“Hi, I’m Laura Cortese, and I sing and play the fiddle at the same time, sometimes the viola and the fiddle. I live in Boston, Massachusetts, but I’m originally from San Francisco, California. I have been touring and recording basically since I graduated college. I put out my first record then, and at that time I played Celtic music, Scottish, specifically. So, I put out a record of Scottish songs and fiddle tunes, and now, I guess I’m maybe five albums later, and the whole time I’ve been exploring what it means to be an artist.

“You have a place that you grew up, a trade you learned, a style, the people you learned under. That was your first way of learning how to express, was emulating them. Along the way you met a lot of different people and had a lot of different influences, and it sort of starts to coalesce into your own form of expression. I would hope that it continues to evolve.

“You spend all this time, sort of, in the laboratory creating this beautiful masterpiece of your expression and your art, and then it’s done, and you need to get it out there to share it with people. As a musician, typically, that means you load into a van with a few people you think will be fun to hang out with, and that play instruments; and maybe, hopefully, they played on the record with you. They play the instruments that represent this new artistic endeavor. You just pile everything that you could possibly need into the van: all the CDs, all the vinyl. . . your creature comforts. On this tour, we’ve been trying to put a U.S. map on the roof of the van. We’d like to have a little pin to represent everywhere we’ve driven it.
“In each place you show up at some kind of venue, and you’ve either sent things to the newspaper, or put up posters around town, or used Facebook, or told your friends to call their friends to try to get a few people that have never heard your music before into a room, paying a ticket price to listen to your band. You have varying degrees of success. At your hometown show, it’s two sold-out shows, and all your friends come out to play. In another town that you’ve never been to before, you’re really pleased to see fifteen people that are ready to sing along on every song, and hopefully at the end of the night take home the CD. Along the way, you meet all kinds of people, and hear all kinds of stories, and just try to get this album out into the world.

“Doing this touring thing for ten, eleven, maybe twelve years, you have an idea in your head of what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s great to have goals, but as long as you’re doing what you love, and you are doing it for the sake of doing it: because you enjoy it, and because you feel passionate about the music, then at least for me every day is enjoyable. Getting to see my friends, getting to play music with them, getting to have a connection with one individual in the audience every night, and knowing you’ve moved just one person is meaningful to me. Even though there might be certain goals that you might have, like, “Wouldn’t it be great to play on such-and-such a stage, in front of x number of people?” Yeah, it is fun when you get to play to a huge, packed crowd . . . but for me, having that connection with even just one individual is pretty profound, and that means something.” •