Hope as an act of imagination: Laura Gibson’s living room shows visit Spokane

After placing touring on a shelf to dedicate time to her novel, folk singer Laura Gibson is exploring whether live music is still there for her, while turning a critical eye to so-called failure.

So far, her re-entry has been warm and intimate – performing in living rooms across the country through Undertow Music. Her second leg starts in Moscow, Idaho, on Wednesday, followed by Spokane on Thursday.

Gibson tested this model in January and February, trying out new songs and enjoying the format enough to restart this spring with a fresh batch.

“These living room shows have given me more room for telling stories and, even more so, thinking out loud,” Gibson, a multi-instrumentalist, said. “… On such an intimate stage, it’s given me room to explore what songs are about, even as I’m performing them.”

On Thursday, Gibson is playing at West Central Abbey, which local author and co-host Alexis Smith concedes is not quite a living room.

“But it’s a room that people live in, that people are in quiet community together, so a great place for a concert,” Smith said of the space co-host Chris Maccini found for Gibson’s Spokane show.

Smith had considered her garden, but realized her dog would announce each concert-goer, causing interference. She enlisted Maccini’s help, and he happened to be touring the church. Tickets won’t be available at the door but are available for online presale. Only 40 will be available to the public.

Goners artist Gibson is no stranger to interesting venues. In 2008, All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen and NPR music producer Stephen Thompson went to a Gibson show at the South by Southwest festival, but had difficulty hearing her over the “blathering bar crowd,” Boilen reported, so they invited her to their office to perform.

“Rather than going to shows where very quiet singer-songwriters are drowned out, we could just have them perform at our desks,” Thompson said in a recording of this performance.

This was the first NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Gibson returned for the show’s 200th, and said being part of the Tiny Desk history has been a gift, though she joked that if she had known how big the series would become, she might have brushed her hair. In fact, Boilen, now retired, is the host for Gibson’s living room show in Washington, D.C.

Gibson grew up in Coquille, a small, coastal logging town in Oregon. Place plays a role in much of Gibson’s music, and her newest songs are no exception.

“I’m always sort of setting a scene,” Gibson said. “I would say the focus of a lot of the new songs is the genre of two women having a conversation.”

Smith and Gibson first connected when both were living in Portland, and admirers of each other’s work.

“There’s something magical that happens when you put a story to music, and I think Laura does it really tenderly and evocatively,” Smith said.

Gibson said that Smith, author of “Glaciers” and “Marrow Island,” was one of the first authors she had coffee with after having read her book.

“Before I even said out loud that I wanted to be a writer, I definitely placed myself next to people that I admired,” Gibson explained.

Ultimately, Gibson chose to pursue an MFA in creative writing, and moved to New York to attend Hunter College. In 2016, she released the album “Empire Builder,” which she wrote when traveling from Oregon on the namesake train to begin her journey east. Having two years to focus deeply on fiction writing has influenced her songwriting, as well.

“My songs now are much more specific in my imagery, I have a lot more rigor about the world of my songs holding up,” Gibson said. “There’s still abstraction, but really grounding the abstraction in physical details.”

Much of Gibson’s work concerns hope, and she considers herself an artist who makes hopeful work.

“I think that hope can be more of an act of imagination than it is an act of belief,” Gibson said. “Music and writing have given me a way to imagine.”

Though Gibson isn’t ready to speak about the specifics of her novel, she happily reported she was nearing the end of her first draft. She also hopes to release another album in summer or fall. Catching a living room show is a chance to witness that work in its nascent stage. Gibson’s working title for her album-to-be is “The Year of My Defeat,” due to her contemplations of failure.

“The things I’ve been thinking about are just questioning that anxiety around failure, questioning what failure even is, and how to build a philosophy with a better understanding of failure,” Gibson said.