Lauren O’Connell has done another cool interview with me, this time for The Glass Sho podcast, and you can hear it here (The bottom link or on the top left of this page) in its entirety. She spoke about recording, touring, fan support from her Patreon page, and the reaction to the use of her recording of ‘House of The Rising Sun’ in promos for FX’s American Horror Story: Coven.
In this excerpt from the interview, I had asked Lauren about her influences as her music had become so progressive from her first mostly acoustic records to her last 2 full-length albums being in a much more experimental vein production-wise.
“It’s hard to know what your biggest influences are–it’s really hard to know what gets into your head and stays there. A lot of music I listened to when I was younger and don’t really think about anymore–I’m sure a lot of my melodies are rooted there whether I know it or not.
In terms of artists that I try to learn things from now–Gillian Welch is definitely a big one. Gillian Welch, by the way, is really a duo of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. They perform under her name, but they write the songs together and perform them, and their records are pretty much just the 2 of them. There’s so many distractions with production that are available to everybody now, and writing and production are often blended together, but just the fact that they’re still writing songs with 2 voices and 2 guitars, and they are still basically releasing records with just that, and the writing is that strong and they don’t need to add things in production–I really admire that, and it’s something I try to learn from.
And then St. Vincent is kind of in the other direction. I wouldn’t say she’s one of my biggest influences, at least consciously, but she’s going far out, trying to do these new things with her songs, and making all these new sounds, really doing something fresh. It’s kind of the other end of the spectrum, but I love what she does as well.”
The Glass Shō: Episode 5 (Lauren O’Connell)
“Levers and Gears”
