"Fantastically talented" - Jay-Z
"Incredible voice" - Antonio "LA" Reid
The seven songs on Laura Warshauer’s eponymous debut initially appear to be steeped in a sense of
longing and regret, an attempt to hold onto happy memories and let go of painful ones. But on
repeated listens, the songs divulge themselves and ultimately, offer a hopeful spirit at their core.
A New Jersey native, Laura Warshauer is the product of a tight-knit family who has been writing songs
since she was 14. Warshauer first picked up the guitar two years earlier at age 12, mastering both
Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” and Joan Osbourne’s “One of Us,” then began writing her own songs with
titles like “Take Me Home,” “Free Spirit” (“about a beach bum) and “Sign in Disguise” (“I thought it was
incredibly deep at the time”).
When she was 14, $50 in hand, Laura reserved an hour at a studio on the Jersey shore she found in
the Yellow Pages. Walking up two flights of stairs into the main recording room, she still remembers
the smell of cigarette smoke in the air and her dad picking her up at the end of the day, a bag of
pretzels and Gatorade in hand.
“Songwriting gave me my own language to talk about anything I wanted,” she recalls, “a way to
communicate complex emotions with simple clarity and purpose. I can dramatize situations, but I try to
get at the essence of an emotion, while setting them in a place that’s real, finding a different way to say
something that’s been said a thousand times before.”
Graduating early from high school, Laura spent a year at St. Andrews University in Scotland before
attending NYU, during which she began hanging out at the now-defunct Sony Music Studios on West
54th with Rich Keller (DMX, Lyfe Jennings), who took the young singer-songwriter under his wing after
hearing her play and ended up producing her debut EP.
“I was hooked right away,” she says the studio scene, where she padded around in her socks and
raided their chocolate drawer. “It was like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for music. I knew I’d
found my place.”
Through a colleague of Keller, a demo tape reached the hands of Island Def Jam Chairman Antonio “L.
A.” Reid, who dropped in on a Sunday night rehearsal of Warshauer and her band, practically signing
her on the spot.
After an early acoustic indie release, Warshauer’s major label bow maintains its focus on a voice that
evokes such master story-tellers and lyricists as Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos and Stevie Nicks. “I felt a real
sense of freedom making this record,” she says. “We approached it musically with the attitude that the
possibilities were limitless, we’d do whatever best served the melodies, lyrics and vibe of each song.”
Now that her debut is finished, Laura has set her sights on the future. Constantly communicating with
her fans on-line via written and video blogs, she says, “I would like to inspire women who are my age,
who can relate to what I’m talking about.”
To that end, since the age of 16, Warshauer has participated in the organization Musicians on Call,
which brings live music to the bedside of hospital patients since its start on the pediatric cancer ward
at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. “What’s so nice is I got in on the ground level, when it was just a handful
of people involved in New York, Philadelphia and Nashville,” she says. “It’s just a wonderful thing to be
involved with.”
This fall, Laura performed with the Gin Blossoms and the Nappy Roots. She was a featured performer
at the SXSW BMI brunch, Lollapalooza Music Lounge and CMJ.