Jo Lawry - The Bathtub And The Sea (2018)

Staffed by a rotating gallery of musicians from all worlds — jazz, folk, celtic, rock — the Song Club serves as a kind of creative clearinghouse, a regularly occurring get-together in ¬¬ which writers can practice, encourage and try out new ideas around a group of peers. For Lawry, it’s one of the key reasons the record exists (we’ll get to the others in a bit), as it offered something crucial to her process: motivation. “That club is really what set me off to the races in finishing this record,” Lawry says.

That finished product is The Bathtub and the Sea. It follows her celebrated 2008 debut, I Want to Be Happy, which was christened by Downbeat as one of the “best CDs of the 2000s,” and its sterling 2014 follow-up, Taking Pictures. Much as she did in Pictures, Lawry spends The Bathtub and the Sea exploring her gifts as a singer-songwriter, writing or co-writing each of the album’s 11 tracks for a set that often echoes her life while adding a twist or two. “I’m drawn to love songs and breakup songs, especially those with a quirk with which I can identify. Like “Hey, I’m such a jerk, why do you still love me?” or “You’re great, I’m in love with you, but you’re messing with my plans, so could you please go away?”

Lawry’s life and loves are the heart of The Bathtub and the Sea. The title track, co-written with Doug Wamble, sets the course of the album in its tale of navigating beginnings and endings. The shimmering “Wedding Song” was penned as a wedding-day surprise to her husband, musician and collaborator Will Vinson. The equally lovely “So Far So Good,” is her one-year anniversary present to him. And “Olive Tree” is the couple’s first co-write, penned during a trip to Tuscany to visit her boss’s estate. “There was a studio there, so we thought, well, we’d better write something!” she laughs. Vinson had only to glance around the inspirational setting; Lawry later added the words.

You may have heard of that boss. In addition to writing and recording her own material, Lawry has been recording and touring with Sting since 2009, a rewarding, long-running gig that led to his appearance on the song “Impossible” from Taking Pictures and a return here as well. “Once I’d chosen the tracks for this new album, Sting asked, ‘So what am I doing on your record?’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Ummm, nothing?’” She laughs a little, sounding still-not-entirely-sure she had this conversation. “Not because I wouldn’t absolutely love that but given the extreme generosity of his being on my first, I’d never have dreamed of asking him a second time.”

She said yes, of course, but doing so presented a new problem: “I had to come up with something for him to do!” she laughs. “I sent him a few songs, and one of them was this weird demo ‘Unlearning.” The song, she says, was written during one of the Sting tours, on which she sang and played violin. “That’s really how that song was born, me trying to make something to sing to out of a detuned violin in a hotel room. It’s actually my very ham-handed attempt to be Bjork,” she laughs.

The results are best described as sure-handed: The duet version of “Unlearning” is maybe the record’s centerpiece, in which the ethereal twin voices of Lawry and her boss dance around each other. “People don’t always realize that he sings his songs in the original keys, and he had an amazing voice back then, but his voice now has even more depth, it’s even richer. He’s a miracle.”

As it happens, the story of The Bathtub and the Sea is full of such surprising behind-the-scenes anecdotes, including the one about “Jenny Kissed Me,” which is the product of another unlikely story. The song’s first two verses are a poem from the mid-1800s by Leigh Hunt, which Lawry encountered in just about the last place you’d expect to find 19th century English poetry. “I had set aside some time to write and was getting nowhere, so I just felt, well, I’ll watch some Netflix instead,” she laughs. “And there was this show ‘Call the Midwife,’ in which a lovely old nun who was suffering from dementia was trying to express her feelings to the central character, Jenny, who was leaving. And as the car is about pull away, she reaches in and grabs her wrist and recites this poem, and I thought it was just so beautiful, and so sweet. And I looked it up and it was public domain and I thought, ‘YES!”” she laughs.

“Kitchen Sink,” a heartbreaker about the final swings at saving a relationship, was the product of the revived and relaunched Song Club. That season also produced “The End of the World,” which Lawry wrote on Nov. 9, 2016, the day after the U.S. election. “I needed something to do with those feelings,” she said.

Which brings us to the other key reason the record exists: For The Bathtub and the Sea, Lawry employed PledgeMusic, the online service that allows fans to help fund the recording process. Doing so enabled the recording, and though she’s grateful for the boost, the process led her to discover something bigger. “What really surprised me is how people got on board,” she says. “It’s only through the PledgeMusic campaign that I’ve had the notion that anyone other than my friends and family think I should be making music. And it was shocking and so encouraging that anybody, let along so many lovely enthusiastic people, wanted me to make this record. So I had a motivation that I hadn’t felt before on my own records, that somebody besides me wanted it to happen.”

And like the album’s title character, she set off on her journey, and ended up right where she wanted to be.