Nashville may be the place Lawrence Rothman first cut their teeth as an artist, but it took the ongoing surge in Americana and emo country for them to fall in love with the city.
“I kind of sum up Nashville with all the music that’s happening adjacent to the Americana sound right now — and I’m including Zach Bryan — with the rawness of the songwriting, and the lyrics being first,” Rothman tells Rolling Stone.
“That’s an M.O. for me. Nashville had fallen off my radar until I came back here in 2020 and started getting turned on to a lot of these artists. I realized that this is what I’ve been missing. I’ve been searching for music that puts the lyrics first like this.”
Rothman is speaking broadly, but they are also speaking about The Plow That Broke the Plains, the 13-track studio album they released this spring. At a dive bar in East Nashville, ahead of a mid-May album-release show at the Basement, Rothman is eager to showcase a rekindled love for the independent side of Music City.
Away from the microphone, Rothman holds a steadily growing influence on Americana. They have produced, co-written, or performed with Margo Price, Katie Pruitt, Amanda Shires, and Angel Olsen, among others. At the Basement show, Shires joined Rothman onstage for the opening song, “LAX,” to which Shires also contributed vocals on The Plow That Broke the Plains. Rothman called Shires “my best friend,” at the end of the song. “Yes! I have one!” Shires responded, before stepping off the stage and into the crowd for the rest of the set.
Rothman then launched into “Poster Child,” which they co-wrote with Jason Isbell about a 2004 incident in which Rothman was attacked outside of a Texas club following a performance.
Rothman has identified as gender-fluid most of their life and prefers to perform in makeup and flashy, punk-rock attire. In Texas in the early 2000s, such a show carried a certain amount of risk for artists.
“This was the height of the Bush presidency,” they say. “Look, I don’t like to get too preachy on stage, but I did have a history — not in Texas — of taking a George Bush photo, and taking a lighter shaped like a gun, and burning it onstage. Now, I did not do it there, but I think word got around that I’d done it before. And they didn’t like the way I was dressed.
“After the show, I was standing in an alley, and three guys jumped me and shot at me, and broke my ribs,” they continue. “It was pretty traumatic. You hear about these assaults happening, but it’s not until it happens to you that you really feel the pain that one goes through.”
Early in the process of writing what became The Plow That Broke the Plains, Isbell hosted Rothman for a songwriting session, and Rothman said they wanted this record to encapsulate the journey of their musical career. Isbell suggested they start from the beginning, and Rothman began telling stories. The second one was about the attack. Both artists played guitar while they turned the frightening tale into a song. Rothman, who started learning guitar at age 8, says they had long-ago fallen out of love with the instrument until that session with Isbell.
“I sort of felt like I was back in my parents’ basement. I had a comfortable feeling, like we were two kids from Middle America, who were now grown up, writing together like we were back in that basement,” they say. ”It just made me want to go there with this song.”
The Plow That Broke the Plains was largely recorded in Nashville at Sound Emporium studios. A pair of songs on the record, “LAX” and “Drug Store Bummin’,” came from an incident near the end of recording in which Rothman took enough over-the-counter pills that they landed in the emergency room. They flew back to Los Angeles to recuperate. “I found myself going to Walgreens a lot, and I bought a bunch of shit I probably didn’t need, and then I started putting that shit in my body,” Rothman told fans during the Basement gig.
After coming up with “LAX” on the flight back to L.A., Rothman decided to add one more track to the album. “R Blood” is an overtly political number calling out “the American dream turned American horror” over a blend of country and R&B melodies. Rothman recruited S.G. Goodman to perform it as a duet for The Plow That Broke the Plains.
“I was reading an article about the storm we’re about to enter, with the election, and it got me thinking,” Rothman says. “I haven’t written a politically-driven song in years, but I came up with this. Then, I went over to Sunset Sound, and I cut it. I thought, ‘Man, if I’m going to do this, I want someone on it with me, who I love, and who has the same ethics as me.’ Well, that’s S.G.”
Rothman, 42, grew up in St. Louis, extremely familiar with the city’s hip-hop scene, but that was far from the only influence. Their father was a rock DJ and a fan of oldies and country music. When a young Rothman discovered MTV during the grunge era, they were hooked: “That’s when I knew it was something I wanted to do.” Their father took them to Nashville at age 14, and Rothman cut their first professional recordings in the city. Despite living in Los Angeles, they say they find solace in Nashville (away from Music Row) working alongside other progressive-minded musicians.
“I think, for a while, that Nashville was very comfortable in its process, and I think there was a laziness to it,” Rothman says. “Then, people like [producer] Dave Cobb and some of these other producers started opening up the door to where we didn’t have to be that comfortable. We could try other avenues. At the same time the Americana scene — the East Nashville scene — has gotten way more welcoming of diversity. That’s key to good music. If it’s all just the same type of person, you’re going to get the same type of sound.”
Their Basement gig was an early one, meaning Rothman had barely an hour to play and clear the stage ahead of the venue’s late show. When the whirlwind of a concert finished, they walked off with a message of appreciation to the local crowd.
“I love every single one of y’all,” Rothman said. “Don’t ever forget that Nashville is the greatest place on earth, and I fucking mean that!”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing.
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.