A recent review of a live performance in New Mexico:

“Opening act Laurel Premo, handpicked by Will Oldham for the tour, might be my favorite new artist I have seen this year. Her set began with a ten-minute-long solo instrumental piece on the guitar that throbbed with quiet intensity and unexpectedly brought me and many others in the audience to tears. Premo viscerally threw herself into the music she played, rocking back and forth, and fully embodying the swaying nature of her compositions (a mix of traditional and original works). There was something deeply moving about witnessing such an embodied and emotionally present performer work their magic, and I could have listened to her play for far longer than the opening set allowed.” -The Taos News, Oct. 24, 2023

Premo holds a BFA from the Performing Arts Technology Dept. of the University of Michigan School of Music, and has spent half-year stints at both the Sibelius Academy of Music in Helsinki, Finland and the University College of Southeast Norway in Telemark to study traditional music and dance. Important mentors who have helped shape Laurel’s lens in folk arts have been her parents Bette & Dean Premo (fiddle, guitar, and traditional song, Michigan), Joel Mabus (clawhammer banjo, Michigan), Arto Järvelä (fiddle, Finland), Ånon Egeland (fiddle, Norway) and Gerry O’Beirne (guitar, Ireland). 

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The traditions woven in Laurel's music come through lived experience as a woman raised by the beings, land, and traditions of the Upper Midwest. From Finnish dance halls to square dances to time spent locally and abroad with elders, this understanding now pushes itself out, not as separate roots but a combined voice. On the most core level, Laurel Premo is a part of these northern places, from the food, water, folk culture, and beings she is in relation with all the way to the silt that sifts into her boots while river walking, and much of her art is actually in the disappearing of her self, having deeply connected with and become part of all of that to simply reflect and amplify it.

She is active in a diverse group of collaborations and compositional projects, and practices an animistic connectivity to land through fly-fishing, traditional craft, plant medicine and gardening, ancestral relation, and deep listening. Though diverse, Laurel Premo’s roles inside of performance, composition, research, guiding, and teaching are also one and the same, and can be simply put - work in vibration. Her strength and value inside of community resides in welcoming folks into or moving through emotion, providing functional or ritual experiences with sound, and helping folks find their own force and connect with greater ones.

Fretboard Journal podcast (2025) hour-long interview with Laurel

Long form pieces covering the new release ‘Laments’ (10/31/25):

Public Radio 90, WNMU extended conversation with Kurt Hauswirth - “A guide through grief’s dark waters”

Bluegrass Situation guest column - “MIXTAPE: SONGS OF GRIEF & OPENING” - a playlist curated by Laurel that collects tracks that have been medicinal to her in seasons of heaviness, in times when she needed assistance to reopen a closed self. Through diverse genres and modes, they all have the power to help bring in a glimpse or a full serving of transformation, whether that’s delivered from the quietest breath of the mechanics inside of a piano or from the wall of supportive pressure that is the embrace of the Scottish smallpipes.

Review from the independent music amplifier ChillFiltr
“This music feels so grounded in the past that it serves as a conduit between pages of humanity, connecting our modern existence to the time-honored stories of our ancestors, and the tradition of folk music that has always been so deeply intertwined with daily life.” - Krister Axel for CHILLFILTR

WDET 101.9 FM extended conversation with Jeff Milo. “This project is tapping into that sense of awe, catharsis, and possibly transcendence that music can offer” - Jeff Milo, music host. Listen for a discussion of early experiences with sound, algesic-visual synesthesia, traditional forms of entering ecstasy, and exploration of core expression underneath language.

Review from Rootsworld Magazine & Radio “There’s no holding back in the performances. The beauty might be bleak, but it’s definitely there. For all its lightweight title, “Grief Of The Angler” threads a tenuous, very personal path along pain. It feels real, almost an exorcism, a lifting of the weight grief can put on people.” - Chris Nickson, RootsWorld

American Museum of Paramusicology Extended interview, written. Deeply honored to have a long-form conversation with Matt Marble featured in this month’s issue of the journal of The American Museum of Paramusicology. AMP ISSUE 32: “Good Mourning” takes an inspiring look at death and grief through American folk music, and features our yarning on griefwork, trance, cultural memory, poetic encryption, techniques of ecstasy, and how to carefully hold and be held by tradition - how to participate in it’s aliveness by letting it live through you. “I was transfixed by reading about traditional processes of the lamenter, ways of entering the between-space in which she needed to be for the work, simple things like the rocking of the body back and forth, which my body has done in music all along. And so that was a very homecoming feeling to recognize, “Oh, that’s a technique of ecstasy. I understand now, okay.” - Laurel Premo