About
Each album Lawrence Rothman creates is a sacrificial offering — a piece of themself siphoned off and surrendered for the sake of human connection, spiritual liberation and personal metamorphosis. Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, the singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer's fifth studio album, out on KRO Records September 25, is the barest expression of this particular forfeiture. When delivered by Rothman’s extraordinarily rich baritone singing voice, the earthen songs alight. “After twenty years as a singer, the voice itself becomes archaeological,” says Rothman, calling the record “a public reckoning between every version of myself that got buried along the way.” They add, “It’s my album about transformation through ruin, the painful necessity of shedding the identities that once kept me alive. It’s a funeral procession and a resurrection.”
For the last two decades, Rothman has made music as a means of survival, and has worked to survive so that they may continue to create. This reflexive quality is openly expressed on Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, a fertile, nut-brown album whose twin titles encapsulate the lived-in, beautifully imperfect quality of its country-tinged songs, as well as the alchemy of creativity and the redemptive effects of letting go. Crafted with a coterie of gifted friends and peers, including Madi Diaz, Amanda Shires, Sarah Klang, Katie Pruitt, and Jillian Jaqueline the album also conveys the power and life-giving effects of community. In an era where AI is threatening art and the artist’s way of life, it was important to Rothman to express the one thing software may not mimic: the human experience, in all of its ruffled glory.
“This is the most autobiographical of any record I’ve written for myself,” Rothman says of Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust. “I knew I needed to express the hard truths that feel uncomfortable. I did this a little bit on my last two records, but it’s on every song here.”
More so than any of Rothman’s previous albums, Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust probes the complex and often painful companions they’ve traveled with from their origins as a creative Midwestern kid growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, to adulthood as an in-demand producer and singular singer-writer in Los Angeles. These regional identities also serve as each side of the album’s thematic coin. There’s the hard labor of creative work and spiritual survival, and there is the magic of creativity and personal evolution. There is sweat and there is sparkle. Each of these show up in poetically frank statements on addiction and sobriety, love and loss, and Rothman’s identity as a gender-fluid person decades before those conversations and terms were part and parcel of American life.
They are evinced on singles such as “Karmakaze,” the album’s third track co-written with Jillian Jaqueline and featuring Amanda Shires, a mid-tempo lament on desire and how it may lead to self destruction. Propelled by acoustic strumming, and accented by earthen Western guitar motifs, it transforms romance into an embattled airfield above which memory, addiction, heartbreak and pride spiral into one another for a controlled crash. “It’s an answer song to a friends’,” the explain, “and I was nervous about even releasing it. But I knew if it made me uncomfortable, the story should be told.”
Rothman directly recounts their recent path to recovery on “Stable,” a song that frames sobriety as a middle ground between collapse and healing — a never-ending process of daily, ritualistic survival — and “Demons,” about the ghosts that accompany us through life in the wake of self destruction, shame and generational trauma.
The emotional crescendo of “A Word’s a Weapon,” featuring Katie Pruitt and Jillian Jaqueline, demonstrate the nature of human pain — how fear of the other and impulsivity creates cycles of destruction and division, and how those same mouths are capable of love, the antidote to such ills. Conversely, “The Meaning” surveys purpose and connection. “When I see you living / I see me living,” Rothman sings with an evident sense of poetic clarity.
Amid their journey, abounding in trials, triumphs, love and labor, Rothman has gathered and transformed the debris from life’s cutting-room floor into artistic statements brimming with curiosity, candor, wisdom, and wonder. The new album pairs creative fragments from their last 20 years as a musician, with highly personal struggles from the last 20 months, for the clearest view of who they’ve been and what they’ve become: necessarily broken in order to fully live. It offers a bird’s-eye view, and zoomed-in intimacy. Here, Rothman directs their own story.
Rothman wasn’t always comfortable with the confessional realm Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardustinhabits. For much of their career, Rothman has amended extremely personal lyrics in order to obscure their true meaning. As a younger artist, they quite literally shook at the thought of performing such confessional material live, and wrote overtly political songs to avoid that level of soul baring. But they’ve grown since then, and such confessions feel more necessary than ever. “My new album is part three in a trilogy of albums that started with Good Morning, America (2021) and The Plow That Broke the Plains (2024). On each of these, I peeled back layers of my truth more and more.” The personal nature of Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust is an act of bravery, but also a demonstration of their growth as a songwriter, inspired by other artists they’ve worked with such as Lucinda Williams, Amanda Shires, Tift Merritt and Angel Olsen.
The album was written between Biarritz, France and Nashville, Tennessee in a four-week period, and was produced by Rothman. They recorded it in Nashville at Sound Emporium — a studio that was opened and formerly run by the greatest of the Music City bohemians, Cowboy Jack Clement — a setting that centered Rothman in a living environment that matched the songs’ humanity. “Amanda Shires introduced me to that room in 2020 and it’s like home to me,” Rothman explains. “You can feel its tradition. All of my favorite artists, such as John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash and REM, made their songs of hardship, glory and real living there.”
“I’ve recorded my last three albums there,” they add. “Taken together, this trilogy tells my complete adulthood story — my mistakes, my wins, my losses. It’s the sound of a person trying to find meaning, and a reason to exist, amid the chaos of life.”