The Many Musical Lives Of Lawrence Rothman

Lawrence Rothman’s debut album, The Book Of Law, has been hard-won. After more than a hundred songs, two years in the studio, stints in other projects (like the glam rock band Living Things in the early 2000s), the Los Angeles singer-songwriter has come into their own with a debut album of twelve songs, variously sung from the perspective of nine alters or characters that represent different facets of Rothman, who is gender fluid.

There’s Hooky, the melancholy ginger with the nose piercing; Aleister, the bald, tattooed smoker; and Orion, the somber, graceful one with a jet black mullet — and the focus of the video for the single “Wolves Still Cry,” just one of the numerous striking, richly-realized videos Rothman has made with celebrated director Floria Sigismondi. Another, which is also directed by Sigsimondi, for the track “Designer Babies” features the legendary Kim Gordon.

The Book Of Law celebrates musical multiplicity: it draws on new wave, dream-pop, rock and folk, while an array of guests — from Marissa Nadler and Angel Olsen to Pino Palladino and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, just to name a few — flit in and out. I spoke with Rothman ahead of The Book Of Law‘s release about the many, varied musical collaboration, how strained family relationships impacted the album, and lyrical honesty in the service of connection.

What immediately stood out to me about The Book Of Law is how collaborative it is. It reminded me of a New York Magazine article about why so many people go to Los Angeles to make pop music — because so many artists there are down to jam and collaborate just to see what will happen. Was that the dynamic with the guests on your album?

When I sat down to make the record, since I’m a solo artist and I didn’t have a band, my producer Justin Raisen was like, ‘So what do you want to do? Should you and I play everything?’ And I was like, yeah, that’s an option because both of us are multi-instrumentalists. But I really like the energy of live musicians playing in a room together at once for the basic tracking. And he loved that idea too.

So he’s like, ‘You know what, just go home and make just your ultimate list of famous people and not famous people to play on your record.’ So I went home and made the list. I gave it to him and he was like ‘Oh sh*t, OK well, I don’t know any of these people, do you?’ I’m like, ‘No. I don’t know a single one of them.’ [laughs.] It was crazy: Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses, Angel Olsen, Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs… So he’s like, ‘Well, let me just see what happens.’ Justin reached out one by one and pretty much got every single one of them. Every person that came through, it worked. There wasn’t like a bad session, and we used everything. So we got lucky there.

About the open-mindedness of being in LA — I don’t think it’s necessarily an LA thing. I think musicians in this day and age want to come together and play on different genres of music, because with the invention of streaming and people’s Spotify playlists, and things like that, listeners genre-hop all day long. People aren’t as segregated as maybe they were before. Like ‘I’m just a metal guitarist.’ I think people are more explorative.

You’ve said you wrote more than a hundred different songs for this record. Has that always been your artistic approach, to be as prolific as possible and then winnow down the songs that you like best?

Yeah. I write a lot of material because every day I set aside time, no matter what, to just write — [no matter] if it’s going to be good or bad, write. Writing songs and lyrical ideas. I always make sure I have two hours a day set aside for that.

And then I write so many songs from my different perspectives of all the different sides of myself and how they come through in my alters. Because I’m a little bit all over the place with my musical taste and my imagery, each sort of alter and fraction of myself has its own unique style. So I’ll write like a bunch of songs in more of a psych-folk style, or I’ll write more like in a new wave style. So there’s always like this like a plethora of material and — you know, I like having more than I need. Then I can really curate the narrative that I want to tell on a record.

Did your alters come to you kind of fully-formed or did you have to search for their personalities and their characters over time in the music?

No. My whole life I’ve dealt with this sort of… hyper version of I guess what a Gemini would be, where you’re just sort of always changing your mind and your appearance and what you’re into. And my whole life I’ve sort of been living with this idea of ‘This is this side of myself and that’s that other side of myself,’ and I’d divided them into nine different sides. When I was young my mother used to really nurture that, so I didn’t think of it as anything that was out of the ordinary.

You’ve told the story of your gender fluidity, and you talk about how you became estranged from your father because he couldn’t accept that, and how that episode set the course for the album. How did you start writing after that happened? Was it cathartic or did you have to kind of push yourself towards it?

I’m quite close to my parents, especially my mother. With my dad it’s like a closeness — and it’s a weird closeness. So to go through a bunch of episodes with him then it affects [how I can] see my mother and like, hang out my family — it hits me like super hard. Really hard, because I enjoy family. My family is kind of like that movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, everybody is just always together and laughing and having a good time. I’ve had a few of these episodes throughout my life, and so at the beginning of this record was another episode with my father where we were estranged from each other a good period of time.

I’ve always looked at my art as a therapeutic outlet, regardless if [anybody] ever hears it or sees it. It’s always just a place for me to go to feel better about my surroundings and my life. So I applied that, I guess, when this sh*t went down with my dad, but the difference was that I was too deep in it, I had to go away for a little while and while I was there it was the only sort of thing that keep me feeling okay with myself. I started filling out my journals with my whole story, because maybe I should turn this into some sort of a book about what I’ve gone through. I was just going to write all the stories that happened throughout my life with my father and my friends and growing up in St. Louis.

When it came time for the record, I brought this pile of journals and poetry and lyrical ideas to Justin Raisen. I already had songs written and he was scanning through them, like, ‘You need to be a little bit more open about what you’ve gone through but in your songs.’ Because at first I was showing him songs that were more in the style of Kurt Cobain, where it’s more unclear, lyrically. He was like, ‘I think there’s people out there that will relate.’ So he really gave me that nudge to go back in and rewrite lyrics, and rewrite songs to be a little bit closer to home.

You’ve been a musician for a long time, and when musicians who’ve had long track records finally put out something that’s very formally their first album, it can be weird to see it billed as their debut. Do you feel this way about The Book Of Law?

For me it is my debut, because it’s my debut of actually being myself — writing about myself and putting myself out there in it. In my art, I’ve done that a lot privately in songs that nobody’s ever heard. This is the first time I’ve actually done it publicly. So it feels like a debut because I’m just being me and I’m showing people myself. It can be a little bit embarrassing or hard to do, but I keep pushing myself to just show me and see it all the way through, because I think there’s a lot of people that might be able to relate.

The Book Of Law is out now via Downtown/Interscope Records. Get it here.

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