Listen to Spend the Night, the gorgeously stripped-back new single from Laura Cortese & Belgian indie artist Douglas Firs (out on 21st October – pre-save). With the simple yet intuitive combination of guitar and violin, they manage to accentuate that stretching of time and those agonising long days of ‘Walking around in a foggy haze’.
The song was written by Laura Cortese & Steve Poltz in Nashville, TN. “We sat across an old school desk from one another in Steve’s home, talking about ex-lovers. The kind you are determined to say goodbye to, and you’re convinced you’re doing a pretty good job too, until the title comes and ruins the plan.”
Talking about the duet, Laura adds: “When Gertjan Van Hellemont of Douglas Firs (Belgium) and I met in 2013 in a small bar in Oregon (different story), we immediately discovered we loved playing music together. The intimacy of this track allowed us to record it how we like it best: sung together in one room and captured live. No frills.”
While the song may have no frills, when it comes to emotional energy, it’s electrically charged.
Pre-save the single here: https://found.ee/spendthenight
After a number of UK festival appearances, this year, don’t miss Laura Cortese & Friends’ dates in London, Birmingham, Shrewsbury & Bristol this month; see details below.
Laura Cortese & Friends – UK Dates – October 2022
To call Laura Cortese a globetrotter would be to drastically understate her adventurous spirit. Her nature, as a musician, has always been to go where the wind takes her, settling into new ecosystems in which to adapt and grow roots until the breeze blows once more. In these travels, she has found a global network of collaborators – friends and mentors who have helped her forge bonds and grow mastery in many musical traditions, all of which she approaches with the same reverence and devotion that she felt when picking up a fiddle for the very first time as a young child.
Now, more than twenty years into her already impressive career, she makes her home in Ghent, Belgium, where she continues to do what she is best at: building musical community. Despite a global pandemic and rolling lockdowns, Laura has created opportunities for local creatives to come together, sharing space and inspiration with each other in every gathering. In so doing, she has formed a new collaboration of her own with Gertjan Van Hellemont (guitar) and Cleo Janse (harmonium), Belgian musicians whom she first met on tour in the States in 2013. They can be found performing around Europe, exploring and exalting in their shared passion of American roots music.
OCT 26 WED – Slaughtered Lamb @ 8:00pm, London
OCT 27 THU – Kitchen Garden Cafe @ 8:00pm, Birmingham
OCT 29 SAT – The Hive @ 7:00pm, Shrewsbury
OCT 30 SUN – The Wardrobe Theatre @ 8:00pm, Bristol
https://thisislauracortese.com/