Greg Laswell is a three-dimensional artist. While culture continues to crank out American idols, Laswell’s art takes a more hand-drawn approach.  Contributing everything on his albums from guitars and drums to banjos, pianos, and harmonies, Laswell plays both performer and producer with the ability to amble that fine line between indie novelty and pop sensibility (you know, the kind that makes prime time television shows like Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill love guys like him). Greg’s passion for fostering the unique, the different, and the risky as well as his battle with loss and hope come out in our conversation en route to his next gig, his GPS interrupting every so often.

You’re a big fan of the banjo, which seems to appear on almost every song on Three Flights from Alto Nido.  What’s the story behind the affection?

There’s not a lot of banjo in pop music, but I like the banjo a lot so I put it in there anyway. When I was recording in the studio the first song that I added the banjo to was “It Comes and Goes in Waves,” and I liked it so much that I think there’s only three or four songs on Three Flights From Alto Nido that don’t have banjo on it, because I went back and put some on almost all of them. That one banjo lick on the chorus of “That it Moves” used to belong to an acoustic guitar that I recorded it with. I replaced that track with a banjo and it gave it a little more life. It didn’t really fight the track like the acoustic guitar did so I kept in.

There seems to be this profuse longing for something woven throughout your songwriting, almost as if you’re recovering from something or someone. What’s the soul behind your songs?

I’m just acknowledging loss, recovering from it, and also at the same time trying to find hope.  That’s pretty much the theme of Three Flights.  “Comes and Goes in Waves” is pretty much the center of the album, and all the other songs branch from that song.

So through brokenness there’s this element of restoration.

Yeah, it’s like a break up record but some songs don’t have anything to do with that at all. “How the Day Sounds” is actually a happy song.  “Days Go On” is a happy song too if you listen to the verses. If you listen to the chorus it sounds like a sad song but that’s actually a happy song about a surprise…but, yeah, the rest of them are based on breakups.

“Comes and Goes in Waves” is one of those hopeful songs that sounds you’re writing a letter to someone. Who’s it for?

I’m writing it to all my friends and family who all had a really difficult year in 2007 for some strange reason. I kind of wanted to write a song to them to let them know it’s going to be ok.

Speaking of friends, I hear you’re pretty good buddies with actor, Dominic Monaghan, who starred in Lost, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and X-Men: Wolverine. How did you two meet? Was it a bro-mance at first site?

[laughs] He’s a really dear friend of mine.  We met a couple of years ago when he gave me a shout-out in Entertainment Weekly where he said one of his favorite artists was Greg Laswell. I sent him a thank you note through my label and then he got my contact info and just called me one day and was like, “Sorry man, I don’t normally do this, but would you want to grab a beer sometime?” We became friends instantly.

When you’re not performing you’re producing other artists. You just finished producing Molly Jenson’s debut album, Give it Time. How did you hook up with her?

I met Molly years and years ago. We went to college together for about a year. I was writing a bunch of songs I couldn’t really do anything with, so I ended up throwing them out because they were a little too “pop” for anything I wanted to do. I decided I wanted to write with someone to get these songs out of my system, so I called Molly out of the blue, because I remembered she was a really great singer and asked her if she wanted to make a record. She had been trying to find someone to write with and had already started with a few different people that really didn’t pan out. We met a few weeks after and wrote a song together the very first day and recorded it. From then on out we kept writing and recording and ended up with this great record now. She really allowed me to tap into this unexplored female-singer side of songwriting.

So it just clicked with Molly.

Yeah, it’s effortless. We have the same taste in music. We’re both working for the same thing. There are a lot of things she thinks of that I couldn’t think of on my own. She also doesn’t really have an ego in the studio. A lot of people do.

Any plans to produce more artists in the future?

I’m going to be working with Ingrid Michaelson this summer. She just finished up her record already, but we’re going to start on some new stuff.

What do you look for when considering artists to produce?

They just have to click into my strengths style-wise. If I like an artist and I think I can do something good by them I’ll always produce as long as I can.

Molly Jenson is a singer-songwriter from San Diego who currently bases her operations in Orange County. Her new record, “Maybe Tomorrow,” dropped in stores March 3. Undiscovered was able to sit down with her a week before the album released to talk about her music.

Undiscovered: So your new album’s coming out next week right? I heard it’s actually a re-release of one that you did a few years back.

Molly: Yeah, I put a record out just independently and sold it at shows and to friends a couple years ago in 2005. And then when I signed with Bully!/Pulpit Records/Nettwerk Music Group, they bought the record off me and we changed the artwork and added a duet that Jon Foreman and I wrote.

Undiscovered: So it’s one week before your record releases. Is life any busier than usual for Molly Jenson?

Molly: It’s been crazy. This last month has been the busiest and most stressful month of my life, but it’s fun. I’m growing a lot, I’m learning a lot and I’m getting to do a lot. We shot my music video last week, and I got to go on tour with Fiction Family. We’ve been doing all these promotional things and it’s been really cool. This is the kind of stress I like. It shows me that stuff is getting done and things are moving forward.

Undiscovered: You mentioned touring with Fiction Family. Was that different from anything you’ve done before?

Molly: Absolutely! It was so amazing! It was my first real tour. I’ve played in Europe and I’ve played up the coast of California, but I haven’t left California on tour with my own music, opening for a band who has a good crowd of people. And I did five shows with them and I played solo. I’ve never played solo; I would always have at least one person backing me up because I never felt confident enough to play guitar and so they could cover up my mistakes. But I had the best shows I’ve ever played; we sold out every night.

Undiscovered: Your profile description on Myspace said you never planned on recording an album or ever doing any of this stuff. What happened?

Molly: Well, Greg Laswell and I went to college together at Point Loma in San Diego and we had mutual friends and we were only acquaintances in college. But in 2004 I moved to Orange County and I’d been singing on other people’s projects, but I really was starting to think that I wanted do my own stuff, but was really struggling. So Greg was working on his own stuff and producing other people. He heard that I was starting to write and called and said he’d love to meet with me. So we got together and wrote a song, and we just had this connection that can be really hard to find with other people, and it went on from there.

Maybe it was because Jon Foreman and Sean Watkins are two of my favorite modern songwriters or maybe it was because my last concert was OAR at the House of Blues crammed between a brigade of unappreciative, drunk frat boys and sorority girls, but I’m pretty sure that this weekend’s Fiction Family concert was the best I’ve been to in years. Fiction Family wrapped up their debut tour at Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles this Saturday. Surrounded by their family and friends, as well as fans old and new, Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek and Jon Foreman of Switchfoot played a set of originals, collaborations, and covers that lasted over 90 minutes.

Largo was the perfect venue to feel welcomed by this fictional family. A historic landmark, the small movie theatre-style venue has been a home for the Watkins family where they’ve maintained a residency every Thursday night for years. What made the night so uniquely enjoyable was the addition of Sara Watkins on violin and breathtaking background vocals. I couldn’t imagine the rest of the tour without her.
Sara performs with so much passion, energy, and confidence and yet manages to maintain a humble, not-to-be-taken-so-seriously persona while on stage. It’s a package one wishes every artist could deliver.

The renowned piano accompanist, Benmont Tench (Johnny Cash, U2), sat in on many of the songs delivering just the right color to each piece between casual sips of coffee, showing off his incredible solo skills only when asked. Jon’s celloist, Keith Tutt, also joined with his brilliant arrangements that struck well against Sara’s fiddle licks.

Foreman continues to impress me with his songwriting. The group did a number of his that has yet to be recorded called Rob Me, a foot stomping hillbilly tune that  Dylan would be honored to cover. Molly Jenson, a new friend of Conversant and Undiscovered, opened the evening up with her honest stories accompanied by her charming wit and personality that manages to shrink a room so that you feel you’re sitting across the table from her in a coffee shop. Her duets with Jon and Sean fit like a glove. Look for more on her in this blog soon as her new album, "Maybe Tomorrow" releases in March.

Whether it was hushing the room for a cover of Radiohead’s I Dio Teque (with three out of the four vocalists sharing the same microphone in traditional bluegrass style) or a version of Foreman’s stirring Your Love is Strong (based on the Lord’s Prayer) with Sara adding original harmony, or an instrumental bluegrass duet between the Watkins siblings, it was an unforgettable night that wasn’t about Fiction Family at all…it was about friends getting together to appreciate, celebrate, and share, stories and songs together.

The set ended with Foreman and Watkins thanking us for letting them be our fictional family for the evening and “if we wanted to hear some more songs we would have to sing a chorus of Hey Jude before they came back." We complied. Soon each member strapped on their instruments to meet us on the chorus in the key we were all singing, followed by a long list of encore numbers. It was a night to remember.