There’s not a lot of overlap between the crowds you’ll find at the
Phoenix clubs Modified Arts and the Rhythm Room.
Modified Arts is a hip, underground space that welcomes avant-garde
performances, while Rhythm Room is an old-school, urban-blues
mecca.
It’s telling that the Tempe-based band What Laura Says has played at
both of those clubs. From the beginning, they’ve straddled genres and
audiences, and they’re happy knowing that they can’t be easily
defined.
“That’s us in a nutshell,” says Mitch Freedom, bassist for the
promising quintet, when pondering the band’s booking schedule. “Our
tastes are very wide-reaching, but I guess the genres that have been
put into the music we’ve made so far have been kind of ‘indie’ and
‘pop,’ and kind of the underground stuff. But there’s also a very
strong influence of blues, funk and soul.”
What Laura Says is currently touring and plugging last year’s
release of a remastered version of their 2007 debut album. The disc
showcases their delightfully strange relationship with the song form,
as the album-opening “Couldn’t Lose Myself If I Tried” loses itself in
a most inspired way: careening through five radically different
sections in slightly more than three minutes. It also displays the
band’s knack for baroque-pop harmonies and rustic instrumentation
(banjos, ukuleles, coffee cans).
If the band’s Brian-Wilson-goes-bluegrass sensibility feels a bit
schizophrenic, there’s a good reason for that. What Laura Says is
really the product of two different bands—an offbeat pop duo
called What Laura Says Thinks and Feels, and a dirty blues trio called
the Expatriates. Their union is similar to the old Fleetwood Mac tale
of Mick Fleetwood visiting Keith Olsen’s SoCal recording studio in
1974. While Olsen showed off the studio’s excellent sound by playing
him a track from a duo called Buckingham Nicks, Fleetwood focused all
his attention on how much he liked the guitar player, and it wasn’t
long before he asked him to join his band.
What Laura Says Thinks and Feels was created by singer-songwriters
Danny Godbold and James Mulhern, who both played guitar and piano and
shared vocals. The aptly named Expatriates featured three Grand Rapids,
Mich., transplants: Freedom, his high-school pal Brad Muller on guitar
and vocals, and Muller’s brother Greg on drums. When Brad got a job as
a regional sales rep for Blue Bell Ice Cream, he no longer had time for
music, and the remaining Expatriates realized they’d hit a plateau.
“Blues-rock wasn’t really happening in Phoenix,” Freedom says. “It
was totally awesome for us and our core audience, but as far as getting
into the music scene in Phoenix, we weren’t a jam band, and we weren’t
scream, and we weren’t underground enough for some of the younger kids
to grab onto.”
More than three years ago, a mutual friend put the members of Laura
Says Thinks and Feels in the same room with the remaining
Expatriates.
“She was recording us, and she was also roommates with Danny and
James … ,” Freedom recalls. “She saw their need for a rhythm section
and saw Greg and I not really getting into what we were doing.”
By that point, Godbold and Mulhern had already pieced together most
of the tracks for their debut album, but Freedom and Muller encouraged
them to supplement that material with some choice unrecorded songs. The
resulting album never stops throwing aural surprises at you, and its
most consistent delight comes from the intricate, layered harmonies of
Godbold, Mulhern and Freedom. You can hear it in the spacy, XTC-ish pop
of “July 23,” and the spare, near-a cappella “Wish I Could Fly.”
“It comes straight from our influences,” Freedom says. “I grew up
listening to a lot of David Crosby, and he was always right there, not
afraid to sing that high note. A lot of times, that’s what’s missing.
You’ve got the two guys, but (you need) somebody who’s not afraid to
grab that weird note, to make that weird triad.
“It’s not about emulating the music that we listen to as much as
trying to make the music as fun as possible for ourselves. A lot of
people write three chords and the truth, and they often get sick of it,
and I see why.”
Freedom says that at one show, the members of What Laura Says were
talking to a new fan, and the fan asked if they’d grown sick of playing
songs from a record that came out back in 2007. Mulhern and Freedom
looked at each other and simply said, “No.”
The band has tired, however, of having to explain their cryptic
name, and after taking on outside management, they found that the
moniker was seriously slowing their music-biz progress. After a
showcase at SXSW in 2008, Freedom says industry reps uniformly
responded by telling the band’s management something along these lines:
“Great band, excellent songs; what was their name?”
Freedom says he firmly believes that “good music is good music, and
it sells itself, no matter what it’s called,” but he and his bandmates
agreed to drop the “Thinks and Feels” part of the name. What Laura Says
isn’t quite the mouthful that the original name was, but it’s just as
confusing, given that there are no female members of the group, let
alone one named Laura.
“(Godbold and Mulhern) aren’t too psyched to talk about the name,
which leads me to think it was something not too good, maybe a seedy
part of their past,” Freedom says. “People have come to identify with
it, and it’s become kind of a metaphorical thing.”
What Laura Says performs at midnight on the Hotel Congress
Outdoor Stage. A version of this story originally appeared in the San Antonio Current.
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2009.