New York‘s Laura Stevenson has established her position at the top table of US indie music over the last decade and more, her sound gradually evolving from the folk-inflected sit resist in 2011 to the widescreen rock of 2015’s Cocksure. The transformation was by no means final, with single The Mystic & the Master and stunning full-length The Big Freeze returning to folk influences, though Stevenson retained the depth and richness of Cocksure to best support her striking vocal range, and in doing so become one of the most evocative and committed contemporary songwriters.
This summer sees Laura Stevenson return with a brand new self-titled album on Don Giovanni Records. Again welcoming long-time collaborator Jeff Rosenstock on guitar, and produced by John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Hop Along, Dinosaur Jr.), the record feels like the culmination of everything that has come before. From the blend of confusion and catharsis on thundering opener ‘State’, the tone is set, evading any clear mood and style and thus evoking the turbulent milieu in which it was created.
“I relocated for a bit after finishing my last record, to help someone that I love very much who was going through something absolutely unthinkable,” Stevenson explains. The specifics of the situation are left unsaid, but in their place stands something more fundamental. The outline of turmoil in a broader sense, applicable no matter the finer detail. “I left everything kind of open-ended, but I think doing that helps people relate more to the general experience of going through a crisis or helping someone else through one.” A crisis record, a record for our times.
Like any real crisis, the experience unfolds intricate and unregular. The fury and frustration of ‘State’ gives way to the meandering night-time wander of ‘Don’t Think About Me’, the sharp edges of the situation sanded into something soft and strange as life’s banalities start seeping in. “A lucid dream,” Stevenson sings, “but it’s mundane.”
But this is positively racing compared to the tender slowness of ‘Moving Cars’, a whispered reflection that swells like a clenched fist. Here is rawness in a different guise, a vulnerable confession, the kind of naked unravelling which arrives at the dead of night. This wavering is not restricted to moods either, as the songs jump back and forth in time to capture the situation from different positions.
The agnostic plea of piano-led ‘Mary’ serves as a kind of flashback prologue, capturing the pure fear experienced before the contours of the situation were fully established, while closer ‘Children’s National Transfer’ book ends with a curious calm. Single ‘Sky Blue, Bad News’ feels like both at once, simultaneously present and distant, an introspective slip into darkness which traces the entire scenario into history, searching for clues or warning signs, grappling with the sense that some punishment is being metered out.
Did I shirk something?
Did I hurt someone?
Was I ever any good?
Was I ungrateful?
The recording process was similarly fluid in its intentions. Both an act of moving beyond that time, and a continuation of the compassion underpinning it. “The album was written as a sort of purge and a prayer,” Stevenson says. “It was a very intense experience to re-live all of the events of the previous year, while tracking these songs, with my daughter growing inside me, reliving all of that fear and pain and just wanting to protect her from the world that much more. It made me very raw.” Laura Stevenson presents crisis not as some snap moment of terrible energy but a lingering process, a phenomenon to be endured, rooted as it is in both the past and what is still to come. A process rooted, after all, in love.
Laura Stevenson is out now on Don Giovanni Records and you can get it from the Laura Stevenson Bandcamp page.
