Recently, The Daily Cardinal spoke with Laura Stevenson of Laura Stevenson and The Cans. Yeah, she’s an off-the-charts-talented singer and songwriter, so it was exciting to have a conversation about Wheel, the group’s full-length record set to release April 23. But what also came through from the interview was Stevenson’s superbly relaxed personality, which allowed her to speak about her music in an obviously sincere way—hopefully this transcription does justice to her fluid and often hilarious demeanor.
After a stretch of writing and preparation for Wheel, Stevenson is ecstatic to be back on the road and touring with The Cans.
“This year was busy just making this record because I was doing a lot of writing—I don’t even know—whenever I could,” Stevenson said. “And then we were making the record. Then after the record was made we were just at home waiting for it to come out … just like sitting there wondering if people [were] going to like it. So now we’re like on the move, touring, which is what we like to do; that makes us feel like people.”
Stylistically Laura Stevenson and The Cans lie somewhere among the genres of indie rock and folk, but isn’t at all easy to lump into one category. However, every song begins the same way: with Stevenson putting it together by herself.
“I write the songs,” Stevenson said. “So I’ll like write them alone, so they’re small, you know, because I’m writing them with an acoustic guitar and my voice.”
Even though Stevenson writes the songs, sometimes her ideas for what they should sound like are too lofty.
“So the songs are in their form—they’re composed—then we all just like arrange them together, make them bigger, make them smaller, you know, it depends,” Stevenson said. “Sometimes they talk me down; I’m like ‘Okay, this song’s going to have this crazy noise part.’ And they’re like ‘No, it’s pretty much just a folk song, so you should just play it yourself.’ And I’m like ‘Alright [laughs], fair enough.’”
While Stevenson had to abandon some of her noise sections, so far people have enjoyed the new songs from Wheel.
“Yeah we played the Don Giovanni showcase in February. We played some of the quiet stuff.” Stevenson said. “We just started playing the quiet stuff and people really, really liked it.”
