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Laurel Premo is known for her rhythmically deep and rapt delivery of roots music, voiced on finger-style electric guitar, lap steel, fiddle, and voice. The glowing heartiness and rich grit of her sound reveal a love of and complete submersion in heavy archaic roots—from the crossover of old-time and blues American traditions to darker Nordic sounds. She is a Michigan-based artist who has been writing, arranging, and touring since 2009 with vocal and instrumental roots acts, and is internationally known from her duo Red Tail Ring. Her 2021 solo release, ‘Golden Loam’, continues Laurel’s sonic raising of old wild landscape, with ruminant power, a masterful use of space, and dynamic waves of warm, gritty sustain. “Subtle but dazzling and rich in texture. Watching a live performance is pure hypnosis.” – MTV
Laurel Premo has spent her life immersed in American and Nordic folk traditions. Now both new compositions and arrangements of older music are held in a living relationship with tradition, musically revealing a bloom of underlying harmonic drones, minimalist repetition, and rich polyrhythm.
A recent review of a live performance in New Mexico:
“Opening act Laurel Premo, handpicked by Will Oldham for the tour, might be my favorite new artist I have seen this year. Her set began with a ten-minute-long solo instrumental piece on the guitar that throbbed with quiet intensity and unexpectedly brought me and many others in the audience to tears. Premo viscerally threw herself into the music she played, rocking back and forth, and fully embodying the swaying nature of her compositions (a mix of traditional and original works). There was something deeply moving about witnessing such an embodied and emotionally present performer work their magic, and I could have listened to her play for far longer than the opening set allowed.” -The Taos News, Oct. 24, 2023
Premo holds a BFA from the Performing Arts Technology Dept. of the University of Michigan School of Music, and has spent half-year stints at both the Sibelius Academy of Music in Helsinki, Finland and the University College of Southeast Norway in Telemark to study traditional music and dance. Important mentors who have helped shape Laurel’s lens in folk arts have been her parents Bette & Dean Premo (fiddle, guitar, and traditional song, Michigan), Joel Mabus (clawhammer banjo, Michigan), Arto Järvelä (fiddle, Finland), Ånon Egeland (fiddle, Norway) and Gerry O’Beirne (guitar, Ireland).
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The traditions woven in Laurel's music come through lived experience as a woman raised by the beings, land, and traditions of the Upper Midwest. From Finnish dance halls to square dances to time spent locally and abroad with elders, this understanding now pushes itself out, not as separate roots but a combined voice. On the most core level, Laurel Premo is a part of these northern places, from the food, water, folk culture, and beings she is in relation with all the way to the silt that sifts into her boots while river walking, and much of her art is actually in the disappearing of her self, having deeply connected with and become part of all of that to simply reflect and amplify it.
She is active in a diverse group of collaborations and compositional projects, and practices an animistic connectivity to land through fly-fishing, traditional craft, plant medicine and gardening, ancestral relation, and deep listening. Though diverse, Laurel Premo’s roles inside of performance, composition, research, guiding, and teaching are also one and the same, and can be simply put - work in vibration. Her strength and value inside of community resides in welcoming folks into or moving through emotion, providing functional or ritual experiences with sound, and helping folks find their own force and connect with greater ones.