Anais Nin, Rita Hayworth, Henry Miller, Dusty Springfield, Ravel, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Yoko Ono, Gandhi, the entire staff of MoveOn.org, Howard Zinn, Billie Holiday, Judee Sill, Aretha Franklin, Kate Bush, Patti Smith, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, the Beats, My Bloody Valentine, Deborah Harry, Patsy Cline, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Willie Nelson, Nina Simone, Lisa Gerrard, Moby, Kim Deal, Donna Summer, Diamanda Galas, Throwing Muses (Kristin Hersh esp), Jorie Graham, e.e. cummings, Frank O'Hara, films like Gilda, Les Amants du Pont Neuf, anything by Terrence Malick (esp Days of Heaven and Badlands) and perhaps my favorite film of all time, Harold and Maude....Henry Darger, Daniel Johnston, Rilke, Tennessee Williams, Lucien Freud...& of course, Yoshiki
風格近似
Reviews of Moby's Hotel:
"...Laura Dawn will tear your heart out, still beating, on the surprisingly gorgeous cover of New Order's Temptation..."--XPressmag
"..Laura Dawn's siren-like vocals..."--AmnestyUSA.org
"Sexy, mysterioso, murky but precise, full of a curiously heavy uplift, like Red Bull and vodka. Makes me want to have a drink and f---. Especially when the girl sings.
About the girl: She's named Laura Dawn, provides backup throughout, gets two duets and two leads, the first of which is a chanteusey cover of New Order's "Temptation" that's been shot full of muscle relaxant. Best thing on the record. Four tracks later, she's pretending she's a couple of seconds away from a very stoned and very convincing orgasm on "I Like It." Second best thing on the album. Third best? Wistful electro-ballad "Dream About Me." Guess who sings on it." --the Village Voice
"Temptation breaks things up, with Laura Dawn providing intricately layered vocals to what is a beautifully relaxing ballad. By the time we reach the middle of the album, and Spiders, which features yet another excellent rushing chorus, Hotel has already trounced his last album and is perched comfortably amongst his best works. Fortunately, the second half of the album does little to disappoint either. Laura Dawns sultry vocal returns to swarm all over the clubby disco beats of Very, and the slow paced, sexually-mesmerising I Like It, her vocal contribution almost equals Mobys on this album. The main man then rises to the challenge, providing one of the best vocal performances of his own career on the spellbinding ballad, Love Should. Undoubtedly one of the best things hes written in terms of pure songwriting ability." --Barcode
"... Fittingly, New Order's song Temptation is covered with Moby's friend Laura Dawn offering sultry vocals over a heartbeat...on Very, Dawn returns to show she can do dance diva as well as sultry songstress..." --MusicOMH.com
"...Moby's....last-drinks/first-tears version of New Order's Temptation features the shimmering sad voice of Laura Dawn..." --Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
"...former punk Laura Dawn adds real emotion to a stripped down cover of New Order's Temptation,...and a spot of Blondie meets Donna Summer electro disco in the form of Very.."---MSN Entertainment
I'm a singer/songwriter/producer/political activist. I was born and raised in Pleasantville, Iowa, (population 1,000). My first band was the all-girl punk band Fluffer. We were fierce. A reviewer from Time Out once said that we "lured you in like poisonous flowers". I thought that was an apt review. We played a lot of shows, put out two albums, and toured with the Melvins and Skeleton Key and some others. We were on MTV for like 5 seconds. Ok, ten seconds.
Then I got a solo record deal on extasy/warner brothers and in 1999, put out an album called "Believer". It was a bunch of songs I wrote when I was 25 or so, all about moving to New York City with $300 bucks in my pocket and living at the YMCA and then in a squat with east german artists and drug addicts in the East Village back when the East Village was actually still a rather scary and edgy (and in my mind, exciting) place to live. I co-produced the album with Ted Niceley (yes, the man who produced FUGAZI, and a genius and a teddy bear). A lot of people loved it. Reviews were good. SPIN magazine said it was a "...sweetly vicious debut, which is equal parts power pop and sugary punk, like Siouxsie Sioux meets Jewel". My record label went under while I was making my second album, which never got finished. Ahh, life.
Interesting factoid: my now husband and I lived right beside each other on 9th street in the East Village for about a year in the mid-90s and never met. A friend of his took him to see Fluffer at the seminal indie rock club Brownies on Avenue A one night and he (my now hubby) thought to himself: "who is that weird girl singing?" Two years later we ran into each other at a party, where he says that I snubbed him when he tried to talk to me--(it's probably true).
A year after that we met again while drunk as skunks and he claims I was rude to him again (ok, probably true) until someone dared us to kiss...and then we made out so violently that we both nearly fell to the floor. And then I went home to my boyfriend and he went home to his girlfriend. Ahem.
A year later he walked up to me at a party and said, "are you single now? Cause I'm single now." I said "yes", he said "for fuck's sake give me your number"...and three months later we were married. In Las Vegas. Yes, Elvis was present. So that's how musicians meet cute in the east village. We've been married for 5 and 1/2 years.
These days I'm a full-time political activist and I also sing with Moby. I'm the vocalist on his album "Hotel" and I was the featured vocalist on his world tour this year. The reviews for the tour were really nice. The Evening Standard in the UK said (after saying great things about moby) "...the true eye-opener was co-singer Laura Dawn...she was made to co-habit Moby's stage. She could wail like Claire Torry did on Pink Floyd's 'The Great Gig in the Sky'. She could deliver a lyric such as Spider's "let peace and beauty reign/and bring us love again" and make it sound uplifting rather than corny. And when she wrapped herself around a funerally paced version of Play's formerly brisk "Natural Blues", she could stop traffic." Personally, I'm very glad they didn't think I sucked, as that was my first tour of that magnitude. We've also performed at lots of political events--me, Moby, and my husband Daron. The most amazing was performing to 1 million people in DC at the March for Choice in 04. Hearing a million people sing along with you is quite the moment.
I work full-time for MoveOn.org. If you're not a member, you should be. MoveOn allows disparate people to come together to form a consensus on how they want to be governed. Historically, government panders to the few at the expense of the many. I'd like to see that stopped. Some scary shit has been going down in this country, starting with a stolen election in 2000 and frankly, it's all been down hill from there. Some well funded right wing extremists have been leading our country into war, lies, corruption, and corporate oligarchy and if you care (as well you should), please join MoveOn and get involved. I also work with organizations like Amend.org. Basically, I'll work for anyone who's trying to make the world a better and more equitable place for it's inhabitants.
What kind of work do I do? I come up with national media campaigns and events that propel progressive ideas into the popular culture. At least that's what I do in theory. Basically, I organize artists. I work with writers, directors, actors, musicians who care about our country and who are a part of the fight to take it back. Historically, artists have always been great instigators of social change. The right wing likes to denigrate that idea, but history has shown it to be true. I believe in the power of art and I believe in the aggregate power of people. So that's where my heart is these days.
I still do music--my husband and I do music for films, tv shows, commercials etc. I still hope to do another album-- a solo album or collaboration with Daron--and we have our own studio now.
I also have recently edited a book, called "It Takes a Nation." It will be out on Palace Press this August. It's about MoveOn's Hurricane Housing program, which housed over 30,000 evacuess in private homes in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina. All proceeds from the book go to organizations that are continuing the fight for evacuees' rights. Cause those people are still screwed. Our government let them down. Please check out the book and read their stories.
Thanks for the add! From one indie artist to another, please check out my debut novel, "Stars in their Eyes," a tale of sort-of love and semi-fame for a young soap star in LA. It's available now on amazon. com :)
hi! i have registered you and the little death fro the next meeting at the AA :-/ I thought it might be helpful, of course, mainly bc they need real musicians to witness. ok, joke aside. i hope that between two beers you could enjoy the COurbet's exhibit which is happening at the Metropolitan museum..until.. 18th of may! *eyes wide open* we lent you some of his masterpieces! so if laura and daron don't go and enjoy it, i say "what a waste!" and drag moby with you, at the same time. he won't lose his time for once :/ kidding. PS: i saw a piece of Brooklyn when i went to nyc last autumn, it was such a cosntrast compared to manhattan. I mean it was calm suddenly. *re-eyes wide open*
ok, have a nice day. and well ok, go on drinking and rocking your music and voice around. (if it makes sense, for me what I wrote makes sense, i totally visualise you singing music and being semi-drunk) Alexandra.
