Preview
LAURA LOVE
Friday, November 28
Dalhousie Community Centre
Saturday, November 29
Braeside Community Centre
Laura Love must be a nightmare for music store employees. Where the hell does the music go? Celtic, R and B, funk or folk? With a voice that is at times light and playful and other times stridently yodelling, and a musical style that veers wildly between African rhythms and Celtic fiddle, Love is anomaly personified.
Growing up in Nebraska and spending a good portion of her childhood in a series of foster homes, Love’s latest album, Welcome to Pagan Place, charts the distance in between.
"I was in a hotel room a while ago reading the Bible that was there, and came across a story about how God disembowelled some poor guy for misbehaving – pulled out his entrails, or something disgusting like that. Who needs a god like that? Not me, that’s for sure," she says.
"I come from a place of believing that we’re put on this earth to dance, to have fun, to be good to each other and to enjoy life. That's it, that’s the whole meaning of life right there."
Which is, of course, pretty standard pagan line of thought, although Love won’t call anything more than her album pagan.
"I don’t have any religious affiliation, particularly since the Bush administration came to power and started showing us everything that’s wrong with religion. I mean he just embodies that whole horrible manifest destiny kind of thinking that allows him to do the kind of shit he’s doing right now.
"I mean, everybody uses their god to justify whatever they want to do, whatever atrocities they want to commit. It seems to me that if we just took the god out of it all, and were just good to each other, we’d all be a lot better off."
As you may have gathered, Love is not short on opinions or passion. Love’s musical tastes, like her politics, are liberal, astute and eclectic.
"In Nebraska in the ’60s, radio was a lot more interesting than the homogenous crap we have now. Plus my mom always had us listening to whatever she was interested in. And all the stuff I heard in the different places I lived. I got to listen to so much, and I got to pick and choose what I liked," she says.
"I mean, because I’m a light-skinned black woman people assume things about my musical taste. They’re always thinking I’m up on the latest rapper or something. ‘You know so-and-so? I’m sure you’ve heard of him’… Why are you sure?"
Many people say that music is a thing that rides below the level of consciousness, that there’s some kind of collective unconscious memory involved. When you hear a certain kind of music, often connected to your heritage, something in you responds. But there are plenty of cases where the heart responds fervently to something completely unconnected to it, too.
"When I’ve heard African music, it feels like it’s in my bones, and I have this real longing to be near it, to move to it, it just fills me with joy. But Celtic music feels like that to me, too. I love all kinds of music, and respond to all of them, but those two feel like something in my blood," she says.
"I think the walls between music and culture are getting broken down now, anyway. People are playing what their heart responds to more and more. Maybe it’s just a function of my being out on the road and seeing it so much, but, for instance, I know a ton of Jewish bluegrass musicians, black folk-singers, white rappers. The lines are getting blurred. It’s a good thing."
So Love continues blurring the lines. Growing up, being a square peg in all the round holes people were constantly trying to shove her into, she’s used to the feeling. What’s relatively new for her these days is the fact that she finds herself more and more pulled to write about the state she finds her country in these days.
"I’ve never felt compelled before to spout my political beliefs in my music, but writing this record, I had to go there. I realized partway through – ‘this ain’t gonna be no funny, whimsical record.’ There’s been such a frightening mowing down of our rights and freedoms in the last few years, I had to make this record and talk about that," she says.
Love has chosen to speak out, regardless of fears over the potential backlash, fears which are increasingly likely these days in the States.
"I’ve gotten over a lot of the discomfort of being booed or challenged about my music – it just feels more frightening to be silent than to say something right now. One guy wrote me a letter that said ‘shut up and sing, woman’. I just responded that I’m glad we still have enough freedom of speech to be allowed different points of view." |
Copyright ©2003 FFWD. All rights reserved.