Laura Veirs, Year of Meteors

Tracks & Durations

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Review

On her fifth album, the Seattle songwriter-cum-brainy chanteuse once again creates her austere emotional moonscapes, but this time she's molded them into a high-concept travelogue that seems to be about going on a rather somber vacation, or moving from one place to another. The scenery blurs, but you can pick out her brittle eccentric images, full of specific details that seem to draw you in closer to her cold flame--with Laura Veirs, both God and the Devil are in the details. She has a very specific, but skewed, vision that makes you feel she's just reporting events as they unfold, but she sings and writes with such detachment, you wonder where her autobiography ends and her observational skills kick in. On this record they seem a little closer to home. There's an elegant, sad quality and a jagged yearning here, forcing you to be silent witness to this exquisite, seductive pain. --Jaan UhelszkiSeattle-based singer-songwriter Laura Veirs calls her 2005 Nonesuch release Year of Meteors "a road record." "It doesn't sound like one," she says, "but it is." Veirs had spent most of 2004 touring in support of the hauntingly beautiful Carbon Glacier, her breakthrough effort and Nonesuch debut. She started out in Europe, where she was greeted with overwhelming critical praise and sold-out houses. Then Veirs worked her way around the States, where she was still just being discovered (though the reviews were also often superlative). The experience was at times heady, other times grueling, and she incorporated it into her new songs. However, given Veirs' vividly descriptive yet dream-like lyrics, you won't learn anything about her actual itinerary. Year of Meteors is no ordinary travelogue, but it will definitely take you on a remarkable journey.

"All the songs are about transportation, motion," Veirs explains. "If you listen to the words, there's always some movement happening, whether it's greyhounds running down a mountainside as mud flows or a person flying off into the sun or someone lurking around the bottom of the sea. I think that's because I was in motion so much of the year. Somehow I knew that all the traveling would come into the songs, but I wanted to remain focused on the bigger things, not just life on the road, so that's why there are no direct references to that." There are, she hastens to add, "love songs related to that experience, like the struggles of being away from home and your partner. Or having my band and the different relationships I have formulated, many of them very close because of the intense circumstances of touring. So it's a relationship record too."

And, finally, it's a band record: a fertile collaboration between Veirs and her studio band, the Tortured Souls (who often play live with her)--Steve Moore (piano, organs), Karl Blau (bass, guitar, vocals), and producer Tucker Martine (drums, percussion, treatments). Viola player Eyvind Kang, another longtime associate, also sat in. As Veirs explains, "When we talked about making the album, we decided to record a lot of these songs as a band first, then do some more of the solo type of songs. It had always been the opposite before, I would go in and record the more quiet guitar parts and sing. This time, half of the record or more are tracks that we did live as a band first. Then we went in and recorded the quieter ones. We approached this from the beginning more as a band album and it really turned out that way."

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