Interview with Lawrence App: Song Writing & Influences

I started writing tunes when I was pretty young. I think I was eleven when I wrote a couple of songs that were complete enough to actually call them songs.

I was really most prolific when I was a teenager, maybe because I didn't know that much and the editorial part of me wasn't that strong where I was kind of censoring things out before they'd have a chance to bloom. I was still pretty exacting within the realms of what I knew, even as a teenager when I was writing music. The prolific part of it could have been for a couple of reasons, because I didn't have much else to do besides school. Although, I don't know I was pretty busy, so I don't know if that was a good argument, but also I didn't have any other outlet really, my family was really disfunctional and I was really disfunctional and I didn't have ways to express or process or cope with a lot of the things going on in my life. So for me, the way to do that was to put it in songs.

I was looking back. Fortunately I saved some notebooks. There's not many recordings of the songs, so all I have is the words, and maybe some chords, but I don't remember how a lot of the songs go. I think, say from the time I was 15 until I was 18, I probably wrote a couple of hundred songs, quite a few.

When I started traveling and trying to earn my living playing music and gigs, I had to spend more of my musical time getting better at playing. Getting more proficient on guitar and singing because the standards were higher if I really wanted to get paid enough to earn my living from it. And I had to be able to play other people's music well. I didn't really, when I got my first gig playing out, when I was 18, my first really professional full time gig, I didn't know very much music, so I'm really fortunate that they hired me and gave me a chance to learn this stuff. Fortunately a couple of the guys in the band had faith enough in me that they knew I was a smart guy and picked up things fast, and if I put my mind to it I could do it, but my output decreased dramatically from that time. From writing maybe 50 songs a year to writing ten, which is still... now I write even less than that, although I would be happy with ten songs a year now.

I did, I was in a band, the last year or two I was in high school that was an all original music band and we did a couple recording sessions, but they weren't very good. We weren't in a professional studio. It was a guy we knew had a studio in his house, and back in those days, his recording was really pretty crude, especially by today's standards, so that output, a little bit of it survives, but it's really not very good. When I say not good, you can't even really make out some of the instruments and stuff very well. But I went back an re-recorded it, and tried to be as faithful to the original arrangements as I could. So I have some of that available. I called it L. App 71-73. A fairly unimaginative title, but that's what it is. I think there's only 8 songs on it. I have others that I would like to add to it. I would like to record more of it.

Part of the reason that I never really put that CD out commercially was that it seemed like it was too short. It was only like 30 minutes of music, but when I look back on that era, there were albums that were shorter than that.

When I was a teenager and writing a lot, I guess in the back of my mind was a concern that I wanted people to hear the music, but I wasn't so concerned with playing out, and that kind of stuff. In fact, it kind of terrified me, because I hadn't really performed that much in public, but once, say I was in my twenties, and I had been playing a lot, publicly for a while, I guess a concern for me, or part of the inspiration for writing was that I felt, like if I was just writing the music for me, and it was stuff that was going to kind of mold away in my own archives, it just wasn't really, it wasn't enough inspiration for me to keep writing that way anymore, as it was when I was younger.

Having an outlet, or even a prospective outlet made it easier for me to write. So when I was in my twenties and I started doing the Latin music and then the Carribbean music in general, I immersed my self in a number of those styles of reggae and Brazilian music, and calypso to a lesser extent, and salsa too, even earlier than the reggae or Brazilian stuff. I really immersed myself in those musics because I loved it. For whatever reason it really moved me, but as a result of being immersed in it, it started coming out in my own song writing.

Also playing in some bands, kind of commercially, in the sense that we were out in the public getting paid to do what we do, that was my main venue or outlet for writing. A lot of my own songs started taking on that character. That sounds passive... I don't know... it seemed like it was just happening, but on a subconcious level I think I was really trying to, hopefully write a song that sounded like something that Milton Nascimento would have written or something that Bob Marley would have written.

Video: Lawrence App Performing "It's Easy"

Interview with Lawrence App: Musical Studies & Performing

An Interview with Lawrence, Picking up from the October 5th Multi-Instrumentalist Post

I don't know if quantity alone is worth anything. A lot of the gigs have been commercial gigs, but my tally of total number of gigs is somewhere between 7 and 8,000 in my life so far. I still perform quite a bit. I probably perform a couple of hundred times a year, which is a lot, especially compared to a concert musician that may only do fifty shows a year. So I have to be concerned with conserving my energy and my vocal chords and my fingers, all the mechanical parts that go into my playing the instruments, otherwise I am dead in the water; I can't do anything.

I studied music some when I was a kid. In fact my parents insisted that I study piano for a couple of years, when I first wanted to learn to play music; that was the prerequisite to me getting a guitar. So I learned to read music a little bit. I took guitar lessons briefly, I didn't really care for it, so they let me off the hook with that. But I did continue to study voice through highschool, maybe not junior high. I did both choir at my church as well as sang in the choir in high school. It was helpful, so at least I had some familiarity with the dots, with standard musical notation on the staff.

But I totally got away from that. I went on the road when I got out of highschool, playing in some commercial bands, and some of them were cooler, like Latin, Caribbean bands and jazz groups and stuff like that. I had to be able to read chord charts but it wasn't necessary most of the time for me to read standard notation.

I was pretty succesful at least from the stand point of earning a living, but I hit a point, in my late twenties, or around the time when I turned thirty, that I felt like I was stagnating musically. I was still writing music. At that point I had written, oh, several hundred tunes, recorded some of them, but I just, there wasn't anything new coming in. I had learned a lot from some of the.... especially when I was young I tried to work with older musicians, people at least older and more experienced than me and kind of apprentice myself to them, in one way or the other. So I learned quite a bit that way, but I just kind of reached a limit on what I could do studying that way. So that's when I decided to go back to school.

I wasn't even really planning on studying music when I first went to college, but I gravitated towards music and earned a few degrees. I got a bachelors in Jazz Studies from the University of North Florida which was a really great experience, because there were a lot of good musicians there; a lot of good players, some of them even quite a bit younger than me, but really, really really good. Kevin Bales, Marcus Printup, were a couple of guys that went on to become... actually there were quite a few, Doug Wamble is another guy that moved to New York. Quite a few of them have gone on to be pretty successful in the Jazz world.

The faculty was really great too. The learning curve... it just opened up a whole universe of music, that I knew was there, because I'd listened to jazz, and I'd learned what I could through learning by ear and the mentor/protege relationships kind of things that I had but, studying at UNF, gave me, really just that experience of two or three years there gave me enough stuff there to work on really for the rest of my life. Pretty amazing.

I continued on. Did some graduate study at Florida State and got a graduate degree in Ethno musicology. Had a few articles published as a result of the research that I did while I was there. The school of music at Florida State is usually ranked in the top ten in the country I believe. I was fortunate that I didn't have to move too far from my daughter, because the University of North Florida in the Jazz education world, was the same thing, probably in the top five, it's always really highly acclaimed.

It was in relatively close distance to where my daughter lived and meant that I could also work at some of the venues I'd been working at, so I could still have a decent income while I was going to school. I was a single dad, performing three times a week and going to school full-time; so it was kind of a busy time.

One of the sort of ironic or serendipitous things about going to school at Florida State, when I was in the ethnomusicology program there, eventually you have to pick your major area of study and a minor area. Usually they prefer, not just Florida State, but any ethonomusicology school, prefers that it be contrasting geographical areas, just so you have some diversity in your portfolio. I really didn't know, for a while I thought I was going to do some kind of West African music or possibly Indonesian music as my major field of study. South African was also another possibility that came up that I did some research on. Afro-Columbian music from Columbia South America, in fact that was one of the articles I had published, was from research I did on that.

I kind of came full circle back to the Caribbean music that I had performed commercially for many years. I guess it was Michael Bakan, once again, my closest ally amongst the faculty there, said, "Why don't you just do the steel drums? You already know a lot about it, and there's not a whole lot of research out there." So I decided to go about it, but the irony about studying the steel drums and doing my thesis on that was when I was out doing my field work, observing the guys playing steel drums, not to offend anyone, but a lot of the people I saw, I thought, "Well I can do that!"

It had this whole mystique about it, because I had worked with some really excellent steel drummers in my own band, guys that had played with Jaco Pastorius and some really, one of the guys was the Trinidad National Steel Drum Champion back in the sixties. So these guys were at the top of their game. So that was my idea, you had to be that good to play steel drums, but when I got out and had a broader cross section of the musicians, at least in Florida, that were out playing steel drums, that's when I had the idea, "I could probably do that."

When I finished my master's degree at FSU, instead of pursuing further research on the steel drums or doing something else, I got back into performing and decided to start playing steel drums and it's turned out to be a really great thing. I enjoy it and it's also been good from a financial stand point because there's still a lot more room to move in that area. There's not that many guys doing that compared to something like guitar, when there's literally millions of people playing guitar.

[Note: Here's an interesting history of Steel Drums.]