The record that saved Khruangbin’s Laura Lee: “Emotional support”
Almost everybody has got an album that changed their life, rewired their brains, and changed how they listened to, felt or understood music. An album that opened their eyes to new ways of thinking, possibilities, and interests.
Plenty of people have even got albums that saved their lives, albums that they return to when they’re in need of comfort, support and a familiar feel. An album that reminds them of the light when they’re in the darkness. For Laura Lee Ochoa, founding bass player with the psychedelic rock Texas-trio Khruangbin, the album that saved her life was perhaps a surprising one.
Speaking with Uncut, Laura Lee ran through some of the music that changed her life. “We had all The Beatles cassettes on rotation in the car growing up. I actually taught myself to read from the liner notes,” she said before talking about the lasting impact of their seventh album, Revolver, “Still today, every time we record an album, I always go back and listen to Revolver because it’s such a study in freedom. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is a pretty wild experimental choice, and sometimes people are afraid to make those choices now”.
While she remembers listening to The Beatles in the car with her father, at home, she would listen to something completely different with her mother, “My mom, who’s Latina, adored Gloria Estefan because she represented this woman who crossed over into the American diva world,” she explained. “Then when she put out this record, she was harking back to where she came from. It was the record I probably sang the most with my mom.”
The parental effect on her formative music tastes is strong, but Ochoa discovered plenty of music which inspired her on her own, such as Clutch’s Slow Hole to China album from 2003, “This record in particular is full of riffs. Clutch are a powerhouse – they never broke big, but within the stoner rock scene they’re very well regarded. There’s something actually really funky about stoner metal, and I really like that aspect of it. There’s a groove in this hypnotic, hazy way”. A lot of these words could be used to describe the music that Krhuangbin make: groovy, hypnotic, hazy and full of riffs. Even if the genre is different, the core elements are shared across the artists.
“If I had to pick one record to listen to for the rest of my life, it would be this. I think it’s perfect,” she says of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 release I Want You. “This is when he was breaking away from the mould that had been defined for him, so I think it’s quite a rebellious record.”
When she adds that “songs start and stop in odd places. That’s a beautiful thing to keep in mind when crafting a record, to not feel like you have to do anything to please anyone”, you can again hear the influence creeping into the Khruangbin ethos. As much as their music is pleasing on the ear, with their calming and earthy rhythms, you get the sense that Khruangbin are making the music that they want to make, hoping it finds a community and a home but not worrying too much about whether it will. They’d still be playing the exact same things for themselves if nobody was around to hear it.
While all of these albums changed her life and later inspired her own music, the one that she singled out as having saved her life entirely was Radiohead’s 1997 release, OK Computer: “I feel like this record saved my life. I was going through a traumatic time in my young life, and it made me feel that I wasn’t alone – it made sense of the world to me. A record had never given me that much emotional support”.
Perhaps somewhere out there now, or someone out there in the future will feel the same way about Khruangbin’s The Universe Smiles Upon You or A La Sala albums.
