Laura Gibson seemed an unlikely candidate to show a
beastly side when she competed in
And And And’s basketball tournament
last year. The slender, soft-spoken singer-songwriter is known for
swaying gently onstage, sporting cowboy boots and cotton dresses. Her
best-known song was used in an ad for the Humane Society.
But Gibson doesn’t fuck around on the court.
“As soon as the game
started, I was like ‘Rahhrrr!’” she says of her team’s Rigsketball run.
“And it’s funny, because I don’t think a lot of people had seen that
side of me. It was fascinating how fast I lost myself to just, like, be
in it.”
Gibson learned how to
play basketball long before she learned how to play music. She was a
Red Devil at Coquille High School and a Wildcat during her first year at
Linfield College. But confidence on the court didn’t immediately
translate to confidence in her music. Before taking the stage for the
first time as a Linfield senior, Gibson lost her voice. “I swear it
wasn’t a mental thing,” she says now. “But it felt like it.”
When she moved to
Portland after college, Gibson started following indie music for the
first time, but the scene seemed intimidating. Instead of pursuing local
labels, she found a creative outlet playing “informal music therapy”
for late-stage AIDS patients. “I thought that’s what music would be for
me,” she says.
But when she heard a
Hush Records-signed folk-pop act called Norfolk & Western, Gibson
felt a deep kinship with the band’s music. She wrote frontman-producer
Adam Selzer and asked him to help her record. He agreed. But in the
studio, when Selzer asked Gibson for direction, she’d defer back to him.
“She knew what she didn’t want,” Selzer says now, “but not so much what
she wanted. There was a lot of trial and error on the first record.”
“I had no idea that
it was possible for me to make production decisions,” Gibson says. “It
was far from what I had identified as my skill set.”
In the five years
since that record came out, Gibson has vastly improved that skill set.
She’s still soft-spoken in concert, but confident enough to lead the
crowd in singalongs and crack jokes during the pauses. Her 2009
full-length, the Tucker Martine-produced Beast of Seasons, was a courageous departure that opened with a white noise-filled, 7½-minute opening tune and veered experimental throughout.
Gibson’s new disc, La Grande,
is a different kind of departure. It finds the singer-songwriter
tackling rowdy country tunes, charming sambas and Dixieland-influenced
ballads. Her new songs cover love and sex and death and nature. But on
songs like “Lion/Lamb,” “The Fire” and “Time is Not,” there’s another
theme that comes to the fore—an embrace of the current moment and taking
control of one’s own life. “There’s the type of intimacy that’s like
sitting next to you and whispering in your ear, and then there’s this
type of intimacy where you’re able to feel very free in front of an
audience,” Gibson says. “I wanted to enter into this experiment to see
if I could end up at the same place of intimacy and sincerity, but to
achieve it by being completely uninhibited—and offering that to the
listener.” The sentiment is a little more rock ‘n’ roll than what we’re
used to from the once-shy Gibson, but it makes for her most engaging,
brilliant full-length to date. It also helped her make decisions in the
studio.
“This time I was
like, ‘I’m in charge, I’m the boss,’” Gibson says, laughing as she
describes her second go-round with Selzer. The production on La Grande
was more collaborative than last time, and Gibson felt freed up to try
new things in the studio (vocal effects and horn arrangements pepper the
disc). The emergence of a bolder Laura Gibson couldn’t have come at a
better time: La Grande is the singer’s first effort for respected
indie label Barsuk Records, which sent Gibson on a headlining tour of
Europe last month.
These days, Gibson
doesn’t lose her voice before shows. “It’s not so much that I have
learned to appear confident, I just trust the people who are listening a
little bit more,” she says. “I think that’s where shows become a little
magical, in that letting go.”
SEE IT: Laura Gibson plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., on Friday, Feb. 3, with Breathe Owl Breathe. 9 pm. $12. 21+.
