‘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 iD 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 sitdown 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 selfconfidence 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
water to irrigate co-op members’ 34,000 acres of sugarcane, and that effectively puts an end to sugarcane farming in the south Texas borderlands.
Co-op leadership blame this on ongoing shortages related to a US water-sharing agreement that splits Rio Grande River water with Mexico. If only Mexico had released water from its reservoirs to American farmers as decreed by a 1944 treaty, Uhlhorn told the Guardian, sugarcane might have been saved. Phone calls and emails to various Mexican consulates were not returned.
But sugarcane’s demise in Texas is indicative of many agricultural areas’ water woes. Increasingly dry farms find themselves vying with other farms, cities, industries and mining operations for dwindling resources. In 2022, drought decimated Texas cotton and forced California growers to idle half their rice fields. Water disputes are also on the rise as decreased flows in the Colorado River and other vital waterways pit state against state, states against native nations and farmers against municipalities.
“That story is playing out all across the western US,” said Maurice Hall, senior adviser on climate-resilient water systems at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). And irrigated agriculture, “which uses the dominant part of our managed water supply in most of the arid and semi-arid western US, is right in the middle of it”. Sugarcane may be the first irrigated crop to go under in the lower Rio Grande. But it probably won’t be the last.
By early March, the mill had harvested the last sugarcane crops from about 100 area producers, including from the 7,000-acre farm Travis Johnson works with his uncle in Lyford, Texas. His family has farmed this land for 100 years, but sugarcane – a lucrative crop thanks to government subsidies – was a new addition about 20 years ago.
As the lower Rio Grande’s notoriously fierce winds gusted through his phone, Johnson sounded resigned to the end of his family farm’s sugarcane era. For the near future, he’ll be growing more of the cotton, corn and grains that fill out the rest of his acreage. “It was nice to have another crop we could rely on,” he said. “Sugarcane was something that we could harvest and get money for during a time when we were spending money on our other crops.”
Though sugarcane was a reliable cash crop, it is also a water hog. In a place like the lower Rio Grande, where average rainfall is 29 inches or less a year, sugarcane requires up to 50 inches of water a year. It cannot grow here without irrigation. The co-op’s sugar mill churned out 60,000 tons of molasses and 160,000 tons of raw sugar annually, and that’s also a water-heavy business.
“So many of the steps along that process require a massive amount of water,” starting with washing cane when it comes in from the field, said journalist Celeste Headlee, whose Big Sugar podcast explored Florida’s exploitative sugar industry. (The bulk of US sugarcane is commercially in only two other states, Florida and Louisiana; less water-intensive sugar beets are grown in cooler states like Minnesota and North Dakota).
Per the 1944 treaty, Mexico is obligated to deliver 1.75m acre-feet of water to the US in any given five-year cycle (the current cycle ends in October 2025).
“This thing worked pretty good up until 1992,” said Uhlhorn, when “we got into a situation where Mexico was not delivering their water” due to extraordinary drought – a scenario that played out again in the early 2000s. In 2022, Rio Grande reservoirs fell to treacherously low capacities. A storm eventually dumped rain mostly on the Mexican side; what fell in Texas “was enough water for maybe one irrigation, but you’d have to starve your other crops” in order to water sugarcane, Uhlhorn said. A Texas Farm Bureau publication said that Mexico currently “owes 736,000 acre-feet of water”.
Lack of water caused Texas growers to plow under thousands of acres of sugarcane during the last growing season. “So now [the farmers are] down to 10,000 acres and we’re no longer viable,” explained Uhlhorn about the decision to end production. “Even if we had the best yields ever, with our fixed costs, the mill would have lost millions of dollars.”
The Texas A&M agricultural economist Luis Ribera said: “It’s not that Mexico is holding the water because they are bad neighbors. They’re using it” because drought has plagued both sides of the border. As David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, elaborated, the entire Rio Grande [Valley] faces these challenges “from source to sea. Users on both sides of the border are going to have to define water efficiencies and conservation strategies to mitigate these pressures.” In other words, said Travis Johnson, the mill closure “is probably going to be a wake-up call for farmers in our area, whenever we do get water again, to try to conserve it as much as possible”.
In the immediate post-closure period, Uhlhorn and the cooperative members are selling off equipment to settle debts and trying to find replacement jobs for mill staff at places like SpaceX and the Brownsville Ship Channel.The facility employed 100 full-time workers and supported another 300 part-time laborers. The cooperative also reportedly shipped all remaining sugar from its warehouses more than 600 miles away to the Domino refinery in Chalmette, Louisiana, one of the hemisphere’s largest sugar processors.
The Santa Rosa sugar mill was a vital cog in an industry that generated an estimated $100m annual in economic impact from four counties in the lower Rio Grande. The loss of jobs and community revenue might well extend to the valley’s $200m citrus industry, which also is struggling to meet its water needs and survive.
“I wish I could tell you we had all the answers and we were geniuses, and we were going to avoid what happened to the sugar mill. But I can’t,” said Dale Murden, a grapefruit and cattle farmer. “Water going into the spring and summer is as low as it’s ever been, and some water districts have already notified customers they’re out [of water] for the year. Without rains and inflows and cooperation from Mexico, we are in serious trouble.”
The International Boundary and Water Commission, which is responsible for applying the 1944 treaty, began negotiating a new provision to it – called a “minute” – in 2023, with the aim of “bringing predictability and reliability to Rio Grande deliveries to users in both countries”, a spokesperson wrote in an email.
Vanessa Puig-Williams, EDF’s Texas water program director, said that if the new minute focuses on the science of how much water is actually available on both sides of the border, that would be an opportunity “to think more innovatively and creatively about how we can conserve some of those water rights”.
Either way, Michel said farmers must adjust to a thirstier reality. That might include using recycled water and tools like moisture sensors, finding better irrigation techniques and planting more drought-resistant crop varieties. And they may have to reconcile themselves to the fact “you won’t be able to do [certain things] any more just because there isn’t water”.
Chelsea Fisher, a University of South Carolina anthropologist who studies environmental justice conflicts, said lessons relevant to the current water crisis can be found throughout agricultural history. “Something that you notice across societies that manage to farm sustainably for at least several centuries is that they’re emulating relationships that already exist in nature – whether that means copying the way that wetlands recycle nutrients, whether it’s dryland farming that is very much in sync with the ways that water naturally gathers in certain places,” she said.
In fact, Johnson plans to stop growing crops that require irrigation. Instead, he’ll focus only on those that can be grown with naturally available moisture. “I don’t think [the water situation] just amazingly gets better overnight,” he said.
The Environmental Defense Fund’s Hall said that the water crisis was pushing growers to ask: “What is the future that we want? And how do we move toward that future, recognizing with a clear-eyed view what the real hydrology is? … People want to continue doing what they’ve been doing. But at some point, undesirable things are going to happen. Things like sugarcane and industries and whole communities going away. Farmers who are willing to listen to what the science is telling us is going to happen, and to think about how we can do things differently: that is where the real innovation at scale is going to happen.”