and strings make an appearance. By the end, it feels like a hymn.
And, when she sings “Homing pigeon fly, to hover by” her voice is just so perfect in its imperfection that I can’t even deal with it.
This is the first song I ever heard by her and may still be my favorite. The melody is haunting. I just can’t think of any other way to describe it. The carefully plucked electric guitar sounds like it is being played by a ghost. The meshing of sounds in the long instrumental ending is perfect. Sounds enter and leave just off kilter, but not so far as to disrupt the flow. And how great is the line:
But doesn’t it get lonely
Riding up there to the sun
On a single raft for one
Don’t you wish for someone
She did a show with Colin Meloy back in January that NPR broadcast. They’ve still got the MP3 of the show up. It’s worth a listen. Also, you can hear MP3s from a show she did on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic at So Much Silence.
You can also download her albums on iTunes, or buy them at her website. I recommend you do so.