Lawrence Rothman Closes Trilogy With 'Here Lies Love / Sawdust — SkimNews
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- Lawrence Rothman released 'Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust,' a 13-track LP via KRO Records that completes a trilogy beginning with 2021's 'Good Morning, America' and 2024's 'The Plow That Broke the Plains'
- Rothman conceived the trilogy after moving to Nashville during the pandemic and connecting with the Americana scene, citing Henry Miller's 'Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus' as the inspiration for making a series of records
- Amanda Shires serves as a recurring collaborator across the trilogy, having first met Rothman on 2021's 'Thrash the West,' which Rothman later revisited by writing 'Karmakaze' with Jillian Jaqueline as the song's second half
- Floria Sigismondi, Rothman's wife and creative partner, directed the 'Karmakaze' video set against a desolate rock-walled desert backdrop
- Rothman collaborated with Madi Diaz, Katie Pruitt, and Shires on the new LP, with Rothman also producing for artists like Shires and Maggie Rose
- Rothman argues live performance is the most important artist influence on younger generations, warning that 'we are really deep now into zeros and ones' and framing Y2K-style digital disruption as having 'happened in the year 2025'
Why it matters: Rothman's trilogy closes with a deliberate stand for analog live performance over digital consumption at a moment when AI-generated music is flooding streaming platforms — and the album's anchor collaboration with Amanda Shires, which began as a one-off anxiety song in 2021 and grew into a multi-record thread, shows how Rothman's Nashville move reshaped an already genre-fluid career around the Americana community.
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