Singer-songwriter Laura Veirs may come across as sombre, but the well-travelled Colorado woman is really a happy camper, she assures Tony Clayton-Lea
She rarely smiles in photographs. Colorado-born, Seattle-based singer-songwriter Laura Veirs is, she freely admits, the owner of a serious face. If the public's general perception of singer-songwriters is that they are sombre individuals, cursed by their innate understanding of the miseries and mysteries of the human condition, then Veirs is their pin-up girl.
"Happy people can write the most depressing songs," she says, eager to correct this often misjudged view. "I can write very sad songs when I'm in a great mood. It's not directly correlated, although I'm sure some people would like to think that. They might think it's fake that you're happy and you're writing a sad song, but it's not fake - the writing is just coming from a different place."
After some five years of hard graft working the folk clubs and coffee bars of North America, Veirs is finally starting to receive the attention she deserves. After a couple of flatline releases, she came to notice first with 2003's Troubled by the Fire, then with last year's Carbon Glacier, and now Year of Meteors. Her leap from Troubled by the Fire to the new album (it's on the Warners-affiliated Nonesuch label, home to Joni Mitchell and Ry Cooder, among others) is a huge one in several important ways. She has, for example, assuredly sidestepped being pigeonholed; aside from being categorised by the catch-all "singer-songwriter" tag (now as ultimately generic an umbrella title as "rock" music), Veirs has managed to surprise with each release. Whereas previous records have highlighted her tremulous, introspective side, the new album's broad, crunchy guitar sound has pleased radio programmers no end. Seemingly without trying, she is now on the cusp of commercial acceptance in the US.
Veirs's background is as intriguing as her music. The daughter of academics (her father is a physicist, her mother a tutor), she grew up in Colorado Springs in what she terms a "college environment". She didn't discover music, she says, until she hit 20.
"My parents weren't crazy music fans, and Colorado Springs is not a music town," she says. "It's a weird mixture of conservative, Christian, right-wing, military people coupled with little pockets of progressive professor types. I remember distinctly thinking in high school that it'd be fun to be in a band, but there weren't any role models in the part of the city I lived in; I had no one to look up to."
COME COLLEGE, VEIRS started playing campfire songs, "just to learn some chords, and to figure out how to play the guitar". Shortly after that learning curve had been stretched and straightened, she embraced the Riot Grrl punk scene and formed an all-female band.
"It was a great beginning - embracing the electric guitar and playing loud music - and very exciting, because I was totally ignorant about underground music," she says. "I had no idea it was out there."
Her life seems to have been quite cloistered, I suggest. While Veirs admits that her parents might have not been up to discussing the finer points of Riot Grrl scene-makers Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, she takes polite exception to the inference that she was kept at home and force-fed a diet of Donny Osmond and Descartes. Travelling was a family passion, apparently.
"One year, they took me and my brother out of school and we travelled all over Central America and Mexico on a hippy bus, and then all over America, Europe, Australia," she says. "Because my parents were teachers, we'd also travel during the summer vacations. As far as music was concerned, it was cloistered, but in most other ways it wasn't at all. We were exposed to different cultures, people, languages, and so on. Also, through travelling, I gained a lot of confidence; hitting the road is no problem to me whatsoever."
And yet there are signs that Veirs remains curiously distanced. She says, for example, that, following a wallow in positive media coverage for Carbon Glaciers, she now prefers not to read her own press cuttings.
"I started to get a distorted view in my head as to why I was doing music," she says. "The ideas that other people had - or have - of me were starting to creep into my mind, which, as someone trying to write songs, I found very uncomfortable. So I stopped, and I think that has served me well. I appreciate, of course, that I need to do interviews - without them I couldn't get across to people and fans, but for my own sense of self, for keeping my inner sanctum safe, I don't read them."
DOES SHE HAVE any idea of what her fans' perception of her might be?
"I don't know what the perception is, other than people come to the shows," she says. "I get a sense from the audiences, especially in Europe, that they like what they hear. And that's a great feeling."
Are singer-songwriters the lonely, aloof people that some think - or are they a lot more fun? "Is that the general perception? I didn't know that."
She's kidding, of course. Isn't she? "Honestly, I didn't know that! It depends on the person. I know some very morose songwriters, but most of the people I know are totally normal, bubbly fun-to-be-around people.
"Me? I think I'm really fun, but I have dark moments that interfere with my creative processes, my friendships, my band, my relationships. I try to keep a wrap on those, but it can be hard sometimes."
She can place the dark moments behind her, however, as Year of Meteors proves. The acoustic austerity of previous albums (notably the blatant wintry chill of Carbon Glaciers) has been replaced with something altogether more light of heart. Connecting the records is a family/academic background in science.
"I was studying Chinese and Chinese culture, which was my major up until the time I switched," she says. "And I became fed up dealing with human history, because it's so bleak. And Chinese history has some brutal aspects to it, which I was learning all about. I couldn't handle that, so I switched to science, and with my family being the way they are, that was a comfortable change for me."
And here she positively bursts forth with joy. "Plus, that's where I met my partner, Pete - he's a gorgeous guy. So it went from learning about brutal history to going on outdoor trips with hot guys! It sounds so shallow, but it was also another reason to switch courses. It was good fun!"
And the record titles? Well, Veirs is clearly an outdoor sort of gal, thereby killing instantly the impression of her as a somewhat fussy, timid person. She says she has just returned from a two-week camping trip in Alaska. No bugs, no rain; it was, she imparts, the quintessential non-Alaskan experience.
"I receive a lot of joy being out in the wilderness, and sometimes those ideas creep into my songs," she says.
Reverting to the rigours of a tour bus and a series of anonymous hotel rooms, then, must be a disconcerting experience. Being on tour, she admits, is losing some of its original magic. But guess what? The art, the shows, the opportunity to sing her mostly tensile songs to an appreciative and growing audience, compensates for the discomfort. "I guess so," she says. "I'm not one of those people who will want to tour around all year, year after year. I need to be home to get a sense of place and self. But, yes, it's a great job being a touring musician. A really great job."
Year of Meteors is on release from Nonesuch; Laura Veirs and the Tortured Souls play Whelan's, Dublin, on Sep 20