Songs About Musicians #1: Laura Veirs' Homages to Carol Kaye, Alice Coltrane and Judee Sill

I’ve written a lot in this newsletter about songs that take objects as their subjects. I’ve also explored songs about other songs, a topic I plan to return to. This post initiates a series on songs about other musicians.

I’m calling the series ‘Songs About Musicians’, but I realise that many of the songs I might later include name musicians without always being about them (think Taylor Swift’s ‘Tim McGraw’ and Tim McGraw’s ‘Kristofferson’, both of which I’ll be writing about in a future post).

No such worries with this week’s subject, however. Oregon-based singer-songwriter Laura Veirs has released songs about musicians that are really about them, in that listeners can learn something about the artist as well as hearing appreciation of their work.

Veirs’ music is characterised by recurring themes of nature, weather and the seasons, making her an exemplary artist for thinking about music, place and time. I’ve been a fan been since at least the release of Carbon Glacier in 2004. I have a handful of her albums on rotation in my car stereo, and I especially enjoy them when driving through the local countryside.

The songs I want to write about today, though, are ones Veirs has written in homage to other musicians. The first comes from her 2010 album July Flame, a work she described as a ‘dark summer’ record in contrast to Carbon Glacier’s ‘winter and ice’. Those quotes come from an episode of Keith Jopling’s podcast The Art of Longevity; I recommend the Laura Veirs episode for its insights into her music, career and more.

July Flame’s penultimate track is ‘Carol Kaye’, a tribute to the prolific bass player. The song is light on biography but includes the line ‘Ten thousand sessions from an Everett, Washington girl’. That gives us two important pieces of information—Kaye’s birthplace and the number of recordings she is estimated to have played on.

It’s because of that incredible number of sessions that Veirs is able to say, at the song’s end, ‘Not a household name but she's been in your head all day’. The bulk of the song’s lyrics fill out some of the details by using a ‘list song’ technique to detail songs that Kaye played on, including tracks by the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel and Lou Rawls, as well as her work on soundtracks such as Mission: Impossible.

An endearing feature that also appears in the other Veirs songs I’m sharing here is the expression of respect and admiration: ‘She can really play it / She can really lay it down’; ‘It would be so cool to be like Carol, Carol Kaye / Maybe I can meet her, maybe shake her hand one day’.

Wisely, perhaps, there’s no bass guitar on the recording. Veirs’ vocal and guitar are complemented by Jon Neufeld’s archtop guitar, Eyvind Kang’s viola, and harmony vocals from Jim James and Karl Blau, who also provides saxophone.

‘That Alice’, from the 2013 album Warp & Weft, is about the jazz musician Alice Coltrane. There’s more in the way of biography this time: Alice McLeod’s birth in Detroit, her studies in France, marriage to John Coltrane, her use of the harp as a jazz instrument, her move to California to become a swamini.

The song’s refrain is ‘That Alice built a palace for us to hear / That Alice built a palace for our ears’. It’s a lovely image, which builds its own little structure, less palatial than Coltrane’s extended works. but solid. memorable and hooky.

‘Palace’ is a good metaphor for those stunning works to be found on albums such as Universal Consciousness, Journey in Satchidananda and Lord of Lords: more unusual than the ‘sonic cathedral’ metaphor, yet similarly evocative of a spacious, special place that listeners can explore and marvel at. At the same time, it’s a seemingly simplistic rhyme for ‘Alice’ that manages to evoke the innocent wonder that Veirs’ songs do so well.

Prior to the final verse, there’s an excellent couplet that brings time and space together: ‘You made a million journeys in your mind / I can feel it in the way that you keep time’. The last verse then echoes the line about the musician’s timekeeping with an observation about how listeners are able to ‘keep’ music that would otherwise be lost to time: ‘I can hear it in that spinning black / Living room jukebox soul coming back’.

I think the division of that last line is meant to be ‘living room juke box’ and ‘soul coming back’, the idea that records can reanimate the dead. But there’s an ambiguity that also makes me read/hear ‘jukebox soul’, which feels like just the right, slightly odd combination to use. Coltrane’s music, often referred to as ‘spiritual’, can as easily be described as soulful, as journeying into the soul of the individual, the collective, the cosmos. That these prompts for inner and outer journeying are available to us as recordings means that our departure point can be a living room or anywhere we plug into that palatial sound.

As someone who invariably listens to Alice Coltrane’s music on vinyl, I appreciate that reference to the ‘spinning black’; it makes me think of a side of vinyl as a portal to other spaces.

‘That Alice’ features additional vocals from the great Neko Case, as well as fine electric guitar work from Veirs and lead guitarist Carl Broemel. In keeping with the sound world of Warp & Weft, it’s a rockier track than ‘Carol Kaye’. It also features piano, Farfisa organ and bells (all courtesy of Rob Burger), an apt combination for the kinds of sonic worlds conjured up by Alice Coltrane.

‘Song for Judee’ is another collaboration with Neko Case, and with kd lang too. It’s from the superb 2016 album case/lang/veirs. It’s very much a Veirs song—I could tell that before checking the credits—but her collaborators are a key presence.

This one’s about Judee Sill, the singer-songwriter who produced two classic albums—Judee Sill (1971) and Heart Food (1973)—prior to her death from a drug overdose in 1979.

Some of the lines of ‘Song for Judee’ match material from a 2014 BBC radio documentary about Sill. I don’t know whether this was a source for Veirs, but it’s interesting to hear the lines in both texts. There are obviously different ways of organising material in a 30-minute documentary and a three-minute song; both involve editing, but the song has to be ruthless in the fragments of biography and evaluation that it keeps above the surface. We get some of the expected biographemes: Sill robbing liquor stores in her pre-music days, walking the streets, dying with a needle in her arm, writing beautiful songs like ‘The Kiss’. And we get unexpected details too, especially in the refrain: ‘You loved the Sons of the Pioneers / And those Hollywood cowboy stars’.

The song addresses its subject directly, from its first line: ‘You wrote “The Kiss” and it is beautiful / I can listen again and again’. As with the songs about Kaye and Coltrane, Veirs makes a personal connection as a devoted listener, with the second-person address adding to the weave.

The song is surprisingly jaunty. In a CBC feature promoting the case/land/veirs album in 2016, Veirs noted how ‘the bouncy chorus offsets the darkness of [Sill’s] story’. Neko Case added:

The chorus is maybe one of the more fun songs to sing a harmony to. That easy, immediate, open harmony that it just feels so good to lock in with. And the song is upbeat enough, yet it’s really super sad, and that combination is something that Roger Miller does and Ray Davies from the Kinks does. Where something is really sad and when you put it in a major key and there’s little details, that is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Where it seems like this light, beautiful thing but then there’s this little thing that just gets in and pokes into you and it breaks your heart. It’s extra moving for that reason.

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One thing I cherish in Veirs’ songs about musicians, and that connects with her odes to nature and the seasons, is the sense of wonder she exudes. Lines like ‘she can really play’ or ‘it is beautiful’ might sound slightly mawkish from another writer or singer, but Veirs makes them part of her worldview, as if to say shouldn’t we all, always, be expressing wonder and admiration for deserving humans, nonhumans and environments?

It’s worth highlighting that the songs featured here are all about female musicians. This was something raised by Samira Ahmed in an interview with Veirs for BBC’s Front Row in 2022. In response to Ahmed’s observation that she tells stories that haven’t been told, Veirs said that she enjoyed writing songs about women, also mentioning the children’s book she authored about the musician Elizabeth Cotten.

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To close this first entry in the ‘Songs About Musicians’ series, here is some music by the artists that Laura Veirs has celebrated.

Mel Tormé, ‘Games People Play’, from the 1969 album A Time for Us, a showcase for Carol Kaye’s distinctive bass.

A harp solo by Alice Coltrane, one of several tracks from the 1987 Jazz Jamboree festival in Warsaw that are currently available on YouTube. As well as being a strong example of Alice in meditative engagement with the harp, this clip also has some great comments attached to it; I particularly felt the one that likens Coltrane’s treatment of the harp to a mother brushing a child’s hair.

Also well worth checking out: this Black Journal TV feature on Alice Coltrane from 1970.

Judee Sill, ‘The Kiss’, on The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1973. It is, indeed, beautiful.

Bonus track, featuring the subject of Laura Veirs’ book for children: Elizabeth Cotten, ‘Freight Train’.