Lawrence Rothman Wants to Break Free From Music’s Ones and Zeroes

Flesh and Blood

The songwriter celebrates human interaction on new album Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust. "Now is the biggest time in human history for artists to perform live," they say

For most of Lawrence Rothman’s career, the singer-songwriter and producer has eschewed any notion of a genre. But the longer they have spent in Americana spaces, whether on their own projects or producing for the likes of Amanda Shires or Maggie Rose, the more Rothman comes around.

“Americana, to me, in 2026, is everything that’s associated with great American music, all rolled into one ball,” Rothman says. “It’s soul, R&B, singer-songwriter, folk, country, rock. You even got a little bit of punk rock. For me, it’s the place to identify with the way that I create.”

Rothman’s creative impulses turned into Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, their 13-track LP that dropped on Friday via KRO Records. It’s the follow-up to 2024’s The Plow That Broke the Plains and it completes a trilogy that began with 2021’s Good Morning, America. Rothman conceived of the idea shortly after moving to Nashville during the pandemic and connecting with the Americana scene.

On a sweltering late-summer afternoon during Americanafest in Nashville, Rothman sat on the patio of Brown’s Diner — while Jeremy Ivey serenaded a crowd inside and played over the patio’s speakers — and explained how this project came to light.

“I’ve always been big on trilogies,” Rothman tells Rolling Stone. “Henry Miller, one of my favorite writers of all time, had this series called ‘Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus’ [Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion trilogy], and that was like the first meaty thing I ever read as a teen. I was maybe 17, and it was 400, 500 pages, and I loved it. I was obsessed. After that, once I became a songwriter and had a record deal and all that, I thought, ‘One day, I want to make a series of records just like how Henry Miller did that.”

Even without that context, Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust comes across as a natural sequel to The Plow That Broke the Plains, as Rothman confronts generational trauma, self-destruction, and existing in a politically-charged, AI-dominated era from which music provides little respite. The album also features Rothman collaborating with songwriters like Madi Diaz, Katie Pruitt, and Shires.

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Pruitt and Shires are repeat contributors to Rothman’s trilogy, with Shires’ contribution acting as a clear-cut tie that binds the whole project. In 2021, the two artists sang “Thrash the West” on Good Morning, America. It was a tune that served as an outlet for Rothman’s own anxiety and bouts with depression, and includes lines like “karma came and bit us in the ass.” For Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, Rothman wrote “Karmakaze” with Jillian Jaqueline. By the time they finished, the song had become the second half of “Thrash the West.”

“I didn’t know Amanda when I wrote ‘Thrash the West,’” Rothman recalls. “That was our first meeting together, and we really hit it off as friends and collaborators. I had ‘Karmakaze’ floating around for a while, and actually at one point wanted to present it to her so she could make it her own. But I held onto it and finished it for this record. I had a verse, and it was called ‘Kamikaze’ but I eventually figured out that I was writing about karma.”

This summer, Rothman dropped a video to “Karmakaze,” directed by Rothman’s wife and creative partner, Floria Sigismondi, that features Rothman playing the song against a desolate, rock-walled backdrop set in the desert. It drives home the lonely angst in Rothman’s voice as they sing, “We’re going down like a karmakaze, still alive but the odds against me,” against a strings-and-percussion melody that the album returns to time and again.

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Rothman will spend most of September and October touring off the album, hitting clubs and rock rooms such as Groove in New York City and Chief’s on Broadway in Nashville. They say that playing live is the biggest motivation in their career, and that artists can still impact society directly by getting onstage and singing songs to real, live people.

“I started my career in a punk band,” Rothman says. “We would burn effigies of George Bush onstage, then get kicked off the stage or off the tour. We were making statements about how you felt about how the country is run, and then you’d get censored. Now, you can say anything, but the threat is, we are really deep now into zeros and ones. When they worried, in the year 2000, about the whole Y2k thing? Well, it happened, but it happened in the year 2025.

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“Now is the biggest time in human history for artists to perform live, with their hands on a microphone,” they continue. “Seeing the human touch and visually watching it — that’s the most important influence that we can be as artists on a younger generation to not get locked up in those zeroes and ones.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.