Khruangbin’s Laura Lee reveals her favourite Beatles song
Khruangbin have been making their own blend of psychedelia, rock, soul, funk, and dub since 2010. Consisting of Laura Lee on bass and vocals, Mark Speer playing guitar and occasionally contributing vocals, and Donald ‘DJ’ Johnson on drums, the trio have released three studio albums since 2015.
Naming themselves after the Thai word for aeroplane, Khruangbin thought it well-suited the band’s global spread of influences that inspired their rich sound. Both Lee and Spear are also well-known for their on-stage personas, which feature the pair wearing long black wigs that help to partially conceal their faces, with Lee changing outfits multiple times throughout the show.
After releasing their debut album, The Universe Smiles Upon You, in 2015, the band toured with the likes of Father John Misty and Massive Attack, as well as joining the festival circuit. In 2018, Khruangbin released Con Todo el Mundo which was positively received, and since then, the band have collaborated with Leon Bridges, released another record in the shape of Mordechai, and continued touring across the world.
It makes sense that a band with such a diverse range of influences, including Spanish and Middle Eastern music, are also inspired by the Beatles, a group whose music was greatly influenced by world music as their career progressed. As part of a Stereogum article that compiled a list of 80 artists’ favourite Paul McCartney songs in honour of his 80th birthday, Laura Lee was asked to pick hers.
Pondering for a moment, she chose ‘Golden Slumbers’ from the Beatles’ seminal 1969 album Abbey Road. She said: “Whenever I had the opportunity to ride shotgun on mornings my dad would take me to school, he’d put on a Beatles cassette tape and quiz me on which Beatle wrote each song. Paul’s were always the easiest for me to recognize at a wide-eyed four years of age.”
She added: “A few years later, the home I knew and loved fell apart and I spent most of my childhood and adolescence clinging onto what I knew of it. ‘Golden Slumbers’ became the anthem of my life. For years I’d listen to it every time I needed a hug or felt lost. It consoled me; it rocked me to sleep; and it put into words things I didn’t yet know how to articulate. It’s the gorgeous thing about music. The one minute, 32 second song managed to encapsulate an entire childhood’s worth of feelings in a beautifully nostalgic and painfully hopeful way.”
She concluded: “As a grown woman and musician, I still tear up when I hear it, but it’s one of those sweet single tears that happens as you smile, wiping it away as you laugh at the beauty of life and the beauty of memories being held in the arms of a song.”
“And this is just the personal emotional attachment I have to the song. It’s also the perfect breath within arguably the greatest medley of all time. Sandwiched in between the much fuller songs that surround it, it feels like a heart-shaped locket in the middle of rock ‘n’ roll. The greatest things in music and in life are almost the simplest but difficult to achieve. ‘Golden Slumbers’ is just that. I love you, Paul. Thanks for keeping me company all my life.”
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