On a chilly Tuesday afternoon, several dozen visitors to the Harvard Square Newbury Comics store are still with anticipation. One aging hipster perfunctorily thumbs through a few albums, but his attention keeps drifting toward the corner of the store, where an acoustic guitar rests beside a pink amplifier.
Two young women pass the time by chatting about their current music favorites. “Have you heard Rachael Davis? You’ve got to check her out,” says one of them. She then steps over the guitar and begins to tune it, at which point it occurs to the uninitiated that it is her picture plastered across the walls of the store.
“Hi guys,” she says. “I’m Mary Lou Lord. I’m gonna stand in the corner and sing some songs. I hope it sounds okay. Thanks a lot to Newbury Comics for bringing me in from the cold.”
The introduction is quite fitting, considering that Mary Lou Lord’s career as a singer/songwriter began as an attempt to keep warm. While studying music production and engineering at the London School of Audio, Lord lived as a squatter in a room where the heat was operated by an electricity meter that ran on 50-pence coins. One day a street musician asked her to hold his guitar while he went to the bathroom. Lord, whose guitar skills at the time were crude at best, took the opportunity to play one of the few songs she knew, John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery.” “I really sucked,” she recalls in an interview a few days after the Newbury appearance. When a passerby flipped a pound coin into the guitar case, it was an electric moment (on multiple levels) for Lord.
With several albums and a few more chords under her belt, the 37-year-old folk singer no longer needs to play for spare change, though she still enjoys playing in front of the Coop and in Brattle Square. Live City Sounds, her most recent release and her first for independent Rubric Records, quickly sold out its initial pressing and has generated excellent reviews. As an added bonus, Lord is nominated in the category of Best Singer/Songwriter for a Boston Music Award, which will be handed out on April 11 at the Orpheum Theatre.
Highly distrustful of music critics, Lord pays much less attention to press and awards than she does to her fans. Live City Sounds is an attempt to bottle the subterranean magic that has made T-riders reach into their pockets and purses for more than a decade. As she recently explained to Rolling Stone, “I figured people have been so supportive and generous, why not give them exactly what they’d heard. It’s why they liked me in the first place.” The album’s 16 tracks, which Lord recorded herself at Park Street and Harvard Square, consist almost entirely of covers, including Big Star’s “Thirteen,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” and the Pogues’ “Sayonara.” The disc also features songs by Lord’s longtime friends Nick Saloman (of the Bevis Frond) and Grammy-winning mainstream breakout Shawn Colvin (of “Sunny Came Home” fame).
Many of Lord’s fans view the live album as a refreshing follow-up to her major label debut in 1998, which was produced in a studio with a band. One purist commented, “Mary Lou Lord is best just stripped down to an acoustic guitar. You can’t get any closer to real sound than that. Overproduction ruins music.” The intimate street performances allow Lord’s audience to connect with her on a level that other venues do not permit. To know the effect of her playing on people is simply to observe the droves of travelers, their eyes twinkling and often teary, who are magnetically drawn to her favorite spot on the Park Street platform. “Once I saw her on the street corner playing for about ten people,” recounts a middle-aged male groupie. “It was the best show I’ve ever seen.”
For Lord, the glory of busking lies in the artistic freedom it affords her. “When you’re in the studio, you’re always looking at the clock, and on a stage I’ve never felt completely comfortable,” she says. She attributes her uneasiness on stage to the pressure she feels to please pre-paying customers. “I don’t want to have to do shit for them,” she says. “I’d rather play and then have them pay at the door when they’re leaving.” A teenage Lord first discovered her need for autonomy while working as a disc jockey for WERS, the nationally recognized Emerson College radio station. She was fired for refusing to adhere to the prescribed playlists, an event she describes as a turning point. “I love music but I don’t want anyone to tell me what I can or can’t play or turn the world on to,” she says.
The early years of playing subways and streets in London and Boston allowed Lord to be a DJ again without the fetters of a playlist. She made it her mission to disseminate her favorite obscure songs, especially the work of then-unknown Shawn Colvin, who had yet to release an album. Lord vividly remembers when she first saw Colvin perform in 1988 at the Somerville Theatre. “Her songs were so good that I had to learn them,” she says. “I was just floored. I just sat there and I cried.” Colvin became a close friend to Lord as well as a mentor, particularly regarding “how to approach a song, how to deliver a performance.” Colvin’s example and the success of female singers Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman motivated Lord to intensify her own musical pursuits.
The story of Lord’s transformation from a struggling busker to a major-label recording artist is well known to her fans and filled with twists and turns that will one day make for a fine “Behind The Music.” The underground Boston music scene brought Lord into the path of a woman named Tinuviel, a punk rocker based in Olympia, Wash., who was spending her summer in Boston. They became close friends and several months later Lord moved to Olympia to join Tinuviel and Slim Moon, the man who ran Kill Rock Stars, an acclaimed small record label that housed Tinuviel and other Northwest punk acts.
Through Moon, Lord met two people who would greatly influence the course of her career. After a gig in Portland in 1995, Moon introduced her to future Academy Award nominee Elliott Smith, who instantly became one of her favorite songwriters. “I’ve never heard a piece-of-shit guitar sound so good,” Lord recalls of her first exposure to Smith. The two decided to tour together, and each of them released a self-titled album on Kill Rock Stars. Later that year, Moon persuaded a BMG Music Publishing executive named Margaret Mittleman to see Lord open for indie-rock stalwarts Sebadoh. Mittleman had just signed a “crazy guy,” in Lord’s words, who was playing weekly shows at a New Hampshire flea market. Although Lord was shocked by Mittleman’s audacity in signing the offbeat singer/songwriter, she was so impressed with the executive’s musical instincts that Lord signed with her as well.
Mittleman’s crazy guy turned out to be Beck, and the phenomenal success of Mellow Gold and Odelay spurred record companies to court her next catch aggressively. After being wined and dined by more than a dozen labels, Lord decided to sign with The Work Group, a Sony label that had released Fiona Apple’s Tidal and several albums from Jamiroquai. The Mary Lou Lord with little more to her name than a guitar and a futon was no more—she had become a big-league recording artist with a six-figure advance, a manager and a booking agent.
The sole product of Lord’s contract with The Work Group was the 1998 Got No Shadow, which she recorded with various session musicians. The album features guest appearances by several heavyweights, including Roger McGuinn of the Byrds and Jon Brion, a versatile Los Angeles musician who has produced albums for Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright. Lord’s old friends Colvin and Smith contributed as well. Though the album received a solid three-and-a-half stars from Rolling Stone and many other kudos, Lord says she feels it lacks emotion and energy. “If we had been in a band, we would have had the right dynamic,” she says. “It was just missing the thing you get when you’re in a band and you’re comfortable and you know where the song should go.”
Both critics and admirers of Lord’s work are quick to point out the lack of original material in her catalogue. Yet those reviewers who accuse her of lacking creativity fail to appreciate her long-standing commitment to sharing music as opposed to writing it. She says she views herself as an interpreter blessed with perfect ears, not a natural songwriter. In Lord’s mind, to play a mediocre composition merely because it’s her own is to cheat more deserving songs: “There’s not enough time in the day to sing the songs that need to be sung. Songs are like children—there are enough in the world.”
It is a puzzling analogy, considering that it comes from a woman who is busy raising a three-year-old child, and it sheds light on the jarring effect that childbirth had on Lord’s career. The success of Got No Shadow was tempered by two events that occurred soon after its release. Within the space of a few weeks, Lord checked into rehab for alcoholism and discovered that she was pregnant. Although Lord says she was very much in love with the baby’s father, long-time boyfriend Kevin Patey of the Raging Teens, the pregnancy was not planned. As for her heavy drinking, she says the habit arose as a mechanism to cope with the stress and exhaustion that accompany constant touring. “Instead of addressing that I needed a break, a rest to get my friggin’ head together, I just decided to drink and ignore it,” she says. Lord reached her nadir when she missed a tour date in Boise, Idaho, while she slept off a hangover in New York. The next day, her manager canceled the tour and Lord returned to Los Angeles to enter rehab.
In the wake of Lord’s double whammy, her record company abruptly curtailed promotion for the album. Without a tour to support it, sales fell short of their potential. For a female musician, Lord says, “it’s never the right time to have a baby, and it’s never the right time to go into rehab,” and yet she had done both simultaneously. Got No Shadow was be Lord’s first and last album released by The Work Group. Amid the sweeping music industry consolidations of 1999, the label folded, transferring some artists to Sony’s Epic label and dropping the others. Whereas the demise of the Work Group might once have brought disappointment, it ironically put Lord at ease. A clause in her contract held such a label switch was tantamount to a breach of contract, and thus Lord was able to part from her deal with financial security. A recovering alcoholic with a infant, Lord opted to take a break from the studio and the road—and she could afford to do so.
While obviously a milestone in Lord’s personal life, the birth of her daughter Annabelle has also ushered in a new stage of her professional life. As touring has become less practical, Lord is switching gears to focus on promoting the budding careers of new and unrecognized musicians. She views DJing, busking and music publishing as natural steps in a career devoted to the belief that “everyone deserves a good song.” Lord admits that finding new talent has been difficult because of her strict standards. “But I found something and I want to work with that something in a big way,” she says enigmatically, hesitant to disclose her hidden treasure.
Lord cannot contain her passion for long, grinning from rosy cheek to rosy cheek as she declares, “It’s Rachael Davis.” After hearing the young folk singer on the radio last summer, Lord persuaded her to relocate to New England and uses her own gigs to showcase Davis’ talent. She takes pride in the fact that Davis, who had never played outside of Michigan when they first met, is now up for a Boston Music Award. (Modest as always, Lord fails to mention her own nomination.) When Lord dragged her 21-year-old discovery on stage for an encore at a recent show, Davis treated the audience to an a cappella rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She sold 25 CDs that night, though she wasn’t even on the bill. The concert took place at the Somerville Theatre, the same venue where Lord had fallen in love with the music of Shawn Colvin nearly 15 years earlier. Now she was passing the torch.
Lord is not upset by the fact that her career as a touring musician may be waning, or that superstardom has eluded her. “I think I was somewhat afraid of it,” she says. “I’ve seen success. I’ve seen it. I know what it would take to get there. And I was right there, I was so close. And I fucked it up. I did everything I could do to fuck it up. I think that there was a part of me that just knew that it just wasn’t for me.” Lord’s discomfort with the prospect of fame can be found in a verse from her song, “Some Jingle Jangle Morning,” which was written in the early ’90s and eerily foreshadows the turmoil she would later experience:
Somewhere it all got crazy and now it’s like a dream
And I know that I blew it from the start
I was too freaked out to deal with it all
And too fucked up to care
I stood right there and watched it fall apart
Two decades after rebelling against her manager at the radio station, Lord still worries about the pressure to please others and fears letting them down. “I just really don’t want to be committed to having to prove myself to anyone, and I feel like that’s what happens when you become famous or when you become successful,” she says. “If I let myself down, that’s one thing. But if I let somebody down because I did a thing like having a baby or whatever, then that’s not right.”
* * *
Between her Newbury appearance and a weekend gig at the House of Blues, Lord descends onto the Park Street platform with her guitar and a couple boxes of Live City Sounds. Several teenagers on skateboards approach and listen, their eyes glazing over. Their skater-dude banter grows dead silent as Lord sings AC/DC’s “Love at First Feel.” After the boys miss their train several times over, their trance breaks and they pool the contents of their pockets in order to buy an album. Whether Lord continues to pursue her own career as a singer-songwriter or puts her energy into promoting new talent, it’s clear she won’t be letting anyone down.
