LAURA Cantrell is reissuing her first album of original material in eight years to coincide with her February tour.
The Nashville-raised singer-songwriter, who lives in New York, issued No Way There From Here last autumn on Spit & Polish Records, but if you missed it then, you can hear the songs live at The Wardrobe in Leeds tomorrow.
“I had a shorter window for some British dates in October, and I’m coming back now as there’re only a certain amount of time you can give to travelling when you have a young daughter in school, aged seven,” says Laura, who is taking advantage of the school half-term to visit the UK from February 13 to 22.
Laura acknowledges No Way There From Here has been “a bit long in the making” but the eight-year hiatus is misleading.
She took a break from recording to raise her daughter but returned in May 2011 to release Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs Of The Queen Of Country Music, her tribute album to one of her heroines, 1950s honky-tonk country singer Kitty Wells.
The album was a meditation on femininity in country music, taking its title from an original Cantrell song about Wells. It also marked Cantrell’s first experience of recording in her home town.
“I’ve had an arm’s-length relationship with Nashville in terms of making my own music,” she says. “That record gave me an opportunity to directly express my passion for the history of country music, and specifically for Kitty and her work. Whatever qualms I’d had about being from Nashville, but not quite of it, were sort of resolved in the making of that record.”
For the first time in a career stretching back to 2000’s Not The Tremblin’ Kind, 46-year-old Laura decided she would record an album of material mostly written by herself. What’s more, she would do the sessions at Beech House, Nashville, a couple of miles from where she grew up.
“I’d been doing a bi-monthly song club check-in with a group of writers to finish songs that had been lying around,” she says.
“Coming out on the other side of having a young daughter in the house, it was time to figure out whether these songs were worth it.”
The songs were work-shopped with the Radio Free Song Club writers, a group that included the likes of Peter Blegvad, Victoria Williams, Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric, and the working practice involved recording songs with the Radio Free Allstars in a live setting, as if for a radio broadcast.
“Since having my daughter, I’ve been through a natural process of opening up – I wanted to use that openness to make my writing more personal,” says Laura. “I also felt like I was connecting with like-minded friends, which led to some fruitful collaboration.”
A particular favourite was Glass Armour, the song she finished with Tracyanne Campbell from Scottish band Camera Obscura. “I met Traceyanne when Camera Obscura were such a young band at John Peel’s 65th birthday party,” says Laura. “I could see she had real ability as a songwriter and we stayed in touch despite the distance apart.
“I kept saying I would send a song to her and in the meantime she sent me something, asking if I would add to it and so we started on Glass Armour. It’s still me, it’s still her, but there’s something more to it because it’s the two of us together.”
• Laura Cantrell plays The Wardrobe, Leeds, tomorrow. Box office: 0113 245 5570.
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