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Since moving to New York City from her hometown of Nashville, Laura has been a fixture on Big Apple airwaves. She began her radio career at Columbia University’s WKCR, and after graduation became a volunteer on the legendary free-form station WFMU in Jersey City, where she has served as “the proprietress” of the weekly, award-winning Saturday afternoon “Radio Thrift Shop” since 1993.
As a recording artist, Laura reached an international audience with her debut album, Not the Tremblin’ Kind (2000), which she followed with When the Roses Bloom Again (2002). Both albums received rave reviews (including four-stars in Rolling Stone) and earned her such celebrated fans as Elvis Costello (who personally selected her to open 17 dates on his 2002 U.S. tour) and legendary BBC broadcaster John Peel. Her frequent U.K. visits have included five prestigious “Peel Sessions,” and back home she has appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, as well as being featured on national public radio shows like All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, On Point, Studio 360, World Café and Mountain Stage. She has also been profiled in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, W, and Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, along with such mainstream U.K. publications as the Sunday Times, The Telegraph Magazine, and the You magazine in the Sunday Mail.
The daughter of two Nashville attorneys (her father served 18 years on the Tennessee Court of Appeals), Laura was exposed to much country music during her childhood, and later got a first-hand education as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. After arriving in New York she began singing in college dorm rooms and coffee houses, performing with groups like the Oswalds and Bricks, led by Mac Macaughan, who later formed Superchunk and Merge Records (which eventually released a lone Bricks CD and pair of 7-inch singles). After college she moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. There she befriended John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, who recruited her to sing on “The Guitar” on the band’s 1992 album Apollo 18 (Laura also appears in the video for the song). Flansburgh also offered to issue an EP of Laura’s original songs on his “Hello CD of the Month Club” subscription service, and produced four tracks that were released in June 1996.
Laura continued writing and performing locally in New York and in 1999 a four-song demo produced by guitarist Jay Sherman-Godfrey reached Francis Macdonald, head of the Shoeshine Records label in Glasgow, Scotland, and drummer for Teenage Fanclub, BMX Bandits and Scotland’s premier country band, the Radio Sweethearts. With Macdonald’s encouragement, Laura recorded additional songs to complete Not The Tremblin’ Kind, which was released on Shoeshine’s newly-launched Spit & Polish imprint in March of 2000. Laura began touring the U.K. backed by the Radio Sweethearts (as well as members of Belle & Sebastian and the Battlefield Band), received airplay from John Peel on Radio 1 and the Bob Harris Country program on Radio 2, and was profiled by Mojo magazine.
In the fall of 2000, Not the Tremblin’ Kind was released in the U.S. by Diesel Only Records, a label run by her husband Jeremy Tepper that had previously focused exclusively on truck driving music and jukebox singles. The album received simililar kudos in the U.S., including reviews in U.S.A. Today, Country Weekly, and Billboard magazine. The follow-up, When the Roses Bloom Again, was released simultaneously in the U.S. and U.K. and led to more extensive press coverage and touring, including opening slots for Elvis Costello (U.S.), Joan Baez (U.S.) and Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys (U.K. and Ireland), and appearances on the Grand Ole Opry, Cambridge Folk Festival (U.K.), Celtic Connections (U.K.), Blue Highways Festival (Holland) and Kilkenny Rhythm & Roots Weekend (Ireland).
Both a writer and an expert “song finder,” Laura composed eight of the songs on her first two albums, including “Queen of the Coast” and “Mountain Fern,” based on the lives of two pioneering women in country music, Bonnie Owens and Molly O’Day, respectively. For additional material she has turned to friends and neighbors that she admires, such as Amy Rigby (“Don’t Break the Heart”), Amy Allison (“The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter”), Joe Flood (“All the Same to You,” “Pile of Woe”) and Dave Schramm (“Conqueror’s Song”), and has also recorded forgotten country gems (“Somewhere, Somenight,” and “Oh So Many Years”). The title track from When the Roses Bloom Again, a Wilco/Billy Bragg collaboration for the album Mermaid Avenue, was dropped from the collection of Woody Guthrie-penned lyrics when it was discovered that the song was copyrighted by A.P. Carter of the Carter Family (further research has found that the song was previously published in 1901 and credited to writers Gus Edwards and Will D. Cobb under the aliases Will Whitmore and Harry Hillard).
In order to support her musical endeavors, Laura took an administrative position at a Wall Street investment firm. After surviving a series of mergers and acquisitions during the 1990s, she found herself the Vice President, Business Manager of Banc of America Securities Equity Research Department. This highly demanding day job found itself increasingly at odds with her burgeoning musical career (during this time she was profiled in both the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times of London), and in the Spring of 2003 she resigned her position to concentrate on her music full time. After leaving Wall Street behind, she was featured in the Oprah magazine O in a section dedicated to women who followed their “passion.”
More to the point, Laura has followed her instincts — whether selecting songs to record or to play on the radio show that she continues to host each week — and her heart, with a sweetly impassioned voice that Rolling Stone has described as “pitched somewhere between the bluesy realism of Lucinda Williams and the vintage femininity of Kitty Wells.” It is a voice that conveys a deep reserve of emotion, that has connected with people on two continents, and that is uniquely her own. |
