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.