Laura Veirs: Reading riot the grrrl

When Laura Veirs is not writing plangent, lyrical albums of her own, touring with her band, or talking to journalists in fancy London hotels, she teaches songwriting. Her students are, she says, mostly "adults who are struggling with their hobby". And for those enthusiastic amateurs lucky enough to schedule an appointment at Veirs' home in Portland, Oregon, she has three pieces of advice: keep it simple; don't be afraid; finish it.

Veirs practises what she preaches. In the past seven years, the bright, bespectacled singer-songwriter has released five albums of increasingly direct charm. The latest record, Saltbreakers, which will be released in the UK next month, charts the break-up of a long-term relationship, and is, like her previous albums, rich in the imagery of the cosmos and the ocean. Indeed, as the title suggests, salt is everywhere - salt tears; salt from the waves; the residual salt from perspiration. But like Years of Meteors before it, Saltbreakers is not poetically opaque - not so much a concept album as a conceit album. Veirs has simply taken a powerful metaphor and run with it.

"The key to me is not to be precious," says Veirs. "I think, without meaning to brag, that's my great strength as a songwriter. When I write songs I don't labour over them. I do work hard on it, and I do write a lot of songs, but I often just write a song, finish it, and move on. And I end up tossing tons of them away - either because something's not right about the melody, or the lyrics.

"The problem that a lot of my students have is that they can never finish anything. They can't just complete something and be a bit light about it. They tend to be so concerned about it being perfect, or it being genius. When you have very high expectations of yourself it makes it impossible to actually produce anything."

It's hard to imagine that Veirs - with her amiable demeanour and infectious, ribald laugh - is precious about much. One could forgive her a little diva-ish behaviour when it comes to her music, but she has never seen her current occupation as a calling. Indeed, as a teenager growing up in backwoods Colorado in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was much more interested in her studies and the swim team than her musical career. What changed?

"When I was growing up, I had mostly heard stuff on the radio, or the mainstream, teenage bands that my brother was into like The Cars and REM," she recalls. "But when I got to college in the North-west, I met some people - my boyfriend of the time in particular - who exposed me to a lot of underground stuff I had never heard of. It was exciting for me because I discovered riot grrrl (I was a feminist, and still am) and I'd never heard feminist punk rock before. And then I learnt about all the North-west scenes, and my eyes were opened."

It was only in 1996, when Veirs was a final-year student of geology and Mandarin at Carleton College in Minnesota, that she was inspired to start her own feminist four-piece, Rair Kx!. Were they any good? "It was good for me," she says. "I mean, we were just starting off. I was playing guitar and writing the music, but my friend Dava Hester was singing the vocals - and she was the total rock star. It was fun for me, because, as a beginner, I could stay at the back. We only played 15 shows, but I got pretty good at the electric guitar doing that."

Later, as a graduate, Veirs travelled to China to be a part of a geological expedition, and discovered her knack for writing indie-folk songs of her own. She exhaustively chronicled her experiences on that trip in her journal - a practice she keeps up today - and, with a $10 guitar, started to write.

Saltbreakers is the product of a fecund decade as a writer. And, just as there are points of comparison between this latest work and Veirs' previous output - her reedy, yearning voice and fairy-tale lyrics, for instance - there are signs that Veirs has modulated her approach. For one, her band changed its name from The Tortured Souls to The Saltbreakers, even though the line-up - Tucker Martine (drummer and producer), Karl Blau (bass and guitar), and Steve Moore (keyboards) - has not changed for five albums. And, if Veirs was tired of the white folk cliché of the Tortured Souls tag, she has also looked to more eclectic influences for her new album.

"I've never been an obsessive reader," she says, "but I think, now, that reading has a good influence on my

writing. I've been reading Jose Saramago's Blindness. Sometimes I can't believe how wonderful his words are. He can articulate things I've thought and felt in ways I never could. And I strive for that standard myself."

Veirs was so impressed by Blindness that she asked the Portuguese author's express permission to adapt his images for her song "Don't Lose Yourself". Meanwhile, the title track of the new album is inspired by AS Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance.

Veirs' musical boundaries, she says, have also been pushed. She has listened to Gal Costa and a host of Brazilian singers ("I love their singing aesthetic. It's very straight"); a Swedish folktronica band called Tape; the new record from her North-west contemporaries, The Shins; and "a bunch of music from Mali". Indeed, that Malian influence is what inspired the most impressive song on the album, "To the Country", a call-and-response number recorded with the Cedar Hill Choir at Johnny and June Carter Cash's cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee.

"My music collection's all over the map," decides Veirs, with some understatement. She will shortly be all over the map herself. The Saltbreakers are due to tour Europe and America from April.

"It's a mixed experience," she says. "Once I'm doing it I enjoy it, but it's hard to look forward to because it requires so much energy. We're doing this European tour, and then the American tour, and then a bunch of festivals, and then two months with [her fellow Oregonians] The Decemberists. I do like getting close with my band, and feeling that musical relationship grow stronger. And it's wonderful when you feel that visceral energy with an audience. You knit this fabric together when you're a band. It's not there after one show, but after 30 shows it's palpable."

But what would she rather be doing? "Right now, I'm reading The North-West Guide to Gardening," she says. "It's a reaction to all the touring. I'm making plans to do some feverish gardening work before I go out on the road again." Her garden, though, is destined to be a pipe dream. Just as Seamus Heaney wrote that he had "no spade", Veirs' itinerary means she is destined to endure the same privation. But she has a pen, and, luckily for us, she'll dig with that instead.

Laura Veirs' 'Saltbreakers' is released on Nonesuch Records on 26 March