| The graphic at the
above right is an actual photo of the pages where
I wrote "Where Are The Girls With Guitars"
which is on our brand new CD, Cures What Ails Ya.
I wrote this song exactly one week before we recorded.
I taught it to bassist Pat Morvan and drummer Tony
Braunagel in the studio shouting out changes as
they made a few quick notes and then we blasted
through it in one take. It might be hard to see
in the graphic but I write the bulk of the song
in its more or less finished format on the right
hand page. I use the left hand page to jot down
the various lyrical or musical ideas I get but don't
actually know where they will fit in the finished
song at that exact moment.
Writing music is genuinely one of the greatest
joys in my life. I call it my "cheap
therapy." It is the vehicle by
which I exercise my demons, lament my trajedies
and give voice to my triumphs. Many people
have said that they feel like they have gotten to
know me through my music. I can dig that!
A songwriter's willingness to be vulnerable is
both her most important tool and most frightening
responsibility. It can be a difficult thing to accomplish
because you are exposing your own weaknesses and
hurts and trying to convey it all in a way to which
others can relate. You may wonder why anyone would
want to do this. I have to admit, sometimes I wonder
about that myself! For most songwriters, myself
included, sharing the inner workings of my world
is truly an attempt to reach out to others who may
have had a similar experience or feeling and connect
with them.
At the same time you can't take yourself too seriously...let's
face it, you can't always be so darn vulnerable.
Sometimes life is incredibly wonderful and filled
with joy, when everything is going your way and
you can't imagine that it could get any better.
So sometimes ya gotta puff out your chest and crow!
A supersize dose of rock & roll swagger every
now and then is good for the soul!
I have written songs during every stage of my life,
during every possible emotion: inconceivable pain,
unabashed happiness, abject boredom, humiliating
contriteness, innocent wonder, playful curiosity,
self-righteous indignation, helplessness, foolishness,
hopelessness, hopefulness....
I know that I am not unique for having experienced
all of these emotions. As individuals we have all
led different lives but there is so much common
ground upon which we tread. It's my hope that we
can just walk that path together from time to time
through my music. |
t could have been a disastrous beginning. Laurie's womanizing, alcoholic father walked out on her mother and her when she was five years old. They were living in a little white house on Bittersweet Lane in New Lenox, Illinois. While it was a great struggle, and money was always in short supply, Laurie's mother was a hard worker who never accepted charity, and they managed to live a simple life in an upstairs apartment in Joliet, Illinois. Her mom eventually met a wonderful man, fell in love and married. Things got quite a bit easier then, with two incomes in the household, and they even managed to buy property in a rural town called Plainfield upon which the family built a house with their own hands.
Laurie grew up surrounded by all kinds of music. Her step-father, who Laurie considers to be her "real Dad", was a hard core country fan. Her mom listened to the lighter side of rock and pop, and Laurie was a typical midwest teenager who listened to all kinds of rock, pop, country, R&B, even disco. She absorbed it all…although she does remember her Dad actually banning her Kiss albums from the house! The one thing that was missing from that period is the blues. Even though Chicago was less than an hour away, in their tiny little microcosm of small town Illinois, Laurie was completely in the dark about the musical form that would soon shape her very existence.
Laurie's best friend Brendan had an acoustic guitar. In the high school band, she played flute during concert season and drums during marching season, but this was totally different. Being curious, she gave it a try. She thought the guitar was "the greatest thing ever" and wrote her first song after learning only three chords. She was a busy kid in high school, as Laurie was also an accomplished athlete earning a total of 12 varsity letters during her four years and was eventually inducted into the school's Athletic Hall of Fame.
At 18, she went off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to get a degree in Electrical Engineering. She also attended the U of I's Institute of Aviation, earning private, commercial, instrument and multi-engine pilot's licenses. Her sophomore year, she was running out of money fast and missing playing sports. She tried out for the volleyball team and won a full-ride volleyball scholarship. She now had a way to pay for her education and loved playing volleyball. She would always bring her acoustic guitar along on the team's road trips and it was quite common for her to get the whole team singing while they were waiting for delayed flights to and from their games.
Laurie eventually bought herself an electric guitar, a beautiful, white Les Paul Custom with gold hardware and an ebony fretboard, which she says, "took everything I had and then some to buy." Years later, it was sold for rent money back home while she was out on the road somewhere. Laurie laments that she still misses that guitar.
After graduating from college she took a job in aerospace and moved to Los Angeles, joining a rock & roll cover band as a rhythm guitarist and vocalist. It didn't take very long before she wanted to play lead guitar. Once she started, she progressed quickly due to her ability to practice for long, long hours and never get bored. "The guitar is so fascinating to me," says Laurie, "an unending source of inspiration and wonder, something no mere human could ever master." It was then that she got her first Stratocaster: "It was red and shiny and sexy, and I was home baby!" She quit her engineering job, never to return, and joined a road band as its lead guitarist/vocalist, doing Top 40 covers. They traveled around California and Nevada playing 5 nights a week in clubs, casinos, hotels, and every dive bar that would have them. Laurie would play guitar 4 to 5 hours every night at the shows and practice 3 to 4 hours every day in her hotel room. She was ravenous about that guitar.
In the very early stages of developing her guitar style, Laurie learned note-for-note from the world's greatest rock & roll players, diving into their recordings like a starving woman after a loaf of bread. She couldn't get enough! All that intricate, detailed studying paid off, giving her the dexterity and vocabulary which allowed her style to develop organically its own unique voice. To Laurie, playing lead guitar is "a lot like doing a life-long dance of seduction with your true love. It's just as important to know when to shut up and listen as it is to hoot and holler, when to tease and when to please, when to be tough and when to be tender."
Her musical performances were rooted in guitar-driven blues rock and southern rock as she was playing lead guitar and singing in a power trio. When she was introduced to the music of Stevie Ray Vaughan her whole life changed. She fell head-over-heels in love with Stevie's powerful, electric blues! He was also the gateway through which Laurie was introduced to a world of blues history she'd never been exposed to before. She says, "It was like being turned loose on an unending feast!"
Once she started creating her own brand of red hot blues rock, she realized quickly that this was what she was born to do. Her guitar playing style sprang forth as an evolutionary leap into life from that primordial soup of electric blues, rock, and country she was listening to. She says, "Nothing had ever felt so real, so visceral, so expressive, so passionate, so sexual, so nurturing, so spiritual, so painful, so healing, so thrilling, so demanding, so all-encompassing and so perfectly suited to me. I genuinely feel most complete with my guitar in my hands and I don't expect that will ever change."
The next step was to begin recording her own music. Recording was expensive so that meant raising funds which in turn meant having to work at something besides music while still pursuing music. A terrible and painful sacrifice, but there was no way to get around it. Laurie got a Master's Degree in Applied Mathematics and taught college math classes to raise recording money.
Her first album was Out Of The Woods in 1997, and the band was called Backroad Shack in those days. Laurie wrote all 10 songs. Second, in 2004, came Find My Way Home, where Laurie wrote 8 of the 11 songs and a name change to the Laurie Morvan Band. Her third CD, Cures What Ails Ya, was released in March of 2007, and came close to capturing the raw power, dynamics, versatility and passion of a Laurie Morvan Band live performance. Laurie wrote all 12 tracks on this one.
The release of that third CD was a turning point for the band, and a real highlight for Laurie was when Guitar Player magazine interviewed her for a two page feature article in their October 2007 issue. Next came an interview with Vintage Guitar magazine, a feature spot on Dan Aykroyd's House of Blues Radio Hour with Kickin' Down Doors chosen as the Blues Breaker Song of the Week, and a flood of great reviews and articles in DownBeat, Blues Revue, Modern Guitars, and others.
In February of 2008, the band advanced to the finals of the International Blues Challenge held in Memphis, TN. Their CD Cures What Ails Ya also made it into the finals (top 5) of the Blues Foundation's Best Self-Produced CD competition. Out of 160 acts that fought their way through their own regional competitions and made it to Memphis, the Laurie Morvan Band was the only one to advance to the finals of both the live band and CD competitions. Through the exposure of the IBC they were able to make connections for touring in the Midwest, something they do regularly now.
For her fourth CD, Laurie made the decision to work with an outside producer for the first time. After being introduced to Steve Savage (Elvin Bishop, Robert Cray) they began recording, and in 2009, Fire It Up! was released. A classy, blues statement which shows Laurie's continued growth as a songwriter, producer and guitarist, it was named as a nod to both one of its cuts, the double-entendred Come On Over To My BBQ, and to the burning energy of Laurie Morvan Band live shows.
Laurie wrote all 12 songs on Fire It Up! Lay Your Hands aches for the healing touch of someone who loves you, while Skinny Chicks pokes some good-natured fun at the surplus of Big Legged Woman songs perpetuated by the blues men of the world. While the slow and powerful grind of Livin' In a Man's World is a callout to the challenges Laurie has faced as a female blues guitarist, countless women have sought her out to seek comfort and camaraderie in sharing their own career related experiences. Laurie says that the tender ballad, Let Me Carry Your Troubles, "came to me in the middle of the night and nearly wrote itself" after she heard of a friend's cancer diagnosis. Café Boogaloo is about the spiritual and communal juke joint created whenever and wherever blues lovers gather to escape the woes of the world.
In 2008 and 2009 the band's touring has expanded, with more festivals and more venues, in more towns in more states. A highlight of the 2009 tour schedule was their performance at the Ellnora Guitar Festival held at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, IL.
The band is looking forward to what lies next. Laurie often talks onstage about her belief that "music is the most healing force in the universe and that we, as musicians, have a calling to get out there and share some love with the good folks in this world."
Laurie Morvan, Discography
Fire It Up!, 2009, Laurie Morvan Band
Cures What Ails Ya, 2007, Laurie Morvan Band
Find My Way Home, 2004, Laurie Morvan Band
Out Of The Woods, 1997, Backroad Shack
|
| Music sample
coming soon |
Many guitarists like
to focus only on lead playing, and who can blame
them, it's the most fun in the world to play lead
guitar! However, what many guitarists miss out on
is the absolute joy that comes from creating a big,
greasy groove with your bassist and drummer. This
lesson is specific to the basic blues shuffle rhythm,
something most guitarist take for granted as "simple",
yet so many don't do very well at all. It takes
genuine concentration to really lock in your rhythm
playing with the kick drum and that is the most
important element for a guitarist to help create
that elusive "perfect pocket"!
Let's use a key of A example. In a I - IV - V progression,
that's A - D - E, a guitarist will use the following
fingerings:
On the A chord
E--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
B--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
D--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A-----------7------7---------9------9---------7------7----------9------9---
E-----------5------5---------5------5---------5------5----------5------5---
Count: 1 2
3 4
On the D chord
E--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
B--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
D-----------7------7---------9------9---------7------7----------9------9---
A-----------5------5---------5------5---------5------5----------5------5---
E--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Count: 1 2
3 4
On the E chord
E--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
B--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
D-----------9------9---------11----11-------9------9----------11----11---
A-----------7------7---------7------7---------7------7----------7------7---
E--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Count: 1 2
3 4
Next time you are playing with your band, try going
through a shuffle without playing any lead (tough,
I know!) and really make locking in with the kick
drum your entire focus. If at all possible, set
up a couple of mics, even if they are just on your
guitar amp and the kick drum. Then listen back,
or even better, if you can record to computer software
you can visually see as well as hear where you are
lined right up and where you are not. You might
just find yourself amazed at how much you are wandering
around the beat, but once you get your rhythm playing
synced up with the kick drum, the whole groove opens
up! There is so much more room in the musical space!
To me, creating a great pocket is just as satisfying
as ripping off a great lead line. I really mean
that. It is all part of forging a fantastic, professional
sound on stage. Your fans might not be able to articulate
to you just exactly what the difference is, but
believe me, they'll feel it. |
