‘Bowie told me it’s OK to be messy’: the starry life and strife of singer-songwriter Lawrence Rothman

Lawrence Rothman has lived a lot of lives: in the early aughts, they performed under the name Lillian Berlin in the ultra-political hard rock band Living Things. They’ve been a model, posing with Kate Moss in a 2008 Roberto Cavalli ad; and with their wife, Floria Sigismondi, director of The Runaways, in i-D magazine. Kim Gordon, Lucinda Williams and a pre-fame Billie Eilish are just some of their collaborators. And on their debut solo album, 2017’s The Book of Law, they explored nine alter egos, each with distinct personas and visual identities, through flamboyant, off-kilter pop.

With the release of 2021’s Good Morning America, they switched gears into sun-scorched country, a mode that continues on their third album, The Plow That Broke the Plains: an intense, upsetting, starkly personal record. “To bear things inside of myself that are uncomfortable, it felt weirdly easier for me to do it in a singer-songwriter setting,” they say. “In an experimental setting, the lyric is hidden in math, and you haven’t purged it from yourself. I had a lot of purging I had to do on this record.”

That choice of words is depressingly apt: much of The Plow That Broke the Plains chronicles a period post-pandemic in which the 41-year-old realised they had “a borderline eating disorder” and had developed a dependency on laxatives and diet supplements. The beginnings of that realisation come through vividly on the morbidly catchy Drugstore Bummin’: “Under fluorescent light I’m looking like I’m twice my age / I can see every bone in my ribcage.”

Rothman, who was born in Missouri and is based in LA, decided to record the entirety of The Plow That Broke the Plains in Nashville, Tennessee. Early on in the writing process, they were taken to hospital with “some very kind of severe stomach thing,” which revealed the extent of their eating disorder. They decided to change their behaviour immediately. “I’m very cold turkey like that when some major event happens – I didn’t need any sort of sit-down from family members. There was some talk, there was the hospital, then next day, I woke up and I never went back to it.”

Rothman says they’ve always been a “love yourself, love every flaw” type of person – so it was confronting to come to terms with the fact that they had been obsessing over their own weight and image. “It’s uncomfortable and embarrassing to say, but social media and the world around us sort of dictate these ways to look and act, and you can get caught up in that. One wrong picture of yourself from a weird angle and you might think there’s a problem with the way you look. If you’re sensitive about that, you could start doing dangerous things to your body, which is exactly what I was doing.”

Shortly after their stint in the emergency room, Rothman wrote LAX, a sweeping song about giving up laxatives that doubles as a resigned breakup ballad. “The dichotomy of it being about an old love in LA and about laxatives at the same time just felt really amusing, but very, very truthful too,” they say. “Addictions can lead to your loved ones disappearing – not everybody wants to hang out with somebody who has a problem, no matter how much they love you.”

The honesty of LAX pervades the rest of The Plow That Broke the Plains, which unearths other traumatic events from Rothman’s life. The chugging, sneering Poster Child, written with their friend Jason Isbell, includes mention of an incident in July 2003 when Rothman was pistol-whipped and shot at after a Living Things show in Dallas, Texas. “I had makeup on, and I was dressed how I wanted to be dressed, and certain folks in the crowd did not like that,” they say. (At the time, it was reported that the assault was by members of the National Guards who disagreed with Living Things’ stance against then US president George Bush.) “It was a severely traumatic experience, and [our label] spread it to all sorts of press at the time, and I was mortified because I really, truly didn’t want other people coming to the shows or giving them ideas to go to other artists’ shows where it’s like, if you don’t agree with what they’ve presented on stage, you can go shoot them or kick their ass.”

More broadly, Poster Child’s refrain of “We can use that” lampoons the music industry’s desire to profit from the trauma of artists – a mechanism Rothman says they’ve encountered numerous times. “When you’re young and you’re naive, companies can kind of take advantage of your traumas in a way that you [don’t] really understand the outcome of,” they say. “My first band was on a couple different major labels and had a lot of major management companies behind us, and they totally took advantage of us, they misguided us.”

In recent years, Rothman has been releasing music independently via their own label, KRO Records; while they say they “don’t really fit into a scene”, they have forged strong relationships with artists like the country singer Amanda Shires, who credits Rothman with reinvigorating her love of music after a period in which she thought she might quit.

She is one of many musicians who have affected Rothman’s art. Rothman’s wife, Floria, a film and music video director, worked closely with David Bowie; in 2013, Bowie visited Rothman’s studio and was one of the first people to hear their debut solo single, Montauk Fling. It was a formative moment for Rothman. “He gave me the self-confidence to just present all the versions of yourself, and [said] it’s OK to be messy about it,” Rothman recalls. Bowie encouraged them to “hop around, follow the inspired moment”, and switch genres at will if inspiration strikes. “He said those words to me in 2013, and it really has stuck with me for the last 11 years.”

Later, Rothman would cross paths with a future pop luminary: while working on The Book of Law, producer Justin Raisen enlisted a then unknown teen singer named Billie Eilish to sing backing vocals on the song Geek, alongside Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses on bass and Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs on guitar. “It was an uncredited accident – before she even had a record deal,” Rothman says of Eilish. “I legitimately loved the way it sounded. And then she obviously became who she is today, which is one of the greatest singers of all time.”

Geek is the kind of cross-genre, cross-scene experiment that Rothman loves; they say that their dream collaboration would involve “King Krule, Sampha, Lucinda Williams and Vince Gill all singing a song together. I just don’t see lines with that stuff.” The Plow That Broke the Plains already boasts an impressive collaborator list: aside from Isbell and Shires, the album also features acclaimed folk singer-songwriter SG Goodman, who duets with Rothman on the fiery R Blood, which rages against anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in America. They describe the track as “very emotion based”, as opposed to the kind of protest song a singer like Isbell or Neil Young might write. “I think in today’s time, it’s actually more dangerous to be LGBTQ in some parts of America than it was maybe even 10 years ago,” they say. “I don’t think that it’s getting any better, and that’s a really sad reality.”

They take some solace in knowing that a younger, more empathic generation, to which their 19-year-old daughter belongs, will soon be in power. “My daughter’s generation is like some of the most beautiful humans that have ever walked the planet. The rules and the hang-ups that all the other generations have just don’t apply to them,” they say. “When that world is finally leaders and government officials, I think at that point it won’t be utopia, but it’ll be much better than it is today.”

• The Plow That Broke the Plains is released 26 April on KRO Records