Earthy Laura Love Finds A New Groove

----------------------------------------------------------------- Where to hear Love

"Octoroon" is out now on Mercury. "The Laura Love Collection" which includes work from Love's previous albums, is available on Putamayo. -----------------------------------------------------------------

It took a hard lesson in integrity to turn Laura Love from a partying-down, dabbling musician into a rich and dignified songwriter.

Love, who arrived in Seattle via Portland from her native Nebraska in the early 1980s, has just released her major-label debut album, "Octoroon."

It is a radiant mix of earthy Cajun tones and hypnotic Caribbean rhythms, and follows three relatively successful, self-released solo albums (and two less-fondly remembered records with her old band Boom Boom GI).

"I had joined the band trying to be a bass player," Love says. "We had a singer who wasn't showing up much and I ended up with the job, but they weren't my lyrics." With the band's songwriting already taken care of by the guitarist, Love found herself the female figurehead of a male rock band, mouthing the kind of crass statements some male rock bands are all too fond of.

"I was so stressed about learning to play the bass at the same time that I learned the words of the songs phonetically," she remembers. A local music paper printed a review that called the band "annoyingly pointless" and picked out Love as a mindless mouthpiece. A stunned Love took a step back and saw what she was doing.

"That review told me that I do have a responsibility to say what I believe, and whatever it is, it should be honest," she says.

"The cold and bitter lyrics of Boom Boom GI weren't my perspective, they weren't things I agreed with. In my life I have tried to be kind and tried to be accepting and tolerant, and actually embrace things and people who are different from me, and try to find our common ground."

Love clearly is no railing rock chick, but a self-confessed granola-type who in her spare time works on salmon restoration.

"I started this group, Friends of Creek and Urban Salmon, FOCUS!," she says. "I mean, you can't get more granola than that!"

Love's stint on the Seattle grunge scene turned out to be merely an introduction to being a musician and a songwriter.

"The music I've always enjoyed and listened to has never been grunge. That stuff was always fun to play, but never fun to listen to," she admits with a giggle.

But among her rootsy compositions on "Octoroon" is a more or less faithful cover of Nirvana's doleful "Come As You Are."

"One of my biggest regrets in life is I dismissed grunge after I left," she says. "It's just this narrow . . . shallowness. Like when people say, `Hey man, I hate rap.' What do you mean you hate rap? There's good music and there's bad music. There are people who are saying stuff and it's stupid and redundant, and there are people who are innovative who are worth listening to.

"I didn't really allow myself to listen to any of (Kurt Cobain's) music until he was gone. I've been kicking myself ever since; it's been a lesson to me to keep my mind open. You know, I just love `Come As You Are.' "

Her big influences, however, come from decidedly different directions.

"I love Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown," she says, her voice gliding over the names fondly. "Now I'm into bluegrass. Jo Miller and Ranch Romance got me into that."

Love recorded a bluegrass record with Miller and played some shows before Ranch Romance split early last year, and the influence is still strong in Love's new songs - a heady mix of blues, folk and bluegrass. Her transition might sound somewhat typical: Alternative rocker entering her 30s turns to an alternative folksinger-songwriter style instead. But Love takes a detour from the stereotype: She still plays bass.

"I tried to play guitar, but there were just too many strings and they were too little and too close together," she laughs. "So, I just went for the bigger string thing . . .

"I just get a groove going, just a mantra kind of thing; it gets good to me after a while and then I start moving my neck. You know, that bass-player neck thing! Then I get a melody and the words come last.

"The songs just shape themselves. By the time the beat is there and the melody is there, you know what kind of song it is."

So it's all in the groove?

"It's in the groove."