I don’t easily believe ghost stories, but when singer-songwriter Laura Stevenson tells me about a haunting in her life, I don’t doubt her. During a phone call about a week before she heads out on her final tour of the year — a two-week run with fellow New Yorkers Adult Mom — she explains that she doesn’t believe in ghosts either. But Stevenson always felt there was something off about the house where she grew up in Nassau County, not far from New York City. When she returned to the house in winter 2018 to record her newest full-length The Big Freeze with co-producer Joe Rogers, her suspicions were all but confirmed.
“He was like, ‘This is the most haunted house I’ve ever been in,’ ” Stevenson says, laughing. “ ‘There’s so much negative energy, I can feel it!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that makes sense!’
“But it’s also where I had all my beautiful memories,” she adds. “That was my home. You can feel the weight of that [on the record], for sure.”
Stevenson began her career playing keys in Jeff Rosenstock’s Aughts-era punk-pop project Bomb the Music Industry!, and she’s been releasing her own shape-shifting, guitar-driven pop music since 2008. Her solo material reveals a familiarity with things that leave an impression, even if you can’t see or hear them directly. Throughout her catalog, she’s consistently revealed hints of her most intimate emotional territory, vaguely pointing toward feelings of inadequacy, familial strife, struggles with mental illness and heartache.
But The Big Freeze is different. This time, she’s naming names.
As guitars ring out in the spirited pop song “Dermatillomania,” Stevenson sings in a bright, defiant voice about the disorder that has caused her to compulsively pick and dig at her skin since puberty. It’s the first time she’s talked publicly about her struggles with dermatillomania, and she paired the release of the song with a powerful personal essay for the website Talkhouse.
She also addresses the topic in “Value Inn,” a song about the shame that washes over her after caving to her harmful compulsions in a cheap hotel room. Through waves of weighty, dragging guitar, she sings, “And in a Value Inn / I dig at my skin / With a travel kit in the fluorescence / ’Cause I’m lumbering / ’Cause I want to be gone.”
“[Dermatillomania] is so much more common than I ever could wrap my head around, and it affects so many people,” says Stevenson. “People are coming up to me and telling me, ‘I experience this, this is something that I have also, you’re not alone.’ It’s really beautiful.”
She laughs when asked how it feels for her most revealing collection of songs to also be the first of her releases to hit the Billboard charts. The Big Freeze debuted on the Alternative New Artist Albums, Heatseekers Albums and Current Alternative Albums charts when it was released in March.
“I didn’t think about it that way!” she says. “When it was all happening, I was like, ‘I don’t know what any of this means.’ ’Cause I don’t know what any of it means, really. I felt like the response was positive, which I really like.
“If it had been negative at all, it probably would’ve sent me down some sort of spiral of self-doubt and self-hate, so that’s good,” she adds, laughing. “But I was ready to make a record and not care about how it was received. And that, I think, was setting me up for not being freaked out about putting this into the world.”
In November, Stevenson got to hear “Dermatillomania” from a fresh perspective, when she and Adult Mom released covers of one another’s songs for a digital-only split single. Stevenson delivered a charming version of Adult Mom’s tender pop anthem “Survival,” and Adult Mom’s singer (and only constant member) Stevie Knipe recorded a simple and emotional acoustic version of “Dermatillomania.” It’s stripped of all the pop panache of the original, and it is stunning.
“It’s so fucking beautiful,” Stevenson says of Knipe’s interpretation. “It made me nervous, because all of the fun jauntiness I hide behind was stripped away. That was a vulnerable experience for me, to listen to it, because they unveiled this other layer of the song that I was hiding.”
