Laura Veirs 'Year of the Meteors' album

Seattle-based singer-songwriter Laura Veirs calls her 2005 Nonesuch release Year of Meteors “a road record.” “It doesn’t sound like one,” she says, “but it is.” Veirs had spent most of 2004 touring in support of the hauntingly beautiful Carbon Glacier, her breakthrough effort and Nonesuch debut.

She started out in Europe, where she was greeted with overwhelming critical praise and sold-out houses. Then Veirs worked her way around the States, where she was still just being discovered (though the reviews were also often superlative). The experience was at times heady, other times grueling, and she incorporated it into her new songs. However, given Veirs’ vividly descriptive yet dream-like lyrics, you won’t learn anything about her actual itinerary. Year of Meteors is no ordinary travelogue, but it will definitely take you on a remarkable journey.

“All the songs are about transportation, motion,” Veirs explains. “If you listen to the words, there’s always some movement happening, whether it’s greyhounds running down a mountainside as mud flows or a person flying off into the sun or someone lurking around the bottom of the sea. I think that’s because I was in motion so much of the year. Somehow I knew that all the traveling would come into the songs, but I wanted to remain focused on the bigger things, not just life on the road, so that’s why there are no direct references to that.”

There are, she hastens to add, “love songs related to that experience, like the struggles of being away from home and your partner. Or having my band and the different relationships I have formulated, many of them very close because of the intense circumstances of touring. So it’s a relationship record too.”

And, finally, it’s a band record: a fertile collaboration between Veirs and her studio band, the Tortured Souls (who often play live with her)—Steve Moore (piano, organs), Karl Blau (bass, guitar, vocals), and producer Tucker Martine (drums, percussion, treatments). Viola player Eyvind Kang, another longtime associate, also sat in. As Veirs explains, “When we talked about making the album, we decided to record a lot of these songs as a band first, then do some more of the solo type of songs. It had always been the opposite before, I would go in and record the more quiet guitar parts and sing. This time, half of the record or more are tracks that we did live as a band first. Then we went in and recorded the quieter ones. We approached this from the beginning more as a band album and it really turned out that way.”

While the songs themselves are linear in structure, the arrangements take off in unexpected, subtly pop-oriented directions. There’s a handclap-filled call and response on “Rialto,” which could be a reverie about a stopover in Venice, and an almost-sing-along chorus on “Secret Someones,” a lilting track that belies Veirs’ reputation as a purveyor of only chilly moods. Lovely countrified strings glide through “Parisian Dream,” while bursts of grungy guitars interrupt “Black Gold Blues.”

A memorable little synthesizer squeal repeated throughout “Galaxies” seems completely off-hand, but was actually a major Rube Goldberg sort of undertaking. As Veirs explains: “It took three of us. I hit the key, then Steve brought the volume up and down, and then Karl did the modulator thing. Karl was trying to do it by himself but it was too much for one person to handle. It’s funny that the three of us needed to be there to make that work. In fact, you can see what we did on our website under the ‘videos’ section. Tucker was making videos with a little digital camera during the sessions so you can see that as it happened.”

Bella Union label head (and former Cocteau Twin) Simon Raymonde decided to release 2003’s Troubled by the Fire after Veirs played at South By Southwest in Austin, TX. Her 2003 performance there prompted New York Times critic Jon Pareles to name Veirs one of the top three finds of the event. Nic Harcourt of KCRW in Los Angeles featured tracks from the disc on “Morning Becomes Eclectic”; No Depression also gave it a rave, but the real buzz started overseas, where Veirs’ stark and surreal take on Americana found a rapt audience. The NME declared, “Laura Veirs fashions a timeless strand of neo-folk and post-country…there’s a spine-tingling magic to these short stories.”

Troubled by the Fire was not officially Veirs’ debut, however; she had self-released two albums, The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae (2001) and Laura Veirs (1999) that had garnered her local press and radio attention. John Richards of Seattle radio station KEXP called Orphan Mae “a gorgeous album of dark indie-folk rooted in traditional balladry…with some exciting experimental effects.” Her earlier self-titled disc was as raw as she would ever be; it was recorded in three hours with just voice and guitar.

Carbon Glacier, named after “a beautiful, dirty black and white glacier on the northern slopes of Mount Rainier,” elevated Veirs further. It recalled the work of various artists—Leonard Cohen, Laurie Anderson, Beth Orton, even Four Tet—while sounding like nothing but itself. Veirs had composed the austere, mesmerizing tracks in the winter of 2003 and quickly recorded them in twelve days with the Tortured Souls and assorted friends. European audiences in particular were enthralled with Veirs’ stirring, quasi-mystical evocation of the natural elements of her Pacific Northwest home. Here was an America they could recognize and still embrace. “Taking the mythically proportioned American wilderness as giant metaphor,” Uncut wrote, “Veirs explores unpredictability, cyclical rebirth and the tortuous scramble for artistic perfection via gently exquisite songs both dark and luminous.”

Veirs, who was raised in Colorado Springs, had studied geology (along with Mandarin Chinese) as a college student in rural Minnesota, and had always been fascinated with nature. As a youth, she was more involved in sports and outdoor activities than music, but the interest was there, waiting to surface, like an object in one of her gravity-defying lyrics. And when it did, the circumstances could have come from a scenario for one of her songs. Veirs was on a collegiate geological expedition in the desert of Northwest China when she had an epiphany, realizing that her future would be in singing, writing, and playing the guitar. The scientist still comes through in her work, though—lending sharp, precise edges to otherwise impressionistic lyrics.

“I love when I can write a lyric that brings a clear image to mind,” Veirs says. “That’s kind of what I’m striving for. This album has a lot of stuff from the sky—stars, meteors, galaxies—and a lot of stuff from the sea: birds floating in the air or on water, eels and sea grass at the bottom of the sea…For some reason, those things don’t sound scientific and removed to me; they sound vivacious and raw and pure and essential to life. Somehow I hope I can gather my appreciation for those things and translate that through myself, through my songs, keeping a reference to the human aspect, the human experience.”

—Michael Hill

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Laura Veirs - Year of the Meteors