Sweetheart Of The Radio

It’s 2.15am in your reporter’s room at the Holiday Inn, Camden Lock. Laura Cantrell is sipping water and I’m having a beer from the mini bar. Faced with the choice of an early start or doing the interview at this unlikely hour and location, Cantrell, pretty, chatty and just the right side of prim, has elected to take her life in her hands and brave my temporary lair. I’ve assured her husband and road manager Jeremy that if he hears screaming and pounding on the door, it’ll probably be me.

Earlier in the evening, Cantrell and her three-piece ensemble (mandolin, guitar, stand-up bass) had played, with feeling, a set at Camden’s Café Jaxx that veered from the virtuoso to the informal, alternating the old (‘The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter’) with the new and the borrowed (Emily Spray’s ‘14th Street’) and a whole lot of blues. Drawing on her new album Humming By The Flowered Vine, Cantrell displayed an impressive directness and purity of tone, whether re-upholstering Appalachian murder ballads or evoking more contemporary country-rock songwriters such as Amy Rigby or Lucinda Williams. Elvis Costello, who took her on tour a couple of years ago, wasn’t far off the mark when he described her sound as a cross between Kitty Wells and Rubber Soul.
Cantrell herself is Tennessee born and bred, but this is no impoverished gingham-and-dungarees sob story. Her parents were Grand Old Opry devotees but also lawyers. When Cantrell moved from Nashville to New York to attend college, she supported herself not by waiting tables but with an 11 year stint on Wall Street, occupying a senior position in the Bank Of America Equities Research Department. After she eventually quit to pursue music full time, Oprah’s magazine, O, ran a profile on her.
Middle class indie bands might pay good money to shut people up about such a background but Cantrell has no such hang-ups. Just as the majority of traditionalist country acts wouldn’t be caught dead in ripped jeans on a Saturday night, they also tend to appreciate the value of a good job in the city.
“I had a weird epiphany recently, ’cos people carp so much about country music changing and why can’t it be like it was,” Cantrell says. “There’s a lot of animosity amongst a certain crowd of people towards the commercial artists ’cos they’ve changed it, but I just feel like the country has changed. People who were Hank Williams fans, their sons and daughters and grandchildren don’t all live without air conditioning at the end of a dirt road.
“And in a weird way, relating that to my own music, I felt it was okay to not worry about being ‘country’ enough. You don’t need to have that hard luck kind of background to feel feelings or be able to express those universal emotions. Everybody’s got ’em. I worked on Wall Street, but I wasn’t a high-flying banker type. I was a secretary for a long time.
“If you do any kind of work like that, it’s humbling, whether you’re working for a big company or not. I was there so that I could do my radio show on the weekend and be in a country band.”
Ah yes, the radio. Not content with learning her chops in numerous duos and garage bands, Cantrell also trained as a DJ at Columbia University before volunteering at the free-form station WFMU in New Jersey in 1993, hosting an award-winning weekly show called Radio Thrift Shop (Irish listeners may have heard her co-host John Kelly’s Mystery Train).
“Having an outlet on the radio definitely gave me a place to figure out my point of view,” she says. “You hear a song that breaks your heart and want somebody else to experience that too. I felt that was like a weird secret society of radio music freaks that I entered a long time ago. It’s been a part of me developing a voice as a performer.”
Any weird correspondence from insomniacs or guys serving the proverbial five-to-ten?
“I had one guy send me his arrest record. He was a guy who robbed ATM machines. He sent me an article about his arrest and also – this was the strangest thing – the security camera image of him that was used as evidence of him just caught after he’d ripped off a machine.”
Speaking of lawlessness – has she heard about Steve Van Zant’s new outlaw country station?
“You know, of course, from Jeremy about it?’
Nope.
“How did you find out about it?”
From an article in Billboard.
“Oh… my husband runs it! Little Steven hired Jeremy to actually programme it. He was there with the Underground Garage that he’s done as a syndicated radio show on terrestrial radio, and he was signing a satellite deal, and he got the bee in his bonnet to do this outlaw country thing. He needed a guy who could actually bring it to reality, so they got Jeremy to do it.”
That’s not the only radio connection. During her Camden show, Cantrell welled up when dedicating a song to her late friend and mentor John Peel, who described her debut album as his favourite record of the last 10 years, comparing her to Roy Orbison.
“I had mixed feelings about it,” she admits. “I didn’t want to mention John Peel just to hear people go, ‘Raaaa’, ’cos he really did do me a great service in being so vocal about my music on the radio. But aside from that I did get to be friends with him and I always felt like this weird thing, like I didn’t want to be working John, ’cos you know you couldn’t ‘work’ him. He wouldn’t have it. And I’m not the type, particularly in my own music, so I still have this weird tentativeness about mentioning him or trying to seem like I was getting over on his popularity, but I felt like it was worth mentioning tonight, if I could get through the moment, which I barely did.
“We had just been to his birthday party in August, and he said to me, ‘I hope you’re writing some of those narrative songs, Laura, ’cos I like those the best’. It was such a huge loss. Like any other dear friend or dad or whatever, there’s no replacing that person.”

Humming By The Flowered Vine is out now on Matador, distributed by Vital.