a different direction is really admirable. LL: Thank you RM: Were there any artists or recordings that you were listening to around that time that helped shine a light in the direction you wanted to go? LL: I would say I was listening to a lot of Stax at the time, I don’t know if that actually influenced the sound of the songs but, I think maybe a little bit, I guess I was just inspired by the story, with the crunchy guitar sounds you find on those, and how it was a bunch of people coming together almost like a family to write all these great timeless songs, that was really inspiring to me, listening to that Stax Collection. And maybe some Blue Oyster Cult I was listening to! Ha ha ha! But there is more of a classic rock vibe to this one I think, like a Fleetwood Mac influence. That was something that I was kind of thinking of in the studio. RM: What’s your favorite Fleetwood Mac Record? LL: Oh, “Rumors”, not to be a DBag, but that’s just such a great record, I don’t know! (Laughs) RM: It really is! There’s a reason that record got so big! LL: Yeah! And I just love the story about how everyone was losing their minds… RM: Yeah… So once you had decided you were going to scrap those songs you had already written and start again, how fast did the new songs come? LL: It was pretty swift, and I’d already had a couple songs for a while, but I think we recorded in May, and I had a huge writing spurt in March after SXSW. So it all came together very quickly. RM: Well, that just shows you are on the right track when it’s effortless and you don’t get any of those mental roadblocks. What’s your writing process? How does it come to you
and how do you go about documenting it? LL: Most of my songs start with lyrics, I keep a journal pretty religiously and I’ll look through that and sort of take things that I’ve written. I write poetry, a lot of that gets converted and turned into songs, and then I’ll sit down either at my piano or my guitar and start sort of fumbling around. Sometimes I‘ll try to let a melody come to me for a while, till that gets stuck in my head and then when I’m pretty sure it’s good, I usually play it for my guitar player and we start working on our parts and what sort of vibe we want to have. RM: Do you have a home record-
ing setup? LL: I have a laptop and a little digital recorder and I pretty much record everything that I do, but I don’t have a studio or anything. RM: That’s a good idea, but man, that can create a lot of work too cause you have to go back and listen to it all! LL: I know! It’s like, what is this? It sounds like an exorcism, but I record everything that happens to me. I do so much stream of consciousness writing, like I’ll be sitting at the piano and I’ll just sing something, and I’ll be like, wow, I have no idea what I just said, I should have recorded that, so I’ve started just having some kind