and agendas of their own. On the morning I am to interview American singer Laura Veirs, my player jumps from her new album of electric folk-pop songs, Saltbreakers, to Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy and then to a Leonard Cohen compilation. Spookily, it all seems to make sense.
"I did listen to Houses of the Holy a lot as a teenager. And I've listened to a lot of Leonard Cohen," says a surprised Veirs.
mistaking quiet and introspective for mournful.
previous day, rather than by the pool of a modest Central Station hotel. "ButI think it's just a stereotype of singer-songwriters: the miserable life of the singer-songwriter etc. You know I have to depressive that's not an existence I want to have.
"
Still, her earlier work, the album Glacier in particular, did play with the attractiveness of night and personal both. It was easy to picture her writing on a balcony overlooking a still, frozen lake.
It's true enough, Veirs says, but she is as likely to be inspired by literature, writing around a borrowed line from a favourite book.
The current inspiration is Portugal's Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago, with one song on Saltbreakers paragraph for him is as long as a chapter for another writer, so there is this almost dream-like stream of consciousness, more like real life, the way your mind can bounce from one thought to album, Veirs tracked down the reclusive Saramago, who lives in the deliberately hard-to-reach Canary Islands, via his wife's fax number in the phone book.
you're stealing words," Veirs says. "It is a long-time tradition in the folk tradition, probably in any artistic tradition, to borrow an artist.
But nowadays you have to be careful."
feels something is lost generally when traditions die. "It's really sad when people don't feel that they are part of a tradition.
And I think that's particularly true in America," she says. "We want to feel innovative and independent, brilliant and original and100 per cent on your own.
healthy, that spirit of pioneering still in music and art, and I think that's why we are still influential around the world.
But I from being influenced by something, from roots.
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