Up Country

Musician interviews don't traditionally start with the sound of a speaker phone being snatched out of its cradle on the other end, but then Laura Cantrell hasn't exactly followed a straight-line path to insurgent country acclaim. While holding down a day job as a Manhattan financial company VP, she's been been airing the fruits of her junk-sale record shopping on "The Radio Thrift Shop," the weekly show she's hosted on the legendary free-form station, WFMU, for the last 10 years. That apparently not being enough careers for the Nashville-born Cantrell, she turned to songwriting, beginning in 1996 with a five-song EP on John Flansburgh's subscription-only Hello label. It took four more years to assemble Not the Tremblin' Kind, which mixes a handful of Cantrell originals with songs by such little-known New York songwriters as Joe Flood and George Usher. It proved to be a surprisingly potent mix: The album scored a four-star review in Rolling Stone, and John Peel, in a fit of jock solidarity, proclaimed it his favorite new disc of the last decade. Cantrell went from wondering if she'd ever get an album out to worrying what to do for an encore.

"I did have a couple of blue moments," Cantrell confesses from her desk, doubtless several stories above the New York streets. "How do you have the same impact when people appreciated that stuff so much?" Although she will admit to having "a musical vision, if you want to call it that," Cantrell chalks much of Tremblin's success up to "dumb luck."

"We didn't even know until we were halfway through that we were making a record at all," she recalls. No such uncertainty beset When the Roses Bloom Again, which, like Tremblin', is released on Diesel Only, the label run by Cantrell's husband, Jeremy Tepper. But Cantrell found herself falling into the trap of sizing the album-in-progress up against its predecessor, with predictable results. "I kept thinking, ŒWhere's ŒThe Whiskey Makes You Sweeter'?" she says, referring to the first album's tart-tongued tell-off. "Where's the ŒTremblin' Kind'?"

In particular, she got concerned about the lack of the tough-girl songs that had been among her first album's stand-outs. "I didn't want to betray what little audience I had by coming out and being a real wimp about everything," she says. "There were some songs where I was kind of on the fence about where they would fit. But I just decided I didn't need to take myself too literally."

Ironically, despite the lack of emancipatory anthems, Cantrell's singing on Roses is more confident than ever, which suits what she calls the album's "pop" direction. (Cantrell's enough of a country purist that her use of the term has more to do with The Byrds than Shania's blue-disc bhangrafication.) Still, Cantrell isn't likely to be mistaken for Patsy or Emmylou any time soon; what makes her records work is a plainspoken approach coupled with cracking arrangements (including Jay Sherman-Godfrey's production) and ace song selection that plucks diamonds out of pawn-shop windows. It only makes sense, since Cantrell's 'FMU show is about the world's greatest A&R job. "If I've learned nothing more in 10 years on WFMU, I should be able to come up with a set list," Cantrell says. "On the radio, I might do a rock set or a country set, and you don't have that luxury when you're [only] doing 12 or 13 songs. But some of the same rules apply of getting the transitions right, feeling like they feel organic and true to the songs."

The transitions have been coming smoother in Cantrell's music career as well; last fall, she landed a literate singer/songwriter's dream gig: a tour opening for Elvis Costello. Costello, Cantrell says, had already made his appreciation for Tremblin' known, but again, "dumb luck" played its part; Cantrell happened to send him an advance copy of Roses just before the planned opening act dropped off the tour. "Elvis had just written me a really lovely e-mail: ŒThank you for sending me your new record. It sounds great. I was listening to it on the plane.' He was name-checking songs -- it was freaking me out! It was such a nice note to get from somebody. He was like, ŒIt would be great to get a chance to play together, but my tour's already booked -- maybe we'll see each other down the road.' And literally the next day, I got a call from his booking agent." Following Costello's "top-drawer" tour wasn't easy for a small band with no tour support, but Cantrell's hardly ambivalent about the experience. "If there's any person of that caliber's audience you want to play in front of, it's Elvis Costello's audience," she says.

Things aren't quite so rosy in her other non-day job, if only because the American radio is well on its way to becoming a giant audio strip mall. But at least Cantrell herself has gotten some love from her fellow DJs. Most of her airplay, she says, comes from one-person shows like her own -- Triple-A radio, she says, "is pretty comfortable with alt-country, but it's a little scared of getting too close" to the real thing. "I know those folks get a lot of stuff in the mail, like I do, and it's hard to keep on top of it," she says. "To have them appreciate the record and want to play it is a great shot in the arm."

Laura Cantrell plays Thu., Jan. 9, 8:30 p.m., $10, Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St., 215-928-0770.

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February 23, 2006
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