A Postcard From Laura Cortese

EDITOR’S NOTE: No Depression’s “Postcard From” series features dispatches from artists' daily lives on the road, in the studio, or anywhere in between. Our next installment comes from Belgium-based singer, songwriter, and fiddler Laura Cortese. Her new album, Lucky Water, is due out this Friday, October 9 via Compass Records.

I'm sitting at the kitchen table in my row house in Ghent, Belgium, where I wrote my new album Lucky Water, looking out at the laundry hanging under the branches of my fig tree. It's a very "European scene," if you know what I mean, one that I still find intoxicating after almost 10 years here.

On my first romantic trip to Portugal after meeting my now-husband (the Belgian who drew me here), I took at least 10 film photos of laundry hanging from lines three stories up. My life as a touring musician and mother of two includes mountains of laundry dried to a crisp on the line and then brought in to be folded. It usually waits in that folding-holding zone for at least a week as we all fish out favorite items. Some items are washed, worn, and washed again as the mountain keeps growing. How mundane.

And yet I still find it a beautiful sign of daily ritual; the sign of a life lived relatively slowly in these ever-speedy times. These daily tasks mean more and more to me as an artist. They are the details in the stories I tell about the people that matter. Everyday people living everyday lives, and I am in awe of how extraordinarily deep that can feel. 

Hopping on a plane, hurtling through the atmosphere to start a tour sounds exciting. I have memories of adventures playing legendary festivals like Newport Folk Festival, New Orleans and Monterey Jazz Festivals, and Madison Square Garden with Pete Seeger or Carnegie Hall with Band of Horses; supporting Mary Chapin Carpenter and The Mountain Goats on month-long tours, driving way too far crammed in our little minivan, following after their tour buses. Or tours and collaborations in India, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Estonia, Montenegro, Ukraine, and Greece with American Voices. And yet, all those milestone moments, which I cherish, don't touch the feeling I get when I hold a cross-processed, laundry-line photo from 2016 in Lisbon, when I fell in love. Or in 2019, when we returned about a year into our official, signed-by-the-Belgian-state partnership, or in 2022, when we took our first child there again.