Richie Lawrence’s music is the sonic equivalent of a tasty triple scoop ice cream cone.You’ve got your alt country, a heap of roots and a taste of British-flavored accordion sounds. Oh, and don’t forget the Western Swing sprinkled through at least several of the 13 songs on his just-released album Water.
If you think of some of those formats and accordion instrumentation as impossibly 
dated, you’re truly behind the times. Lawrence takes the music to different levels of complexity but allows listeners to watch it bloom, almost like a flower photographed with time delay.
The Tulsa-born Lawrence knows more than a bit about how to make music come alive.
He was just a child when he learned to play the family’s 1917 Steinway Grand by ear, soaking up the music of Ray Charles, Otis Spann, Professor Longhair, Jerry Lee Lewis and Garth Hudson.
He played in cover bands while working toward a BFA in Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder. That’s when he truly became serious about performing and ended up supporting himself with music by the time he graduated.
“As I got better, the gigs got better and I wound up playing with Tim Goodman. When he got a record deal with Columbia, he asked me to move to LA and contribute to his album. I had to decide between going to grad school or playing music.”
After choosing music, Lawrence went on doing session work, playing on a Little
Richard album, and with other bands including Rotondi, an avant garde polka band that went about demolishing the boundaries between polka, rock, blues, pop and world music.
“This was the beginning of the accordion revival,” Lawrence said. “Paul [Lacques, who put together Rotondi] asked me if I could get an accordion sound from my synthesizer. I told him I had an accordion. We took it from there. Since I came from a piano, rock and blues background, I wasn’t familiar with polka. I was able to tap into the energy of the music without copying the style.”
Rotondi put out three CDs, did a lot of local TV, including the Joan Rivers Show and Michael Mann’s Crime Story, toured nationally and almost appeared on Saturday Night Live.
From there he went on to join Justin Bishop in Horse Sense, a duo that performed traditional cowboy folk music. “I’d always been a band member, not a front man, but with Justin I was at the edge of the stage singing and telling jokes.”
Horse Sense toured the globe, but Lawrence wanted an outlet for the songs he’d been writing. When he met bedpandolin (an instrument made from spare parts of other instruments, including an actual bedpan) player and songwriter Ken Cooper, the result was the Loose Acoustic Trio, a bluesy, folky, Cajun, old-time country, ragtime jug band. Lawrence started his own label, Big Book Records, to release the band’s records. Soon he was looking to release his own music. While touring with the Loose Acoustic Trio, Lawrence wrote the songs for Water.
He’ll be touring to support the album, showing fans his serious, singer/songwriter side with the help of the Yolos. “I know it’s crazy to start a solo career at 60,” Lawrence said, “but these songs are important to me. I want people to hear them.”
After even just a quick taste, it’s a fair bet you’ll eat the music up. NANCY DUNHAM
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