Laura Dunn and the Ghosts of Xmas Past

It all started with a bear…or at least that’s how she tells it. After breaking up with her fiancé - an event that would cause anyone to question their direction in life - Laura Dunn accepted a friend’s invitation to his cabin in Montana while she sorted things out. Attempting to focus on something other than her MFA degree in poetry from the University of Montana, she began taking hikes outside the cabin. However, two weeks into her hikes, she found herself in a close encounter with a black bear. Deciding that hiking alone was no longer such a good idea, she chose to remain indoors. It was there that she found her friend’s banjo lying in the corner. Having n outside distractions, Dunn chose to teach herself how to play the banjo, learning different songs by ear, with no prior music education. Knowing she would have more use for the banjo, she was given the banjo, and together they moved to New York, where Dunn joined the songwriting circles of Jack Hardy.
“I started going every week”, Dunn says. “To this day that community has been the most supportive artistic community I’ve ever been in. Having to bring a song in every week, I started to fall in love with the process. I stopped writing poetry and I started writing only songs. I think that when I write I am still writing poems, [but] with just a few more textures to work with — tone, melody, arrangement, etc. I think of myself more as a poet that’s found a new medium than a songwriter. But those terms are also pretty synonymous in my mind. I still write poems occasionally, but then my banjo calls me and they often turn into songs.”
Ten months later, Dunn played her first show. As she was still suffering from stage fright, she chose to focus her eyes on an old friend, Christian Appel. A week later, they were playing together with Appel providing backing vocals. Afterwards, discussions arose about forming a band. With that, Laura Dunn and the Ghosts of Xmas Past were born.
Rounding out the Ghosts are Kirk Siee (double bass), Sarah Baum (accordion), Harry Einhorn (vocals, keyboard), and Brian Rady (vocals, guitar, percussion). Other friends also helped out with the band, and in May of 2011, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, they recorded their debut album, “The Dreamkeeper and A Gun”.
Dunn: “The record started out as a solo recording of a few tracks without a real goal in mind. But after the first night, the boys started coming in for these all night sessions. Something really magical was happening…so we kept doing it and made a full record.”
The album itself has a feel that I like to refer as “Emmylou Harris singing from within a haunted house.” Dunn’s voice mixes with Appel’s vocal arrangements, giving it a feel that is earthy, yet also ethereal. The use of the banjo and somewhat autobiographical lyrics brings to mind Sufjan Stevens’ folk masterpiece, “Seven Swans.” Dunn takes moments from her own life and sets them within metaphorical surreal landscapes. In “Montreal”, she sings of our own attempts to create narratives around moments that need no narrative at all, such as walking in the rain with a friend (or a complete stranger).
“If this were a film/we’d have ended up in love
If this were a novel/we’d have ended up dead”
Laura Dunn appears to be on a roll. After recently ending the second leg of a nation-wide tour, she is currently writing more songs to be performed by herself and the Ghosts in a play entitled The Orange Person at the Gene Frankel Theater during the month of November. There’s also talk of recording a new album in December, though no release date has been set.
And to think, this all started with a bear.
- Virginia Omnivore

Birds didn’t evolve flight for the lark of it. They need it to live, to eat and to not get eaten; migration is escape, not travel. Even so, one can measure these things, and it’s established now: birds do love to fly. Survival finds an answer, and method, in joy. And we can imagine that their desire to fly responds to both these urgencies—from danger, for joy—and feels them conjoined. Conjoined desires run through Laura Dunn’s stunning debut album, The Dreamkeeper and a Gun. Dunn’s voice trembles with joy and pain, love and longing, and her songs seem equally to cast off and celebrate the weight they carry. Each of these gently plucked ballads gives shape to a species of wanting, and wanting here tunes its sting into song.

The first time I saw Laura Dunn perform it was at a rowdy poetry reading in Missoula, Montana, which also featured a trans burlesque show and a papier-mâché salmon playing bass clarinet. She was the smallest thing on stage that evening. Her banjo and her lobababaoked a little twiggy when she first walked out. Her voice, when she introduced herself, was slight. But it was a trick: Her music is far fiercer than first impressions might suggest. Her songs armor themselves in air and lightness, but there is nothing twee about Laura Dunn, and each song carries a vial of poison, which may be the honest source of its light. “When I was a soldier,” she sings on “Little Plastic Soldiers,” an eerie, patient masterpiece, “no one saw me,” but the lament is also a warning: unseen soldiers are the most dangerous, and the blows this album strikes seem to come out of nowhere, as if they’d hid in the brightness of the melodies. “When I was a mother, I blew up the house we made…Not good at love, just good at burning up.” She plays a slow banjo that seems to be listening to its own soft unwinding. She draws out the instrument’s familiar twang until we can hear the metal sharpness that had been within its sound all along, and then she flints a new kind of brightness against its edge.

But these are also songs of friendship and love and hopefulness. In each, there’s a will to break through the cool space between us and a cautious belief in music’s ability to reach out and touch. “In a letter later, you said 'I should have kissed you in that storm.' If I’d have wrote back, I’d have said 'what good is a kiss for?' Remember I reached out my hand, but no drop can pass through skin. If each of us is an island, how do we let more than the cold in?” The album is intent on answering that question, or trying to, naming the cold and inviting us to come in from it. “I’d be a model citizen if your city would let me in,” she sings on “Boyswan,” her ode to friendship and tenderness and taking good care of one another. “These arms could be your pond.” But this is music that also understands the facts of solitude and celebrates them even as it seeks to overcome them: her “Apocalypse Love Song” goes, “through this burning world we go, but if we didn’t struggle alone, our souls would be couch potatoes.” Here again, survival finds a method in joy. This voice wants company, wants love, wants to overcome a core of loneliness, but singing out it discovers the pleasures of solitude. Loneliness hurts still, but company can be beckoned with new strength and new joy. That’s the kind of folk music “The Dreamkeeper and a Gun” gives us: music for your people and music for yourself. --Mark Mayer

- CD Baby

Birds didn’t evolve flight for the lark of it. They need it to live, to eat and to not get eaten; migration is escape, not travel. Even so, one can measure these things, and it’s established now: birds do love to fly. Survival finds an answer, and method, in joy. And we can imagine that their desire to fly responds to both these urgencies—from danger, for joy—and feels them conjoined. Conjoined desires run through Laura Dunn’s stunning debut album, The Dreamkeeper and a Gun. Dunn’s voice trembles with joy and pain, love and longing, and her songs seem equally to cast off and celebrate the weight they carry. Each of these gently plucked ballads gives shape to a species of wanting, and wanting here tunes its sting into song.

The first time I saw Laura Dunn perform it was at a rowdy poetry reading in Missoula, Montana, which also featured a trans burlesque show and a papier-mâché salmon playing bass clarinet. She was the smallest thing on stage that evening. Her banjo and her lobababaoked a little twiggy when she first walked out. Her voice, when she introduced herself, was slight. But it was a trick: Her music is far fiercer than first impressions might suggest. Her songs armor themselves in air and lightness, but there is nothing twee about Laura Dunn, and each song carries a vial of poison, which may be the honest source of its light. “When I was a soldier,” she sings on “Little Plastic Soldiers,” an eerie, patient masterpiece, “no one saw me,” but the lament is also a warning: unseen soldiers are the most dangerous, and the blows this album strikes seem to come out of nowhere, as if they’d hid in the brightness of the melodies. “When I was a mother, I blew up the house we made…Not good at love, just good at burning up.” She plays a slow banjo that seems to be listening to its own soft unwinding. She draws out the instrument’s familiar twang until we can hear the metal sharpness that had been within its sound all along, and then she flints a new kind of brightness against its edge.

But these are also songs of friendship and love and hopefulness. In each, there’s a will to break through the cool space between us and a cautious belief in music’s ability to reach out and touch. “In a letter later, you said 'I should have kissed you in that storm.' If I’d have wrote back, I’d have said 'what good is a kiss for?' Remember I reached out my hand, but no drop can pass through skin. If each of us is an island, how do we let more than the cold in?” The album is intent on answering that question, or trying to, naming the cold and inviting us to come in from it. “I’d be a model citizen if your city would let me in,” she sings on “Boyswan,” her ode to friendship and tenderness and taking good care of one another. “These arms could be your pond.” But this is music that also understands the facts of solitude and celebrates them even as it seeks to overcome them: her “Apocalypse Love Song” goes, “through this burning world we go, but if we didn’t struggle alone, our souls would be couch potatoes.” Here again, survival finds a method in joy. This voice wants company, wants love, wants to overcome a core of loneliness, but singing out it discovers the pleasures of solitude. Loneliness hurts still, but company can be beckoned with new strength and new joy. That’s the kind of folk music “The Dreamkeeper and a Gun” gives us: music for your people and music for yourself. --Mark Mayer

- CD Baby