Lawrence Rothman has a lot of nerve, starting an album with a song called “The Meaning,” and then daring to ask some of the questions inherent in the big picture created by those two words — like, if not what is the meaning of life, then what is the meaning of music? (Of course, for a lot of musicians and music lovers, those two questions might as well be synonymous.) But thoughtfulness and intent are never far away from Rothman’s music, or at least hasn’t been since they made a shift about five years ago toward recording in Nashville and feeling the embrace of the Americana community, as opposed to drifting through a series of rock ‘n’ roll bands and personas in L.A. for a lot of years prior. To ask first about your production work: You work with a lot of great singer-songwriters, and there’s a lot of versatility in the types of sounds you get with different people. No one would mistake an Amanda Shires record for the Maggie Rose album you just had come out.
I don’t know if it’s the Gemini in me, but I’ve loved so many different types of music. my entire life. So to produce and to be able to add sounds, textures and treatments to things that are in a new style every month — because I produce something once a month — helps keep me alive, really, and eep my inspiration up. Amanda Shires makes poetic songs that are just these heartbreaking stories, done in a way that’s so classy, and like Leonard Cohen.
It is such a great thing to immerse myself in, because I love sad music, and she definitely makes some beautifully sad songs. You can do that for a while and you’re in that zone, and then it’s great to be able to pop out and do something like Maggie Rose, where it’s more of a celebratory thing of being a mother and this new stage of her life, where it’s about a weird youthfulness in the energy a family gives back to you. T hat record feels very celebratory, and very different than the Tiff Merritt record I made earlier in the year, which was more of a look at the life of an artist, much like myself — what I’ve gone through and what she went through, in a heavy lyrical mode.
I’m a little Method when I produce. I have to feel like I’m in the band. As a sensitive artist yourself, when you’re with all these musicians and you’re getting Method with them, you can lose yourself in it and start to feel a bit like you’re taking on everybody’s trauma.
So it’s nice to be able to go amongst these groups of musicians that I work with who telling their truths and spilling their drama and their sadness. They’re all such great people that when you leave those sessions, it’s almost like you’ve been acting in a film, crying and singing and laughing with them, and then at the end of it, you can walk away like yourself again. And I feel like all those artists that I work with, when they’re done, it’s like a clean reset.
It’s like a little bit of a demon that you dance with, when you’re producing things. How do you make yourself “part of the band”? Is that literally through playing an instrument as part of the sessions?
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