Laura Stevenson

ISSUE #166

Whose is your favorite voice? It’s a question I was never asked, but I remember the day I knew my answer. I was driving south under a lint-gray sky in the rag-bone days of an Iowa November when I heard Laura Stevenson hit the finale of her immaculate “Master of Art.” Like wisps of steam floating up through the cedars, her voice sounded like a glimpse of ether in perceptible form—the creak at the top of a crooked staircase, the warmth from lying in a pile of leaves. Sometimes decisions feel more like realizations, an ecstatic unveiling of personal truth.

The first time I heard that voice, it was carrying over the Doc-packed dirt of Chicago’s Humboldt Park. September was chilly enough to bite my open skin, but its sun still baked the back of my sweater as I stood alone in the Riot Fest crowd. We were waiting for the Front Bottoms, but a stage sat stolid to our left across the field, so that everyone could hear the other artists finish up while they waited for the coming set.

What I heard fluttering over that mass of beanies slowly gained my full attention—these were beautiful songs written without discernible form, except that each crested in a tidal swell of unrestrained emotion. Guitar sat comfortably amidst arrangements of accordion, trumpet, banjo, and a woman giving a performance that captivated the acres. Only later, when I pulled out the schedule to see who the hell that had been, did I finally learn her name.

Laura Stevenson has that effect on people. You can see it transforming the crowd when she played “Master of Art,” the most tried-and-true introduction to her catalog, on The Chris Gethard Show in New York. Gethard’s audience was always generous, but being a public access show run by a bunch of proud misfits, sometimes the energy had to be manufactured. With Laura, everything came naturally. When she hits the brilliant rush of feeling halfway through the song, chills pour out through the video screen. You can see a spark take and blossom into flame.

Gethard himself has pointed out the profound effect of that show in interviews. They have a longstanding friendship — he used her song “Runner” in his HBO special—and share a DIY spirit, an ethics of art that holds acts of creation as essential to simply being. She came up in Long Island in the early 2000s as part of DIY collective Bomb the Music Industry! with friend and champion Jeff Rosenstock (one of our world-best Jeffs). She inspires devotion, both in listeners and friends—Rosenstock took her on tour and issued her first album, A Record, on his label in 2008, and after signing to Don Giovanni for her next five albums, the label offered to remaster a Deluxe Edition of her second record, Sit Resist, in none other than Abbey Road Studios. They even made a podcast documenting the record’s influence.

That influence extends to the likes Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, both of whom contribute essays to the liner notes of the re-release. Dacus, in particular, credits Laura Stevenson with being the first music she listened to that wasn’t Christian rock or Top 40 hits. She tells the story of her high school friend who brought A Record to her father’s house in Richmond, VA to listen in silence as the sun slowly went down. “I have a hard time tracking my influences, just because I wasn’t trying to make music at the beginning,” Dacus said. “But hearing Laura’s music made me think ‘Oh, I can do that.’ She was the one I listened to before I really went and decided to write some songs.”

Still, with such a wide influence, I feel it’s far too rare that I hear about her. A new album came out just last Friday, the latest in a long list of masterpieces—the time feels right to put together an introduction to Laura’s songs. Beside her voice, it’s her arrangements that strike me. She always knows exactly where to swell from calm to frenzy to carry my heart along for the ride. Her turns of phrase are simple, yet lasting—in “The Move,” she sings “I can make you happy. / I can make you coffee / when I wake up, / if you haven’t made some already,” something I can’t help but think every time I pass my brewing grounds. It’s the most essential part of loving: sharing what makes us happy, unabashed and unbidden.