Artists:Laura Blackley Band

Laura Blackley Band

• You can’t get nothing out of your art if it don’t sting you a little bit in the process. That’s my philosophy on writing songs. I’ve been writing songs and stories since I was 5 years old. I’ve been doing it as a job for the past 15 years. I specialize in love and murder ballads, ghost stories, and done-somebody-wrong songs.

I love the blues, rock and roll, and country music, and you can tell it when you listen to my records. I hate the term ‘folk-rock,’ almost as much as I hate what Nashville’s done to country music. I’ve put out three records independently, and played every beer joint in the southeast that’s worth playing (and a few that weren’t).

I think it’s always been a bad idea to mix music and business. I think a good woman doesn’t come into her own until she veers past 30. I think that people from the South tell better stories than people from probably just about anywhere else. I think that if I ever make any money writing songs then I’m going to invest it all into figuring out how to power muscle cars with biodiesel.

Favorite things: Live music, playing live music, Muscle cars (especially ‘65 Mustangs), Appalachian Mountains, Southern Writers (especially Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrisson), Southern Accents, and ghost stories.