Biography

Multi-GRAMMY nominee Laurie Lewis is a forbearer and contemporary of so many bluegrass, old-time, and folk greats. Over the last five decades, she has established herself as a truly singular vocalist, instrumentalist, and frontwoman in genres that tend to cling to tradition and perceived authenticity. She’s won IBMA Awards, sung and recorded with Linda Ronstadt, set poems by Wendell Berry to music – at his request. She’s influenced and inspired folks like guitarist phenom Molly Tuttle, who’s just one example of an entire generation of pickers and singers who call her a mentor. All in all, Lewis has carved out a unique, superlative niche in American roots music occupied by almost no other musicians and creators.

Set for release May 31 on her own label, Spruce and Maple Music, TREES finds Lewis’s music-making rooted in the natural world – as on many past recordings – with a measured and often melancholy view of life, loss, and grief that’s resplendent and complicated. An avid walker, Lewis is both an urban explorer and a wilderness wanderer – plus a self-taught naturalist and conservation activist. Her skillset in songwriting and recording is frequently outward-looking, text-painting to evoke the landscapes she adores and to interpret their voices to us. On TREES, Lewis looks inward instead, utilizing all of the literary and naturalist skills at her disposal to observe and process seasonal, organic, inevitable life changes.

TREES is a long-play journey, a vinyl trek, inviting each of us to put the needle to the record and join her as she traverses the Sierra Nevada or rafts the Tuolumne River. It’s not simply a metaphor or parable, it’s not merely an introspective, emotional inventory, it’s not a performative challenge to the powers and systems that be – powers and systems that leave us alone to encounter, interpret, and reckon with such grief and loss. This LP is all of these things together, at the same time, held in place by a remarkable linchpin and a gorgeous, maternal tree under which all of us can learn, grow, and flourish. Each of us on this beautiful, complicated Earth should count ourselves lucky to encounter trees as stately and as nurturing as Laurie Lewis.