Laurel Premo
On finding healthier ways to make music
“My favorite practices in life – the things that I go to where I know I’ll feel very good in or cleaned out by in a meditative sense – are the ones in which I have to watch and listen very carefully, actively, and constantly. They’re the things that bring me into presence.”
Michigan musician Laurel Premo is often associated with her distinctive and thoughtful approach to North American and Scandinavian fiddle music. For almost two years, Laurel has had a similar mindset to a new endeavor: fly fishing.
“It’s beautiful choreography. I have so many memories watching my dad do it when I was a kid and feeling transfixed. Fly fishing is this traditionally masculine sport, but it’s a very delicate thing that requires a lot of listening.”
Laurel started fly fishing almost by accident. While on tour in the Northwest in early 2020, she sent her dad a book on fly fishing she found at a bookstore. “I just thought they were beautiful images and that it would be a nice note from the road. He interpreted it as, ‘Laurel's really interested in fly fishing.’ But I kind of rode on the momentum that had happened from his excitement over me getting interested in fishing, and we started researching gear together.”
For Laurel, it was incredibly helpful to have a new practice to go to during the pandemic. “I was trying to make meaning and routine out of all the empty space. Along with music and making a new record, fly fishing has been one of the brave new habits in my life.”
Laurel grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the first fiddle music she heard was the Scandinavian fiddling popular in the region. After playing roots-based music with Red Tail Ring for more than a decade, Laurel released The Iron Trios in 2019 alongside a few collaborators supporting her on electric guitar and bowed & electric bass. Her newest record, Golden Loam, feels like a natural progression. It’s a record full of emotion, dissonance, and sustain, but instead of collaborators interpreting fiddle tunes on electric guitar and bass, Laurel steps into the role of playing electric guitar and lap steel herself. Other than a few tunes, the majority of Golden Loam is solo performance. Percussive dancer Nic Gareiss appears on “Hop High” and “Poor Little Mary Sitting in a Corner”, and Quebecois bones player Eric Breton performs on “Jericho.”
Laurel self-recorded and produced the album during the summer and fall of 2020 in a 10’ x 10’ artist’s space where she lives in Traverse City. “I was recording and working on the music at the same time in a very pleasurable way that I had never been afforded before. I had some arrangements set down that I knew were ready to be recorded and then in between those recording days, I’d have experimentation days with unfinished pieces. It was like doing demo and session concurrently.”
The decision to self-produce came from a place of curiosity. After completing The Iron Trios, a complex and labor-intensive project, Laurel wanted to scale back. “I wanted it to be healing for me as an artist and also experimental. Not in terms of being wild, but experimental in terms of the process to see what would feel most healthy to me. The struggle of being a musician is so much about trying to figure out how I can just concentrate on making the music. So many things distract from that. So in a lot of ways, this record was about experimenting to find out how I can record music better. How can I get closer to the goal of a creative state where music is feeling good for myself?”
Laurel says the low-pressure setup where she wasn’t having to pay for studio time gave her the ability to follow trails of tunes that had come to mind while recording. “I could go home, listen to what I’d laid down for a couple of days, give it some space, and then return to the arrangements. The project was also a refuge for me in that I could just go for a half a day to the studio every day until I was completely worn out and sweaty from being in a 10 by 10 sealed room without windows. I’d emerge back into the outdoors and try again hard the next day.”
This was also Laurel’s first time recording electric guitar as the sound engineer, which meant there was a fair amount of experimentation to capture the tones she wanted to at the beginning. “I loved having the time afforded to attempt and revise that set up, and I landed on something that I really love.”
Laurel says she played a lot of guitar prior to playing with Red Tail Ring. With Michael Beauchamp-Cohen playing guitar in the duo, guitar was mainly used as a writing tool for Laurel. That changed when Laurel was working on The Iron Trios. During that process, Laurel found herself in a position of reteaching herself guitar to provide direction with the guitarists on the record.
“I created the sound that I wanted the guitar to have for that project so that I could ask that of my collaborators. While talking with the guitarists that I had been playing with, it became clear in that, ‘Oh, this is a unique thing that I'm asking of them that's coming from me, and it's really enjoyable. I should play more of this simply as solo guitar music.’”
Around the same time, Laurel became exposed to the music of guitarist Marisa Andersen. “She plays this really atmospheric, beautiful music and listening to her play was like, ‘Aha, I’m getting closer to some tones and sounds in some of this rootsy landscap-y music. Also, all of my life Bill Frisell – his music and tone and spaciousness–has been a great inspiration to me, as well as some Malian musicians like Ali Farka Toure. There’s also some amazing Michigan guitarists and friends who have helped show me what muscular dynamic tone could be on fingerstyle guitar, like Shari Kane, Seth Bernard, and Josh Davis.”
Even if she’s not holding a fiddle, Laurel thinks her approach to interpreting fiddle tunes on electric guitar and lap steel remains similar. “I think my voice is my voice, no matter what instrument I'm holding. I’m always feeling chords when I'm playing fiddle, even if I'm not expressing more than just the tonic drone. The lap steel also gives me a pretty similar expression of being able to bend and hold and slide, like on a fiddle.”
For Laurel, the name Golden Loam represents a space of celebration – both for her engagement with traditional music and for the contributions of others. “I was thinking about this act of digging into the history of roots music. This is music that I’m lucky to hold, from not just my work, but a lot of other people's lives before me. It’s this layered soil that’s really rich because of the things going into it. With my guitar in hand, I’m shaping it as electric glowing dirt, but there’s still a lot of life and death making this thing together. That felt like the record to me.”
Golden Loam can be purchased digitally through Laurel’s Bandcamp and physically on her website. Visit laurelpremo.com for information about upcoming tour dates. Photos by Harpe Star. Trout photo by Laurel Premo.
