After more than a decade of touring, New York siblings Gracie and Clyde Lawrence have transformed their band Lawrence from a scrappy soul-pop project into one of the most vibrant live acts in the country.
But even as the venues grow, the heart of Lawrence remains the same: joy, connection, and family.
“We’ve been touring for something like 10 years now,” Gracie Lawrence told Revue about how life on the road has changed for them. “We used to tour in a van, and now we tour in a bus. We used to eat a lot of junk food, and now we eat significantly less because our bodies are already decaying. But most excitingly, each tour, we see more people show up and scream along to our songs. That excitement never gets old.”
The band will bring their Family Business Tour to GLC Live at 20 Monroe here in town on Oct. 17, and they said they feel like coming to cities like Grand Rapids that they don’t visit as often has become a real marker for how far they’ve come since the early days.
“I’m really stoked to see the new fans we’ve made,” Gracie Lawrence said, adding that time on the road rarely allows them to explore more than the street outside the venue. “If you have one coffee rec we absolutely cannot skip, let us know.”
Before they were playing sold-out theaters, Clyde and Gracie Lawrence were two kids in New York City, writing and performing music together in their family’s living room.
Clyde, older by about three and a half years, showed an early gift for songwriting, plinking melodies on the family piano, with Gracie soon joining in, singing along, and adding her own flair.
At only five years old, Clyde became the youngest member of the Songwriters Guild of America after contributing music to his father, filmmaker Marc Lawrence’s 2000 film “Miss Congeniality.” He’s gone on to write for numerous other films, including the entire score for the 2019 Disney holiday film “Noelle.”
As teenagers, they began performing together around the city, honing their craft in clubs and at open mics. Clyde went on to study at Brown University, writing songs that would eventually appear on Lawrence’s debut album, 2016’s “Breakfast.”
Meanwhile Gracie has leapt into musical theater and acting, making her Broadway debut at only nine years old, and most recently earning a Tony Award nomination for her performance in “Just In Time,” which just finished its Broadway run.
“I think I’ve become a better singer just from getting to stretch my voice and explore new genres, and a stronger performer getting the opportunity to act across Jonathan Groff, and learn from him and our whole cast,” Gracie Lawrence said.
“I’ll definitely try to carry all of that eight-show-a-week energy and chutzpah into our October tour,” she added. “But I feel like even before I was in this Broadway musical, we were always finding really fun ways to make Lawrence feel theatrical. Clyde and I, and everyone in the band, definitely have a proclivity for making music that is super dynamic, even within one song - which in itself, is a very musical theater thing - and we wanted to make the whole ‘Family Business’ album cycle—and tour—feel like a sitcom, or a musical set in a 70s or 80s-looking office that you’re entering into... we’re sort of like the main characters guiding you along that journey.”
“We’ve always loved mixing narrative elements with our music, and of course we love infusing our show with comedy,” Clyde Lawrence added. “So ever since we had the idea to brand the whole ‘Family Business’ album around the idea of our band operating as a fictional company, we had such big ideas for how that could manifest on stage, and we’re so happy with how it has come to life.”
The current tour is the second leg in support of Lawrence’s fourth album, “Family Business,” which came out last year. Its opening track, “Whatcha Want” broke into the Top 40 on the US Pop Charts, and saw the band perform on numerous TV shows including “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.”
“We’ve often described each album as a different season of a TV show,” Clyde Lawrence said. “There’s consistency, but as the story changes, so does the tone. It’s the same with us—the songs reflect where we’re at in our lives at that moment.”
Beyond writing and performing, Lawrence has taken on the music industry itself.
“We’ve been very vocal about things we’ve noticed as we’ve navigated the music industry, not only because we love engaging musicians and non-musicians alike in conversations about it to hear different perspectives, but also because we think that it’s important for artists not to be afraid to question something just because it is the industry standard or the status quo,” Clyde Lawrence said.
Some of those conversations ultimately led him to write an op-ed in “The New York Times,” which then led to Clyde and their bandmate saxophonist Jordan Cohen testifying before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Some positive stuff has definitely happened, most notably lots of venues— including all Live Nation-owned club-sized venues—no longer taking any cut of artist merch sales, and some other similar changes in Live Nation’s financial agreements with artists playing at the club level,” Clyde Lawrence said, pointing to Live Nation’s “On The Road Again” program as a source for more information.
“There are other cool things in the works, but there is also tons more work to be done,” he said.
In the face of so many heavy issues weighing people down, Lawrence never loses sight of their core mission: to create joy in a world that desperately needs it right now.
“I think our shows are really fun—we take fun seriously—and I think fun is not an overrated or frivolous thing to need,” Gracie Lawrence said. “On a slightly more ‘deep’ level, I think concerts are really helpful in connecting with other people. Not necessarily because you go to a show to make a friend, but more so because a song about a specific experience or feeling that was written so personally by the artist is something that a bunch of other people in the same room want to sing along to. I certainly feel that way when I go to see bands I love, and I’m standing next to a stranger and we’re screaming the same lyrics together.
“And then from the perspective of us as the writers of the music, it’s one of the greatest honors and wildest experiences of my life to see a song we wrote back home about our own personal grief or triumph or joy or mistake—or whatever else we wrote a song about—connect to other people who we’ve never even met before.”
Lawrence
The Family Business Tour
Wsg. Jacob Jefferies Band
GLC Live at 20 Monroe, 11 Ottawa Ave. NW, Grand Rapids
Oct. 17, 7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show, $53.50+, All Ages
Glcliveat20monroe.com, lawrencetheband.com
