Without getting too mushy, Laura Gibson makes you want to cuddle. She makes the sort of soft sound that feels like bedding and comforters and logs crackling above a tame, but toasty fire. She makes a person want to close their eyes and just bask in a star-filled night full of big moon air kisses of white illumination. It begs for the embrace, for the warm breath against the side of a neck or over a fleshy ear lobe and sideburn. There’s a lot of autumn in Gibson’s If You Come To Greet Me, an album of sinewy melodies and lavish amounts of darling foliage, but there’s a swath of all of the four seasons poking out from beneath the covers. There are frosty feelings of winter that contain some biting lashes, some of the lush turnings of springtime and the exasperating and unavoidable heat of summer. Mostly, she’s an autumnal songwriter, great for bonfires and absolutely a perfect complement to an evening meant for cradling a mug of hot apple cider or cocoa. She’s sweater weather personified. She’s those vintage ones that wear like a promise. One can begin to think about hibernation and what would happen if we too laid down for months of slumber, but were able to pipe whatever we wanted into some headphones. What if we chose to have Gibson there are our three-month lullaby, singing to us blindly as we survived on our fatty storages, lying there for days and days as snow storms hit and went outside and never did we feel a single prink of Jack Frost’s handiwork. I wonder what we’d wake as, whether it would be a person oblivious to any appreciation for all that’s saccharine in its tenderness or one who awoke with the knowledge of the length of days and all that can be done inside of them – the bursts of glowing bones and faces, the cat calls to the cosmos cutting us some slack, the living still remember that that’s what they’re doing, the dying knowing that they’ve got some left inside of them and the circumstances of everything serving as tinder for the improvement and discovery of more where that came from.

First song
Hands in Pockets (Laura Gibson) [3.05MB] [2400 downloads]


– original version appears on If You Come To Greet Me
I had thought up the first verse of this song and was humming the melody in my head several months before actually sitting down to write it. I never thought that I would write something so catchy…I love playing it. The song is about surviving the winter and other harsh seasons, and how we find ourselves stumbling towards (sometimes away from) intimacy with another person…be it a lover a friend or family.

Fourth song
The Longest Day (Laura Gibson) [4.09MB] [2198 downloads]


– original version appears on If You Come To Greet Me
This was in the first handful of songs that I ever wrote, and maybe the first time that I felt really moved within the writing process. I wrote the song on the longest day of the year, just over three years ago. I was in between houses in Portland, and was renting a friend’s guest room for two months. That week, while my friend was out of town, the power company had turned her electricity off because of a potential fire hazard. The longest day of the year always seemed to me, the most bittersweet day, because, as it was long, it signaled the change of season and the days getting shorter. During the last half house of daylight, I went running up on Alameda Drive, which sits on a bluff looking out over Portland. I looked out over the city lights and thought of the dark and empty house where I was staying…When I returned to the house, I sat down and wrote this song…(Oh…there is a part of the song that talks about candles glowing…I actually didn’t write it by candle light…I couldn’t find any candles but had two little maglight flashlights…candles seemed more poetic, I guess).

Laura Gibson Official Site
““Hush Records”:Http://www.hushrecords.com