This is a great little article that came out in this week's edition of The Good Times.
"Princess of Power
Lauren Shera—folk music’s new royalty?"
by Damon Orion
Local folk singer/guitarist/songwriter Lauren Shera would prefer that you not dwell on her age, but let’s face it—there just aren’t too many 18-year-olds who can boast that they’ve opened for artists like Joan Osborne, Jason Mraz, Todd Snider and former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, the last of whom has said that Shera’s voice “is going to define the next generation of folk music.” Nor is the world teeming with teenagers who have been featured on the KQED program Spark, or who have been swooped up by Bay Area agent Todd Cote (who also handles Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Mudhoney and Vashti Bunyan), or who have declined offers for recording contracts.
That’s right, declined offers for recording contracts. “I was just at a point where I felt like that wasn’t a good idea, ’cause I didn’t want to commit to anything,” Shera says of turning down a record deal with New York’s Or Music a few years ago. “I’m young now; I was even younger then, and it just seemed like a silly thing to do: sign away part of my life and commit to recording albums, something I hadn’t even done at all yet.”
There’s more: In November, Shera was backed by Gov’t Mule guitarist Warren Haynes in a performance of her favorite Bob Dylan tune, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” at a tribute concert for said song’s composer at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall. That show, a benefit for The Music for Youth Foundation, also featured such luminaries as Patti Smith, Rosanne Cash, Natalie Merchant, Medeski Martin & Wood, Chris and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes, Ryan Adams and Cat Power.
Shera says the prospect of playing so huge an event “was really intimidating, but as the day got closer and closer, I just got more excited.” Of performing with Warren Haynes, she says, “I was really honored that he had agreed to it in the first place. I didn’t get to practice the song with him ’till the day of the show, like a few hours before we played it, so it was just really magical to have that all come together right before we played.”
So just what in the holy name of Zimmerman is all the buzz about? Well, along with being in possession of a soaring singing voice, Shera happens to be a formidable songwriter, as evidenced on her new In My Bones CD (created at the local Gadgetbox Recording Studio). While cuts like “Blood Lust” display her knack for crafting melodies that linger in your brain like party stragglers, the most impressive aspect of the album is its poetry, which often expresses the essence of epic life experiences in seconds flat: “Bled my skin of my city sins”; “Wrap up my heart in the hands of a pirate/And kiss you on your wind-whipped cheeks.”
“Lauren’s got the best first lines of songs that I’ve heard,” says Gadgetbox owner and engineer Andy Zenczak. “Within the first phrase, the first line of the song, she immediately grabs you, and you want to hear the rest—you want to pay attention to the lyrics. And me being in production and recording, sound is always first and foremost, so when lyrics have a chance to grab you like that, that really makes it special.”
A few such opening lines from Lauren’s songs: “I was not built to handle an earthquake like you”; “Skyscrapers got nothin’ on me/They don’t see what I see”; “Will you hold my hand as the world ends?”; “’Round the corners in the city/There are monsters/There are werewolves.”
Zenczak says he and Shera based many of their production choices on song lyrics, which Shera had printed out so that he could follow along. “It wasn’t just haphazard or, you know, ‘Let’s try this; let’s try this,’” the engineer recalls. “A lot of it was like, ‘This song is about this topic; what’s going to play the emotional role that helps convey that subject?’”
For instance, buried deep in the mix of “Blood Lust,” complementing the song’s metaphorical references to monsters, are “scary” sounds played on viola and the sides of cymbals. Elsewhere, the fiddle heard on the song “First Flight,” whose lyrics deal with leaving home, is a reference to Shera’s family history of listening to bluegrass, and the entire mix of “Awful Pretty” was run through a miniature Danelectro amplifier to accent the seething tone of the lyrics, which explore the poetic possibilities of heartbreak-as-homicide.
In celebration of In My Bones’ release, Lauren will play at The Attic on Thursday, Jan. 4. Opening for her will be two other Santa Cruzans who created their most recent recordings at Gadgetbox: her sister Lindsay Candra (who, at age 15, is an extremely impressive talent in her own right) and local indie/folk-rock heroine Kelli Hanson.
