Two decades into balancing a career as a recording and performing artist, radio host, writer and mother, Laura Cantrell has released her sixth full-length album, JUST LIKE A ROSE: THE ANNIVERSARY SESSIONS. Originally intended to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her debut record, NOT THE TREMBLIN’ KIND, the pandemic and its aftermath delayed the recording and release. Laura recently told us about her latest project, growing up in Nashville and the roots music scene in her adopted city, New York.
Unlike many of your peers who gravitated to Nashville to follow their dreams, you left for New York but ended up with a distinguished career in country music.
I left for New York City to go to college many years ago now. It is an odd trajectory. If my parents, who were paying for me to go to university, realised that I would end up doing something related to country music, they might have been more sceptical about university in New York. But if you think about what many artists have to do to get their perspective, it's not that unusual to have to leave a place to actually put it in perspective. That is what I feel happened, leaving Nashville and Tennessee and my family's culture. They were very much country music fans of a certain typical era, listening to the Grand Ole Opry. I loved all the greats of the 40s and 50s but I'm not sure I would have been able to understand how different it was from the experiences of country music for other people in other parts of the country if I had stayed in Tennessee. I also do have, what my husband and I call, the advantage of dual citizenship. We have family and friends in Nashville and we’re there very often and feel really much a part of a community.
Were you drawn to country music growing up in Nashville?
Yes, I had an interest in country music. This is just goofy, but you know how little children get attached to certain songs and certain music. It happened with my daughter with a couple of different songs she would ask us to play over and over again. When she was ten years old, she went headlong into The Beatles and knew everything about them. My parents tell me that I had a similar thing as a toddler when the Folsom Prison record came out. My parents said I was mad about Johnny Cash and I went around talking about Johnny Cash as if he was my boyfriend. Going back to the first thing that I was exposed to in terms of music, they really stuck with me in middle school - and going into high school I realised that I really liked Patsy Cline and I really liked Ernest Tubb. I thought about the classics of the Opry in a way that my friends didn’t. They were all listening to new wave and what was on the radio at the time, there was not that same kind of fascination with country music with my friends. That’s when I realised that I was a little bit different. Then as I went to college, even though I wasn’t in Tennessee anymore, I found a group of friends who were as interested in that music and we were finding out all about it, and deepening our knowledge of it and connecting it to other music. I got lucky to find those kinds of allies along the way.
How does the Nashville of today compare with that of your childhood?
Well, it's a double-edged sword and I think this happens in every place. The development boom has brought a lot of energy and different people to Nashville, not all coming just because of music and there are a lot of positives in that. However, the classic thing that happens is the raising of real estate values and people get pushed out who've been there a long time. I know a lot of long-time Nashville people and they really feel like the development has favoured the people extracting the value and not necessarily bringing the gains to Nashville in terms of better education, better services and transportation for the town, all of those things. Of course, there's also the increase in traffic and a lot of people who live in Nashville, including the music makers, don’t want to be associated with the bachelorette parties coming down Broadway. It has brought in tourists, which feels like the town has gone in that direction and is chasing the immediate dollar. I see those tensions but I also think that it's a very vibrant time in Nashville.
When I think of the roots music scene in New York, Cliff Westfall and Zephaniah OHora and you come to mind in particular. Is there a vibrant roots community in New York to perform live to?
Well, there definitely is but New York hasn't gotten any easier if you're a musician. It’s getting harder and harder for all of the places that have music to make money. So, they figure out a way to cut corners and one might be that instead of there being a sound man to properly mix your set and have it sound like it should after you've worked on preparing and crafting the music, they've got an iPad and they tell you to do it yourself. There are all these kinds of challenges for musicians and there are not as many music bars here. There is a really lovely place that Zach and I are booked in called Skinny Dennis in Brooklyn. Cliff has also played there and I just went to see Sunny Sweeney play a show there. Even for my own record release in the next couple of weeks, I chose not to book Joe's Pub or City Winery, rooms where you have to sell 250 tickets. If you just want to play to get experience and to keep your chops up, and have that connection to a live audience, you might just want to go somewhere smaller. It’s like a feast or famine. Do you play to a room of 40 or 50 people and be barely able to pay the ban? It’s kind of a catch-22. The present scene is not the most hospitable environment for live musicians. Having said that, there's definitely a community of people that show up to gigs, people who like honky tonk shows and have a sense of the history of it - that audience for country music is still here and that's one of the reasons it's still satisfying for me here.
The pandemic delayed the completion of your new album, JUST LIKE A ROSE: The Anniversary Sessions. What were the timelines from start to finish?
I did think at a few points that it would never get finished as it was taking so long. We actually had just started raising funds to record it at the beginning of the pandemic. I was assuming we'd be right in the studio then; my plan was to do short sessions with the different producers and we did eventually do that, but we had to do it more spread apart because of the pandemic. We started in November 2020, that was the first time I went in the studio with musicians. We were all masked and stayed far away from each other, which is not a great way to make music together as a communal thing. But we managed to get through that session and then over the course of 2021 had several other sessions. We went to Nashville and did more sessions there with Paul Burch and then ultimately with Rosie Flores and Kenny Vaughan for the last set of recordings, which was very early last year. So, it spans from the end of 2020 to the very beginning of 2022. Every time we felt that in two or three months it'll feel better, then there would be Delta, then Rubicon. Musicians playing in front of people, even though it’s their livelihood, didn't want the risk of getting sick from possibly somebody flying in who has been on an airplane and who was maybe bringing in germs. So, it was a little tricky and it did take a lot longer. Normally you go into the studio to make a record over two weeks and maybe take a few months to mix it and finish the art, but this was a much more extended one.
Despite the interruptions and particularly with the input from five different producers, the tracks flow seamlessly from one to another throughout.
Thank you for saying that. That was my biggest worry especially because we were up and down and often didn't know which way it was going. When we eventually went for the mastering with the sequence, I thought the mastering engineer was going to have my hide, because there were so many different sounds. But when we got the first few songs down, I started to relax. I thought ‘that’s a really pretty good Side A’, thinking of it in terms of a vinyl record, even if the songs were recorded in different places and times.
The first two songs, Push The Swing and Bide My Time, are co-writes with Mark Winchester. How did that connection come about?
I met Mark when Paul Burch introduced me to him at a gig of mine in Nashville several years ago now. It was before my Kitty Wells record came out but I've written the song Kitty Wells Dresses. I was doing a programme at the Country Music Hall of Fame that showcased the music of Kitty Wells. In fact, as I had learned that set of Kitty Wells songs, soon after that and having a band in Nashville, I decided that we should go and record them, so that's how that record actually came about. So, I met Mark as part of that concert and, ultimately, I hired him a couple of times to play with me in Nashville. As he was learning some of my songs, he told me he was also a songwriter, which I didn't realise. I then saw his name on some credits for songs that he had written for a Carlene Carter record that came out some years ago, so we did a few writing sessions together and really clicked, and had a lot of musical simpatico. I really enjoyed working with him a lot and, of course, because he is also a great bass player. He plays in the Brian Setzer orchestra and knows the sort of slap style of bass and he brings a kind of musicality that is a little different than other people that I've worked with as a writer. We really enjoyed working together. In fact, we have one song that is not on this record that I'm hoping to do for the next one. He’s a great resource and a great talent.
Two co-writes with Mark Spencer also feature, the closing track AWM Bless and my favourite track Just Like A Rose.
Mark and I have toured together a bunch probably starting in about 2003 or 2004 and consistently since then. I've also worked in Mark’s studio in Brooklyn. The couple of songs on this record that we wrote together were our first attempt at working together that way. But I've done every other kind of musical thing with Mark, recording, traveling around in a car just the two of us. We’ve travelled to the UK to play as a duo, we’ve played as a trio and we’ve played with him fronting a rock band. He's a very versatile musician and also sings beautifully. Any band is lucky to grab him. My longest musical association at this point is with Mark.
How did it feel revisiting the song When The Roses Bloom again and particularly with Steve Earle’s vocal contribution?
Steve is one of my major inspirations and such an amazing writer and artist. An arc of his whole career going back to the 80s has been consistently excellent. So, as particularly as a writer, I've often thought of him as a standard bearer for Americana, though he’d probably hate to be called just an Americana artist. I do think he's one of our finest songwriters in the United States and over the years, I've opened a few shows for him. When he moved to New York, we were in somewhat the same circles and would see each other at some of the same events. I had in mind to ask Steve to do something that I was working on and when we were working on this project, because it was to celebrate an anniversary, I thought it wouldn't be a bad thing to take one old song of mine and just do a new version of it. I had been thinking about When The Roses Bloom Again because with the soldiers talking in first person in the song, I thought that while it’s not quite like a duet with two characters having a dialogue, but it's like two storytellers telling the story. We settled on that idea and thankfully Steve got it right away. He was like, ‘oh, yeah, that makes sense. I can do that.’ The one thing he told me to do was change the key so it could be a good key for him to sing in. And then he gave me a long lecture about how I should have been singing in higher keys my whole career. We've actually just made a little video for that song; it'll be ready later this summer.
You have numerous dates lined up in the UK shortly including an invitation to play Glastonbury. Had you played that festival before
No, I have not, this will be my first kind of jump into the fray. I’m very excited, to be honest. For me, as a person who started coming over to Europe and the UK. over 20 years ago now, the idea that I get to go back and get the opportunity to play events like Glastonbury is just amazing to me. It's really an honour. I’m just very excited to reconnect with our fans in parts of the world. Unfortunately, I’ve no dates in Ireland this time.
Do you recall the first time you played in Ireland? It was in Whelan's and Holly Williams was the support act.
I do remember that because it was the last day of a tour with Holly and we had plans to celebrate in Whelan’s with a little Guinness and a little whiskey of some kind. Then about a month later I realised I was pregnant. You're not supposed to do that but I didn't know I was pregnant and so gave my daughter a little taste. She's 17 now, so she’s turned out ok.
Have you also been working on your parallel careers as a writer, radio presenter and in the corporate world?
I still do a show on satellite radio here. We are actually doing a George Harrison-based show on SiriusXM called Dark Horse Radio, in conjunction with the George Harrison estate. They actually provide the contents and a calendar of what's discussed on the show. That's been an amazing learning experience for me. I mentioned before my daughter had a very hardcore Beatles phase and George was her favourite Beatle, so it's amazing to get to do that programme. I've done some other short-term radio work; I also do some writing. During the pandemic, I couldn't do much as a performing musician so I did go back to work in a corporate job. What I realized in all of that is that there are artists who just, write, record and perform. They put out a new record every 18 months or so, that's their cycle. And there's a lot of folks that say that if you're not in that cycle, then it's not really legitimate, it's not really somehow as professional. So, I'm really grateful that we're coming back around to having a new album and having the chance to come and perform and play live, and can look back at all of those agonizing moments during the pandemic when I felt like this might not even happen.
Interview by Declan Culliton