Eddy & Kim Lawrence

Let’s get this on the table now- Eddy Lawrence is a major, but overlooked talent. Why this sorry state of affairs persists, I don’t know. But if ever there was a case to be made that Lawrence deserves to be heard – and that folks would love his stuff if they heard him – this new album is it.
Based in upstate New York and Vermont, Lawrence has been kicking around for a few years, releasing a small but steady stream of albums on which he plays every instrument, and writes every song. These albums are lost gems – they contain melodic hooks, witty lyrics, and crisp production. A one-man band is he. But on this newest release, Lawrence has outdone himself.
Recorded around the time of his divorce, Inside My Secret Pocket is actually two albums in one. But the tone and sound blend so seamlessly that it really doesn’t matter what he set out to do; the finished product is sterling: an album filled with moving, catchy, literate songs. And he lays it all out with the sentiment of a folkie who smartly knows when to shift gears and indulge a talent for a power-pop riff or two.
With a cynical eye and wry sense of humor, Lawrence exudes a world-weary attitude that is reminiscent of John Prine at his smarmy best. He dissects his failed marriage and the bitter aftermath on many of the songs here, but in a way that actually allows us to feel his feelings. His images are vivid. His use of language is unflinching.
In fact, Lawrence can be devastating as he goes about pouring out his pain, such as on “Jersey,” a beautiful, although heart-wrenching ballad defined by simply guitar picking. No matter where he and his ex may have attempted to create a life together, he laments that “anyplace would still be lonesome if she were living there with me.” On “Bad About You,” a low-key, wistful song with a pretty melody, Lawrence sings about hating himself for hating his ex, but his consolation is figuring she’s just as tired and bitter as he is. But he doesn’t just sing – he really does sound exhausted and spent by this emotional rollercoaster that doesn’t seem to stop for him.
Occasionally, his sense of humor breaks through. It’s hard not to laugh when he compares his ex to a toilet-bag camera. “You only see me when my pants are down, you’re the only one looking when there’s no one around…you see all of my hidden faces, you know all of my public faces, someone the world doesn’t know.” But mostly, there are some nasty sentiments here. This album is not a love letter. As he sings, “I’d Rather Eat Dirt (Than Be Treated Like It).” But by doing so, Lawrence has used his experience to create something positive – beautiful music. Making this album was clearly cathartic, but it’s also completely accessible. Throughout the 22 tracks here, Lawrence masterfully conveys universal emotions – anger, sadness, confusion, hurt, relief. And, yet he also expresses hope. The closing number, for instance, “I Got The Power,” is a power-pop anthem to inner strength, which also happens to sound like it could have been a 1970s rock radio fixture. Generally, though, Lawrence is simply cranky, trying to make sense of what happened as his life unraveled into an unforeseeable series of events that are now captured in these songs. Like any gifted artist, though, he wants to let it out. And we should be very glad he did. This album is a pure delight, even if it was a heart-breaker for him to make.

Ed Silverman
Dirty Linen
August/September 2005
- Dirty Linen

Lawrence has always been a brilliant, quirky writer. In his first incarnation, he single-handedly accomplished the redemption of white trailer trash, with a knack for spinning wild unlikely tales in the best southern gothic tradition. With this album, Lawrence has discovered his Native American identity in a big way. In "Turtles," he throws out every easy belief system and, clanless himself, chooses from among the families of animal fetishes. He draws heavily on the natural world and Indian crafts throughout, finding in these images a way to define himself and his path. In "Going To Water" he tells the story of his people's conversion in order to rebaptize himself in a daily ritual that is more sustaining. "The Most Universal Solvent In The World" is a different sort of celebration of water, a wild litany of its manifestations.
Lawrence's willingness to lay bare the emotions of a man living without purpose or direction is balanced by his wit and unquenchable humor. Through it all, he shares a vast knowledge of Indian lore and history, not so much to preach or protest but to understand. The result is a very focused collection of songs that explore the paradox of a rich spiritual tradition and social disintegration by poverty, alcohol and a trail of broken promises. By the end of the CD, you feel that both you and Lawrence have made a journey together, one that is both personal and historical. We may be born into a culture, a people, a clan, but in the end we have to recreate it and ourselves if we are to find any sustaining power in identity. Here, he goes from "Five Dollar Indian" to musical shaman.
Going To Water is fully and seamlessly produced, with acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin, harmonica and a range of appropriate percussion. Remarkably, Lawrence wrote, performed, recorded and mixed everything himself.
Hugh Blumenfeld

Sing Out!
Winter 2001
- Sing Out!

There's DIY and then there's DIY. The music on Alabama-born songwriter and guitarist Eddy Lawrence's sixth self-released album, Guitars, Guns, and Groceries, was not only performed, recorded, and mixed by the artist in his upstate New York retreat, it was also recorded on a Tascam Porta-Studio using only solar- and wind-generated power, and it includes a cover "designed, photographed, laid-out, cut-out, folded, and glued" by the artist and his wife. Besides his Santa Cruz Tony Rice model and an Epiphone mandolin, Lawrence lists equipment like "Faux bass--D-18 or Telecaster tuned wicked low" and "Faux drums--tambourine, egg shakers, Reliance portable toilet, Genny Light beer carton (with empty cans)...." you get the idea.
All of which would be merely clever, except that Lawrence is a great picker and a killer songwriter who recently gave the Big Apple a pink slip, opting to go up the country and "off the grid" after releasing four critically acclaimed albums on his own Snowplow label. The shift in environment is reflected in the title cut, "Guitars, Guns, and Groceries," a celebration of the local general store and its virtuoso proprietor ("He played on the road with Bo Diddley / They opened for the Rolling Stones / But he walked off the gig in Cleveland / The day before rifle season opened back home"). While his satire is hilarious in its articulate twists and turns, Lawrence is also a gifted portraitist who sketches an array of characters, from a state prison warden to a Venezuelan street singer, with detail, compassion, and grit.
"Frequently the songs I write that seem like they're true stories will actually be two or three true stories stuck together," explains Lawrence. "People always want to know about how true things are, but it's more important for the song to be interesting than true." Regarding, for example, "The Day the Humvee Came," a woefully funny tale of government ineptitude, he notes, "I'll gladly tell anybody what really happened, but this is not journalism, it's fiction. If I was to write a song about, 'Well, a Humvee could've gotten stuck in my driveway but it didn't,' it wouldn't have been a very good song."
Lawrence usually sets out to write an entire project. "With this record, I had the themes of fame, performers, and self-reliance in mind before I really started writing the songs," he says. "So I'll have a direction. I might write 30 songs around one theme." Working at home has allowed Lawrence a certain flexibility that he welcomes after making his studio albums. "In those days, I might write 25 or 30 songs and then try to pick out 12 to put on the record. Now, since I've started working with my own machine, I might record 25 or 30 songs and pick out however many I'm going to put on it." While there are certain trade-offs, he says, "It works out better making the records with a lower sound quality but having the freedom to experiment."
These recording habits go hand in hand with the work ethic Lawrence acquired during his years in New York City. "Most of the people I was close with were painters, visual artists," he says. "And I got influenced by this idea that you work on what you do. Whether anybody ever sees it or listens to it or buys it or not, you just do it because that's what you do." He sees himself first and foremost as a songwriter; the recordings are a way to get the songs heard.
Lawrence continues to play locally and regionally, mindful of the fact that wherever you go, there are people making music outside the commercial mainstream. Moreover, he's careful to point out that "I live sort of out in the boonies but that doesn't mean that I don't like people. I believe in a sense of community, both a geographic community and a union of kindred spirits. I have my own peculiar way of looking at things, I guess, but that doesn't mean that I'm trying to be completely separated from everything."

David Hamburger
Acoustic Guitar, 1999
- Acoustic Guitar Magazine

Shooting from the Hip
songwriter Eddy Lawrence strikes an acoustic nerve
(an interview with Eddy from Adirondack Life magazine)

I know Eddy Lawrence. At least I think I do as I zoom through Santa Clara and St. Regis Falls and scoot a dozen or so miles over the Adirondack Park's northern border into Moira. Here, at the town's four corners, a tractor crawls at five miles per hour, its driver saluting passersby as I creep behind him. I'm just ten minutes from Eddy's place now, and running behind. But this gives me more time to acquaint myself with him before we meet. I listen to a few more of his songs -- his mostly funny, lyric-driven vignettes that draw from this area, from the folks waving at the farmer in front of me; from the region's snowdrifts, often thick enough to stop an army; even visiting day at the local correctional facility. In one song he trashes deadbeat parents, in another it's overzealous customs agents.
Eddy bares it all in his albums. According to "How I Met My Wife," he and his bride had a unique beginning: I had seen her here and there at bars and parties / We had even shared a joint a time or two / But I never really noticed her until I saw her in the parking lot wearing just her shoes. On that CD, he sings about another woman: I rattled it back on up the truck trail, to where Indigo was waitin' at camp / She was sittin' at a fire made of cast-off tires countin' the rest of this month's food stamps . . . I know a better man than me would leave you, Indigo. Then there's Eddy's fascination with firearms, expressed in "My Good Eye": The only thing that fires my interest is a cartridge in the bore of this sexy piece of darkness in my hand. And thanks to his tune about Shania Twain, we all know where he lives: Shania Twain, Shania Twain, I live just down the road from Shania Twain / Me, I'm close enough to fortune and fame, living just down the road from Shania Twain.
But wait. Eddy's place, off Route 95, in Franklin County, is more like twenty miles away from the multimillion-dollar recording studio and compound Twain and her husband, music producer Mutt Lange, built on Dexter Lake. And on second thought, did he really meet his wife naked in a parking lot? Fortunately, after I bump down Eddy's long dirt driveway and settle on a mini-sofa in the tiny bungalow he shares with his wife, Anne, he clears up any confusion by answering my pedestrian question. "In any given song you're going to find pieces of somebody," he says, sitting across from me, dressed in black, his dark hair tied back at his neck. "But I try to live by the rule: Don't let the truth get in the way of the song."
He's right. People have a habit of marrying songwriters to their words and are often miffed when there's no fiction or nonfiction label stamped beneath the lyrics. "I bristle at that because I can sit down and write songs about myself and people I know and never embellish them," he explains. "But why? I'm just another guy. Who cares about me?"
We care because Eddy's smooth tenor voice, his knack for witty lyrics -- embellished or not -- and his power of imagination and observation give admirers so much pure, though at times adulterated, entertainment. He helps us giggle at our beloved region, mull over "heavy crap," as he calls it, and appreciate our quirky and often overlooked North country characters and landmarks. Take the title track to Eddy's 1998 album Guitars, Guns, & Groceries. It was inspired by Dick's Country Store, in Churubusco: It's owned by a little Frenchman by the name of David Lubec / Who comes from a long line of trappers / He knows every inch of dirt from here to Quebec / He started playing guitar at eleven / He joined a band when he was twelve / He got his first deer in his fourteenth year / The rack is hanging in the store / Where he sells . . . guitars, guns and groceries, and self-service gasoline, a hot cup of joe and a six-pack to go / What else in this world could you really need?
All this from a self-described outsider. Eddy's lived up here a decade, gardening, trapping and hunting his seventy-six acres of former farmland. He first lived in a closet-size shed and used an adjacent outhouse, and later built a sixteen-by-twenty-eight-foot home with solar panels, outfitting it with a wood stove, generator, composting toilet and a water pump in the back yard. Originally from Alabama, he had a studio apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side, then a place in Union City, New Jersey, before moving north. "I realize what a detriment it is to live in the North Country and have Jersey plates," he says.
Still, neighbors have been good to him, and he captures perhaps what he believes to be his status in Moira in his tune "Locals": I am not a local, anyone can plainly see / I might live here for fifty years and still I wouldn't be / The jokes I tell, the clothes I wear, the work I do, the car I drive / The books I read, the beer I drink, tells everyone that I am not a local / Although this is my home / There are many secrets here that I can never know / There are songs out on the backroads that I can never hear / Stories on the fencelines that can't find my ear.
Actually, Eddy's talents include scouting out backwoods tales and absorbing the flavor of his surroundings wherever he goes. "You can hear what's been going on in my life by what my records are about," he says, leading me to ask about his whereabouts -- mental and otherwise -- during the recording of Going to Water, an album he released in 2001. It's a departure from his earlier work, more electric, political and defiant, and constructed entirely around Native American themes. Some fans voiced "problems" with that CD because it sounded so different, he admits. "I've had e-mails saying, 'Why did you put drums on your record?'"
Just before making that album, Eddy started hanging out on the "Rez" -- the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, in Hogansburg. There, he began giving guitar lessons and playing with the Thundertones, a Mohawk band that performs traditional French Canadian fiddle tunes. Also, "I have Native ancestry myself," he says. "My mother's family were Cherokee who escaped removal by hiding out in the hills of North Alabama."
Eddy's experiences with the Thundertones and his new pals on the Rez prompted the song "Onkwehonwe Polka" (Onkwehonwe means "Native person" in Mohawk), which received so much air time in Hogansburg it's the closest thing he's had to a hit. Soon came tunes like "Radio Bingo," about the popular Rez pastime of playing the game via the radio -- letters and numbers are called in both English and Mohawk: It's easy to bingo if you know the lingo / Just get a card and you'll see. And "Four Faces," a critical interpretation of the statues chiseled into Mount Rushmore: Four faces look down, stormy and still / Four white faces carved in the Black Hills / Four faces look down from up in the sky / Four great white fathers telling great white lies. This song prompted an invitation to the Lakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, last June, where he was asked to perform in a concert dedicated to the cause of imprisoned American Indian Movement crusader Leonard Peltier; Eddy says it was a career highlight.
He hasn't been on the road since. I don't want to go anywhere," he says. But when he does feel like gigging, he performs in midsize venues -- clubs that seat about five hundred people. He's toured as a member of rock groups, but his solo act has brought him plenty of opportunities, like a prestigious opening slot for songwriting legend Richard Thompson. In the mid-1980s Dwight Yokum warmed the crowd for Eddy in New York City.
There are hundreds of tunes in the Eddy Lawrence repertoire, some he can't remember, others he chooses to forget. "Songs are like kids," he explains. "Sometimes they go bad and you just have to tell them to leave home." All of his work is original, except for one cover on Guitars, Guns, & Groceries: "My own twisted version of a John Denver song, 'Thank God I'm a Country Boy.'" Eddy alone plays every instrument on his recordings -- guitar, mandolin, keyboards, fiddle and drums.
His last two albums were created, edited and mastered here, in the corner where he reclines right now, four feet away from the sofa where Anne watches television in the evening. According to Eddy, headphones are necessary when you cohabit and mix music in small spaces, which explains why Anne has yet to hear his newest album, My Secret Pocket, a project encouraged by his therapist.
Completing this work was "like going through an emotional root canal," he says, and the end result is "a record unlike anything I've done before -- it's extremely personal." that's exactly the reason why, when it's time for me to leave Eddy and the stillness of his land, I can't wait to listen to the copy he's given me. My truck bounces out the driveway, and I slide the CD in the stereo, press play and get to know Eddy a little more.

Annie Stoltie
Adirondack Life
February 2003
- Adirondack Life Magazine

With a cynical eye and wry sense of humor, Lawrence exudes a world-weary attitude that is reminiscent of John Prine at his smarmy best. This album is a pure delight… filled with moving, catchy, literate songs.

Ed Silverman
Dirty Linen
(Inside My Secret Pocket)


Lawrence has a rare gift for making the personal universal, summoning strong emotion without resorting to sentiment.

Sarah Meador
Rambles
(Inside My Secret Pocket)


Lawrence has always been a brilliant, quirky writer. In his first incarnation, he single-handedly accomplished the redemption of white trailer trash, with a knack for spinning wild unlikely tales in the best southern gothic tradition. With this album, Lawrence has discovered his Native American identity in a big way…The result is a very focused collection of songs that explore the paradox of a rich spiritual tradition and social disintegration by poverty, alcohol and a trail of broken promises. By the end of the CD, you feel that both you and Lawrence have made a journey together, one that is both personal and historical…Going To Water is fully and seamlessly produced, with acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin, harmonica and a range of appropriate percussion. Remarkably, Lawrence wrote, performed, recorded and mixed everything himself.

Hugh Blumenfeld
Sing Out!
(Going to Water)


Lawrence is a great picker and a killer songwriter who recently gave the Big Apple a pink slip, opting to go up the country and "off the grid" after releasing four critically acclaimed albums on his own Snowplow label…While his satire is hilarious in its articulate twists and turns, Lawrence is also a gifted portraitist who sketches an array of characters, from a state prison warden to a Venezuelan street singer, with detail, compassion, and grit.

David Hamburger
Acoustic Guitar
(Guitars, Guns, & Groceries)


Lawrence is genuinely witty and engaging in a cynically innocent sort of way. Picture the wackier side of Don Henry. Likewise, you won't need the lyric sheet, thanks to Lawrence's clear diction, keen details, and crisp settings.

Jim Cambell
Performing Songwriter
(Used Parts)


As we've come to expect from someone who is, arguably, one of the most overlooked talents in the country, Lawrence delivers yet another set of biting, sardonic and sometimes painful songs…Still, Lawrence has a wonderful way of telling a story. Just listen to "The Day the Humvee Came," a retelling of the 1998 snowstorm that engulfed his spartan corner of upstate New York, or "Mark the Shark," an ode to a DJ on a local radio station favored by Native Americans. Perhaps the best track on this outstanding collection is the opener, "Pay a Price," in which Lawrence sings of sacrifice and wanting. It's a sobering but earnest beginning to a disc that is packed with wonderful tunes that should cement his place as a songwriter to hear -- and watch.

Ed Silverman
Dirty Linen
(Guitars, Guns, & Groceries)


I'm convinced that Eddy Lawrence is writing a novel, one song at a time. No one writing songs today crams as much revealing detail, such brilliant local color, and as many authentic overheard conversations into a set of verse and chorus. Whether he's borrowing a musical signature to identify his geographical home, or spoofing international trade policy, Eddy Lawrence plies his craft with wit, intelligence and an unerring musicality. I don't know why Nashville isn't clamoring for Lawrence product. Maybe it's just too good for them.

Ed McKeon
New Britain Herald
(Locals)


Lawrence shows off so much eye, ear, and imagination that his stories barely require the appearance of music.

Robert Christgau
The Village Voice
(Whiskers & Scales)



After a recent concert in Connecticut, someone came up to me and asked “My God, this guy lives such a crazy life. When does he have time to write songs?” They had just listened to two hours of songs and stories about the life of the singer who, it seemed, had been a hot-wire artist, a junk yard denizen, a catfish farmer. Through it all he was a songwriter who had plied his trade from New York City to Nashville, loving a few dozen women, fathering a bunch of kids, meeting car-jacking mothers, buying sunglasses in Barcelona and dancing naked in parking lots with everyone except Muddy Waters. This listener, like so many others, had been beguiled into the fictional world of Eddy Lawrence, a world so full of truth that it’s hard to remember it’s all a story written in songs by one of the country’s great unknowns.

Cliff Furnald
Dirty Linen Interview



He's a genius of a wordsmith, creating stories and characters that aren't readily forgotten. How many songwriters would consider the effect of rhyming "Governor" with "BMW"? It works in the tongue-in-cheek blues of "Just Don't Know". And because of Lawrence's descriptive phrases, I feel like I've always known the construction worker "Pete Bastille". He's "a surgeon on a 40-story skeleton of steel" who once "saw the Eiffel Tower and proclaimed it no big deal."

Ellen Giesel
Dirty Linen
(Used Parts)



Listening to Eddy Lawrence's new CD Locals (on his own Snowplow label) is like reading a Russell Banks novel. In both, the sense of place -- snow-locked upstate New York -- is as palpable as the smell of woodsmoke and kerosene.

Casey Seilor
Burlington Free Press
(Locals)



This LP poses big trouble for anyone trying to write a better country album this year, or for many years down the road.

Edward McKeon
Folk Roots
(Walker County)



One of the finer folkie efforts in recent memory, if only because his roots do run deep and he's not afraid to stretch them, either. Lawrence flaunts his twang while staying just this side of sticky sentimentality, and he offers some telling thoughts on the small pleasures and large limitations in Southern life.

John Morthland
Music & Sound Output
(Walker County)



- various