The act of making music can be extremely useful in life. If your heart has been broken, giving voice to those raw emotions can act as a salve to ease the pain. Greg Laswell knows this, because he did just that on 2006’s Through Toledo, surely one of the most intense breakup albums ever made. When you’ve finally reached the point where life is beginning to seem beautiful and exciting again, there’s no better way to celebrate it than by singing the song that greeted you, fully formed in your head, when you awoke that very morning, telling you everything is gonna be all right. That’s precisely what Laswell did with How the Day Sounds, a six-song EP released early this year, serving as a progress report on his revitalized state of being.
Once you’re together enough to become aware of the other lives that are touching your own, you can then help those around you, just as you’ve helped yourself, with an anthem or a lullaby. This impulse is what motivated the creation of Three Flights From Alto Nido, the enigmatically yet aptly titled third volume of Laswell’s trilogy of heartbreak and redemption. Pointing out that “alto nido” translates from the Spanish as “high nest,” Laswell explains that “Three flights" implies that you’re on your way to a ‘high nest,’ even if you’re not quite there yet.
“Whereas Through Toledo was intimate and autobiographical for the most part, the EP reflected the transitional time of coming out of it,” Laswell explains. “With this album, I wanted to do something really big sounding—a little bit bigger than I am, really. In a sense, the album was shaped around the fact that 2007 was a difficult and strange year for just about all of my friends and family members, and I wrote ‘Comes and Goes (In Waves’) as a kind of open letter to everyone that had had a hard time, reassuring them that everything’s gonna be OK. So I wanted to make the song big and sprawling and full of hope.”
“This one’s for the lonely, the ones that seek and find/Only to be let down time after time,” the song begins, over a feathery acoustic guitar, on a slow build toward its widescreen climax. “This one’s for the torn-down, the experts at the fall, come on friends, get up now, you’re not alone at all.” As much as any, these four lines encapsulate the impulse behind the album.
When asked about other key songs, Laswell points to “It’s Been a Year,” an exquisite midtempo piece burnished with strings and overflowing with humanity. “It achieved what I wanted to say very quickly,” he explains. “It wrote itself, really, as if it was already out there and I just needed to find it.” Another musical and emotional high point is “I’d Be Lying,” which documents a seemingly perfect relationship that falls victim to bad timing. Laswell’s lush arrangement plays against the bittersweet premise, as he stacks layer after layer of vocals, achieving outright grandeur in a stunning display of arrangement and production skills. “Even on the songs that seem sad at first listen,” he points out, “I wanted to convey an element of hope, to make people feel good when they hear it.”
Reappearing from the EP, in newly mixed form, are the pivotal, life-(re)embracing “How the Day Sounds” and the propulsive, anthemic “Days Go On,” each of which remains as captivating and thematically key here as they were in the transitional context of the EP. “Those songs are full of hope, and the album really does wrap around them,” says Laswell. “They gave course to how the rest of the album was created.
Laswell began writing this batch of songs in his Hollywood apartment between sessions for the EP, working in a garage studio located in Santa Ana, which he’d leased soon after moving from his hometown of San Diego. Although he’d decided to separate life and work when he moved, the act of creating the EP was inspiring him anew, and every night he’d work out a new idea in Garageband, cooking up a set of lo-fi but useful demos. When he took them into the studio and began adding elements, he realized that these songs called out for something more than he’d brought to any of his previous work.
Rather than handling everything himself—writing arranging, playing and singing all the parts, producing, engineering and mixing—as he’d done since transitioning from a bandmember to a solo artist, Laswell opened up his creative process, enlisting guitarist Brandon Walters, who regularly joins him in his live performances. “Onstage we felt this chemistry, a musical relationship I wanted to bring into the studio,” Greg points out. “So the two of us went into this mad-scientist mode, tracking layer after layer. Brandon would hop on banjo, I’d grab an electric guitar, then add a piano, and it just kept growing.”
When the recording was done, Laswell turned over another new leaf by calling on highly skilled mixer Greg Collins (U2, Eels, Cary Brothers). “These songs needed to be really big,” he says, “and pulling it off in the mix was just beyond my skill set. Greg made them even bigger; he pulls these songs up to a level I hadn’t even imagined. He’s just brilliant, and he’s added so much to this record.”
Working with Walters and Collins united Laswell’s impulse to go outside himself on Three Flights From Alto Nido with the process of creating it. “That’s the way I approached this record from the beginning,” he says. I wanted to make it for everybody. Not just me, by myself, doing songs about me, but writing songs to other people and for other people. If people want to feel sad and sorry for themselves, they can listen to Through Toledo.” He punctuates this statement with a quick, rueful laugh. “If they want to feel better, hopefully, they can listen to this record.”
