LAURA VEIRS

ABOUT this week’s guest:

When we last caught up with Portland, Oregon artist Laura Veirs in 2022, she had just put out her first self-produced album: her twelfth studio release, Found Light. Now four short years later, Laura is back with a new album that sees her even more fully embracing her autonomy with a collection called Temple Songs. Made with a DIY spirit, a finely tuned ear, and an open heart, in some ways, this album is her most fully realized work to date - a mirror of her talents as a multi-instrumentalist, a producer, an arranger, a songwriter, a singer, and a visual artist. For those unfamiliar, over the last 27 years that Laura Veirs has been releasing albums under her own name on her own label (Raven Marching Band Records), she has also been a third of the supergroup case/lang/veirs with k.d. lang and Neko Case, and Laura has collaborated with, and written for, the likes of Mavis Staples, Sufjan Stevens, the Decemberists, and First Aid Kit, just to name a few. She is a children’s book author, a songwriting teacher, has created and manufactured a deck for creative writers and songwriters called Kaleidoscope Creativity Cards, and even hosted a podcast called Midnight Lightning, talking to musician parents. In this episode, Laura shares how she finally built a room of her own, crowned it the “Temple of Bloom”, and grew herself into this beautiful and most vulnerable phase of her artistry, including recording her brand new album Temple Songs entirely on her own.

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