heART on Center
“One of my friends says I’m the funniest sad guy he knows,” muses singer-songwriter Greg Laswell.
“I think that’s probably correct.”
Before you cue up “Tears of a Clown,” a little context: Laswell, a San Diego native who recently released his third album, Take a Bow, has developed a serious sad-bastard reputation.
His first studio album, 2006’s Through Toledo, was “heart-wrenching,” he says, written during the fallout of a devastating divorce. And since then, that “woe is me” sentiment has stuck around—though it’s wise not to judge a man entirely by his songs.
“I don’t really enjoy happy music,” Laswell acknowledges. “I think other people do it better than I would, so I leave them to it. It’s certainly only just a side of me, though. The fact that I write mostly sad songs isn’t an indication that I’m walking around moping all day.”
In fact, he’s in surprisingly good spirits on his way to that night’s show in Boston. Perhaps his light-hearted attitude is due to a recent change in scenery. Last November, Laswell, 36, ditched L.A. for new digs in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood.
“I’ve wanted to live there ever since I visited six or seven years ago,” he says. “It’s just the pace of it and the electricity of it. I’ve been in Southern California all my life; if it wasn’t San Diego, it was Los Angeles or Long Beach. But I was never really quite at home. I always thought I would just naturally do better somewhere else, so this year was the year that I thought I would check that box of my to-do list.”
Aside from one obvious drawback—“New York has everything except good Mexican food!”—Laswell says he’s feeling settled. It’s a balanced outlook that’s pervasive throughout Take a Bow.
“It’s sarcastic at times, and it gets angry—I get angry for the first time in my music. There are also some happy songs on the record, which is another first for me.”
Though Take a Bow still grapples with the complexity of relationships, Laswell interjects a sense of distance. “I can write from a more objective point of view now that I’m through it all. Being in the thick of it changes your writing quite a bit.”
One of the album’s “angry” songs, “Around the Bend,” floors with its powerful imagery of longing to forget: “The photographs without the faces, the photographs of just the landscapes where we’ve been.”
Would he, given the chance, erase all the painful memories, like in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
Laswell pauses for a moment. “No, I wouldn’t actually. No.”
For this latest release, Laswell packed his L.A. studio into a U-Haul and headed to a friend’s secluded cabin in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he holed up for several months with no company except for his dog.
“With my first record, I was so blindsided that there was very little that could distract me. With my second record”—Three Flights from Alto Nido—“I was probably somewhat distracted. With Take a Bow, I knew that it was my third record and I really wanted to dig down, both musically and lyrically.”
Laswell, who fronted the band Shillglen in the late ’90s, prefers a solitary approach to songwriting. When recording, he tends to play all the instruments himself.
“Sometimes I’ll have a musician come over and do a track for me much better than I did it myself, musically and mechanically, but it just doesn’t seem right. It’s hard to explain. My imperfect guitar playing and piano playing—I think it feels better to me, even if it’s not an amazing performance.”
It definitely feels more personal, which may be why his lush, emotional songs—heavy on the melancholy—have ended up in so many TV soundtracks. The song “Off I Go,” which shows up on Take a Bow, was written specifically for the season five finale of Grey’s Anatomy and plays out after it’s revealed that a main character may be dying. Yep, sad.
On the road, Laswell tours with a four-man band in order to recreate his full-bodied sound. “I love what happens organically when you’ve been out on the road with the guys, playing the same songs,” he says. “I just don’t know that I would enjoy the rest of what goes along with being in a band.”
Maybe, he adds, “I’m a little too much of a control freak.”
This controlling tendency was seriously tested in 2007, when Laswell dated actress and singer Mandy Moore. The couple was trailed by the paparazzi, and on gossipy blogs, posters left cruel comments about Laswell.
“It certainly wasn’t something I was expecting,” he says guardedly. “I didn’t enjoy it at all. I don’t even put my picture on my records. The fact that I have a video out now”—for “Taking Everything”—“is a little too much for me. I go out of my way to keep private about certain things.”
Clearly, Laswell’s deep secrets belong to his songs, where all is fair in love and heartbreak.
Greg Laswell will play a CD-release show with Brian Wright at Anthology on Friday, June 11.
