Lawrence

About Lawrence

After years of consuming Stevie Wonder, Janis Joplin, and Eggo waffles, Lawrence
delivers Breakfast, their twelve-song debut LP. Led by siblings Clyde Lawrence, 22, and Gracie Lawrence, 18, the New York-based soul-pop group blends old-school and new-school vibes to create a set of songs that sound as good on the record as they do at their high-energy live shows.

To create Breakfast, Lawrence teamed up with Grammy Award winning producer Eric Krasno (Lettuce/Soulive/Tedeschi Trucks Band), and brought in several NYC soul/funk mainstays including Adam Deitch (Lettuce), Cory Henry (Snarky Puppy), and Maurice “Mobetta” Brown (Tedeschi Trucks Band) for guest appearances. Following two short runs with Blues Traveler in the fall of 2015, Lawrence is currently promoting Breakfast with a national tour of headline dates, festival appearances, and as many pancakes and omeletes as possible.

Clyde and Gracie have been writing and playing music together since their early childhood, performing regularly at small cafés and clubs around lower Manhattan, and of course, in their living room at their grandparents’ request. During Clyde’s time at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, they met the crew of talented musicians that would ultimately form the full-time Lawrence lineup, an eight-piece keyboard-driven powerhouse with a dynamic horn section to support the siblings’ explosive vocal arrangements. It was with this group that they began to garner a passionate following at countless venues and colleges across the Northeast.

With Breakfast, Lawrence doesn’t shy away from the oft-maligned idea of “pop” music, but instead is on a mission to write the music they wish “pop” sounded like. They draw from the past and present, combining their love of The Beatles, Randy Newman, and Etta James with Beyonce, Ben Folds, and Amy Winehouse.

In addition to working with Lawrence, Clyde has composed songs and score for films such as Miss Congeniality (2000), Music and Lyrics (2007), The Rewrite (2015), and Hard Sell (2016). At age six, Clyde was admitted as the youngest member to the Songwriters Guild of America for his work on Miss Congeniality (2000). Gracie is also an accomplished actress who has performed on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, films such as Did You Hear About The Morgans (2009) and The Sitter (2011), and TV shows such as The Good Wife (2012) and The Americans (2014). 

About Streets of Laredo

It's always hard to put your finger on the exact moment a band began, but it's safe to say that Streets of Laredo probably started in a beach-house on the wild Coromandel coast of New Zealand back in the summer of 2012. A handful of Gibsons (Dave, Dan & Sarah) started throwing some songs at some long-time musical collaborators (including Si Moore), an old-fashioned hoe-down ensued, someone shouted out a band name and it all became a fact before anyone could catch their breath. 

Inspired by the evangelical fervor of the '70s folk circuit that spawned modern day re-incarnations like Alex Ebert, Joshua Tilman and Arcade Fire, Streets of Laredo quickly gelled around the idea of a traveling family band playing unruly sing-along tunes with whatever instruments were at hand. Add in a few timely demos and the growing desire to take on a new challenge and before you know it the Streets family played one show in their home town and then packed up their New Zealand lives and transplanted themselves halfway round the world to Brooklyn, NY. 

"In the fall of 2012 we found ourselves a rehearsal space in an industrial building in Bushwick, just off the Morgan stop, and started playing one of our first songs, 'Girlfriend,' over and over for hours on end. Just trying to figure out our sound, who we were, and how we were possibly gonna survive in this town. The only thing we knew was that we'd finally made it to New York and we sure as hell weren't about to leave." 

Pretty quickly the four-piece met some remarkable people from Bushwick's vibrant music scene and gathered around them a wider family of players who would eventually form a tight-knit seven-piece band that'd well and truly find their place in the local scene. 

A quick trip back to New Zealand in early 2013 saw the band track the bones of ten songs, which would turn into their debut release, the double EP "Volume I & II." Calling in years of friendships and owed favours, those sessions in an old converted Auckland theatre proved to be landmark in locking down that distinctive Streets of Laredo sound. 

However you describe it, the resulting songs and sound of "Volume I & II" have had an instant effect on fans and critics alike, with widely hailed comparisons to Arcade Fire, Edward Sharpe and even "The Lumineers on acid." Add to that sound a mesmerizing stage show featuring multiple stand-up drummers, horn players, guitars in every corner of the stage, weird home-made instruments and five-part harmonies, and it's easy to see why Streets of Laredo won the AAA category of the world-wide Unsigned Artists competition and were feted as a must-see band at 2013's CMJ Music Marathon in NYC. 

Streets of Laredo are: Daniel Gibson, Dave Gibson, Sarah Gibson, Si Moore, Tom Darlow, Sean McMahon, and Andrew McGovern.