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		CD Review - Laura Veirs Reprinted from February 2006 Issue -by ANDY PLYMALE I was struck with sonic familiarity by the in-house music at a local Starbucks this afternoon, and then I realized that the song that I was hearing was a track from Seattle singer/songwriter Laura Veirs new CD, Year of Meteors (Nonesuch), which I had been listening to off and on for the past couple of weeks, and by the time I left with my cappuccino, I had been treated to a second track from the CD, her second on the Nonesuch label. I first met Veirs several years ago, when she was looking for gigs to support the astounding Trials and Travails of Orphan Mae, her debut release as a full fledged alt-country, alt-pop “new music” rock oriented singer-songwriter. Veirs had sent me a copy of the CD at the suggestion of banjo and guitar picker, singer-songwriter, and American music traditionalist Danny Barnes, who performed on the CD and whom I had hooked up with a local gig some time previously. Picking up Orphan Mae at my P.O. Box on the way home from work, I was so entranced by this darkly beautiful work that I took quite a few extra turns on the way home, and then sat in the driveway until the CD was finished. Orphan Mae is an acoustic masterpiece wrought in an epic, cinematic fashion, telling the story of a young girl making her way in the American West (more or less). Not a mere collage of songs, each track segues naturally to the next, leaving the listener at the end of the CD with the satisfied feeling of having heard a mesmerizing story to its end. Far from her days hustling gigs at eastern Washington pubs and college coffehouses, Veirs is now a rising international star, after several highly successful tours of Great Britain and after having her previous CD, Carbon Glacier, picked up domestically by Nonesuch after an initial release in Europe. Nonesuch—home to such diverse artists as the Gypsy Kings, Wilco, Stephen Sondheim, Emmylou Harris, and Pat Metheny—presumably had a greater hand in the production of Year of Meteors than Carbon Glacier, and the result is a less uneven work that is finally get Veirs back to the quality of her Orphan Mae days, even if she has forsaken her initial acoustic sound for a more electric one, forsaking her alt-country persona for an ambient rock sound. Veirs (vocals, guitar, keyboards) is joined on Meteors by her young Puget Sound based touring band, the Tortured Souls: the talented and in-demand pianist and trombonist Steve Moore (piano, organs, keyboards), former Anacortes oyster farmer Karl Blau (bass, guitar, vocals, keyboards), and acclaimed producer, engineer, and percussionist Tucker Martine (drums, sampling, percussion), who also produced the CD. Joining the Souls is the unmistakable violist Eyvind Kang (sideman to Bill Frisell) and upright bassist Keith Lowe (from Fiona Apple’s touring band). A geology major in college, Veirs songs often have a naturalistic quality about them even when they are rock-heavy and highly electronic. She was recently picked by the Seattle Times as a Seattle area recording artist likely to soon land on the cover of Spin magazine.