Laura Stevenson's "Wheel" Tour is an Homage to Nurturing Our Younger Selves

When Laura Stevenson’s third record, Wheel, came out, I was a freshman in college, grappling with new aspects of my identity revealing themselves as I was living on my own for the first time. Suddenly, everything I knew about myself, my family, and what love meant ruptured like a sawdust-filled balloon, creating a makeshift mess in every crevice of my life. My freshman-year roommate, Carly, loved emo music just as much as I did. We’d sit in the dark, letting Waxahatchee or Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) fill the room. I wore my Topshelf Records crewneck. Carly hung a Why? poster above her bed, making the space completely inhabitable for anyone who wasn’t on our level of misery. In our case, our third roommate had decided that we were “too depressed” and requested to leave our room. It was for the best. She invited guys to watch movies in her bunk bed while Carly and I cowered at our desks, blogging angsty poems on our Tumblr pages while Hospice by The Antlers blasted through our headphones.

As we continued to struggle with the chokehold of our own revelations, I showed Carly a few YouTube clips of Laura belting in her powerful voice. Her lyrics were filled subtly with vulnerable messages of trauma, mental illness, and the faulty concept of home. Together and separately, we listened to Laura sing truths to us with gracious, string-lead melodies backing her each move; it felt like an album that captured a season, a moment in time, a feeling. To me, the season was fall, melancholic yet grateful, walking around my Chicago campus or looking out the window while taking the scenic Brown line.

In 2015, I saw Laura Stevenson for the second time on her Wheel tour at the venue known as The Abbey, which was forcibly shut down by a fire in 2019. I remember being confused by the venue, passing Chicago’s token Olive Garden to get there. I went by myself and stood in the front row. Someone in Laura’s band got sick, so she had to go on alone, which I didn’t mind at all. I captured the tiniest snippet on my Instagram and posted it, but that show changed my life – just like every Laura Stevenson show after that.

I interviewed Laura 4 years ago for Hooligan’s 29th issue, and though we have kept in touch since then, we hopped on a Zoom call to talk about her current Wheel tour. Juggling a toddler, an on-and-off tour, friends in town, and other responsibilities, Laura joined the call from her house in upstate New York and caught me up. I asked her how she feels playing this album in full almost a decade after its release. She both earnestly said and joked, “Well, I’ve seen a few therapists and have done a lot of work since then.” She continued, “My therapist now is always trying to get me to hold my younger self and honor my younger self for where I was at, you know? Every time I talk about it, I get really sad, but listening to myself where I was at, or what I was struggling with, or the way of dealing with specific traumas… it was really kind of beautiful to be able to hold that younger version of myself and to nurture that person.”

To play certain songs on a record at live shows is one thing, but to play the entirety is its own commitment. There is the process of relearning all the songs, incorporating newer aspects, and putting oneself back in that place when one wrote the record. It’s like going into an attic and staying there a while, digging through rusty relics and neglected beanie babies.

Since Laura is a parent, the tour structured of weekend shows. Having already played a few sets of the tour on the East Coast, she got to experience the profound phenomenon of this specific album tour. She explained, ”There [are] faces that were in the songs, you know, and it was heavy, but it felt like I was graduating some sort of level of my therapy.” She expanded, “It ended up being really beautiful at the New York show, you know, a lot of the songs I had written in Brooklyn and the same neighborhood that the venue was in, and it just kind of brought it all in.”

This is Laura Stevenson’s chance to come back from only always nurturing her child to put in her energy towards arranging music and performing with people she loves to an extremely attentive crowd. So far, at the shows, people applauded for a long time after Wheel ended. Though they continue with more songs, Laura feels discomfort when attempting to remain present onstage. Her husband, bandmate, and part-time publicist, Mike Campbell, urged her “to just experience it.” She admitted, “People here like the thing, and they appreciate the thing, and we can all be together. I'm going to try to be present for that.” I told her that it would be a gift to the audience for her to let their praise wash over her since that is what she does for the audience. In reality, it’s a reciprocal relationship.

In so many ways, this Wheel tour is a culmination of nostalgia for a past life, nurturing our younger selves and honoring all the ways we’ve grown and survived since then. It is a gift to stand in a room full of mindful friends and strangers, preparing to be washed over by Laura Stevenson’s gift to us, and returning a gift of gratitude right back.

Follow the tour in its Midwest leg here. Support Laura and her Patreon here!