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Psychic Landscapes: An Interview with Laura Veirs

Since 2003's Troubled by the Fire, Laura Veirs has commanded one of the most distinctive lyrical voices in rock. She's backed by an increasingly adventurous band that—after four albums—have traded in the name the "Tortured Souls" for the at once tougher and more poetic "Saltbreakers."

Fittingly, that's also the name of her new record—a dynamic work that mixes confession with nautical metaphors to achieve the feeling of a kind of personal mythology. ARTISTdirect caught Veirs in her new home of Portland, Oregon, to discuss the ocean, her literary influences, and the ways in which music gets personal.

You recently moved from Seattle to Portland. How are you liking Portland so far?

I haven't been here as much as I'd like because I've been touring. But it's a great city. It's a lot smaller and more manageable in terms of getting around on a bike... The city planners planned it out really well in the '70s, so it's a pretty livable city. And it's got a great music scene, too.

Your work seems to make a metaphorical correlation between physical, natural, and psychic space—or space in your head. On Saltbreakers, more often than not, that connection is expressed in terms of the sea. You grew up in Colorado Springs and then studied geology in Minnesota—both places where there's lots of space but no sea—and you've chosen to live your adult life in the Pacific Northwest, which is surrounded by beautiful, natural spaces and sea. Do you think there's a strong connection between your work and the places you've lived?

Definitely, yeah. My first real album—which is my first recording with Tucker Martine, The Triumphs & Travails of Orphan Mae, from 2001—has nothing about the sea in it. But, since then, the sea has come in more and more, because I've lived in Seattle since '97. That first album has much more to do with the, sort of, psychic landscape of my youth. And, since then, the Northwest has crept into the work as far as the ocean, and also just water. You know, it's so dark and rainy here in the winter—I know that's also had an impact on my writing.

Are you inspired by other art that takes its cues from the natural world?

I really love to read, and—outside of music—that's my biggest influence, reading fiction. A lot of writers that I read end up talking about the natural world, but it's in a human context, you know? It's not just the snow falling, it's not just a description, it's how the character feels about the snow falling and what kind of predicament they're in... And so I find that reading books helps me think about the world in terms of words, and in terms of images and metaphors. It helps me get outside of the clichés that come to mind.

What kind of stuff do you read?

Well, I sort of go between a lot of different things. But I've been reading José Saramago. I just read one of his books called Blindness that really influenced me—in fact, I just used a bunch of words from it for that song on the new record, "Don't Lose Yourself." It's about this communicable blindness disease that everyone in this unknown country gets. And about how it doesn't take much for society to break down. There's a really beautiful magic/surrealist component to his writing, and that's always influential to me—this sort of line between a dream world and this world, and that's the line I like to dance along when I write my lyrics.

Saltbreakers makes its autobiographical origins clear right away, in the opening lines of the first song, where you allude to protecting yourself, perhaps at the expense of an important relationship. Do you find that your music plays a role in your personal relationships?

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