Laura Beth Johnson and Sawyer Fredericks – An Xperience Interview

By Larry Felton.

Hope That Recognizes Suffering

Before Laura Beth Johnson and Sawyer Fredericks sit down to write together, they make a list. Not of chords or hooks, but instead, a list of the things they have in common. The practice, introduced by Johnson, sits at the heart of the EP they’ve been working on since August 2024.

Johnson, a Capital Region singer-songwriter, released her most recent EP, “Holy Now,” in December of 2025. After winning the eighth season of The Voice in 2015, Fredericks has spent a decade building a catalog of folk-inspired music while based in the Capital Region. The duo’s first released collaboration, “Stonewall,” closed “Holy Now.” By the time it came out, they already had three or four songs of their collaborative project finished — a record about, in Johnson’s words, “a type of hope that recognizes suffering and continues in spite of it.”

We met at my studio to talk about how their collaboration began, how they work together, and this EP they aren’t ready to name — before I made some portraits.

RRX: Take me back to the moment you first connected musically.

SF: The first time I heard Laura was in Troy at Cafe Euphoria. She was performing, and there was a particular song that struck me — like, oh, this person’s a really good songwriter, I want to work with them. The lyric was from a song about your grandmother’s passing. “The castle of my childhood returns to sand.” That was the line where I was like, oh yeah.

RRX: Laura, what did you know about Sawyer’s music before that?

LBJ: Honestly, not much. The thing that got me was when Sawyer played “Funeral Parking Only” on acoustic at an open mic.

RRX: When did you start writing together?

LBJ: August 12th, 2024. I keep track.

SF: She’s very organized. I’m not.

RRX: Working with someone is different than admiring them. What made the leap feel right?

SF: Shared values. That’s one of the main reasons we collaborated. We have a lot of the same viewpoints, and we connect through that.

LBJ: It’s also what makes our friendship so rich. One of the things I do at the start of a co-write — I had been doing it for a while before Sawyer — is make a list of what we have in common. You learn more about yourself, and more about the other person, when you think intentionally about that.

SF: I’d never done that before with anyone I was co-writing with. It was always, all right, what do we want to write about? But this was creating something we could be emotionally attached to. Finding common ground to write a song about. That was refreshing — and meaningful, because I love emotion in song.

RRX: Tell me about the project you’re working on now. 

LBJ: The project is about finding personal healing.

SF: A lot of my music has despair and sadness in it. What I wanted to create with Laura was something that had that, but is hopeful. About finding light in dark times and working through it.

LBJ: A type of hope that recognizes suffering and continues in spite of it.

RRX: What does a writing session look like?

LBJ: I have my iPad, we’re sitting on a couch, and we just talk.

SF: We figure out what the other is feeling. There’s a song we wrote called “Talk About It” that came from me saying I’d been thinking a lot about family — including family members who’ve passed — and Laura had been too. That sparked the whole session. We find an emotion we were both feeling, and that’s the foundation of the song.

RRX: Will this be duets, or are you bringing in a band?

SF: Probably just us. Maybe strings as backup. I do percussion on my guitar, so the percussion’s covered. The ukulele (played by Johnson) covers the high end. The sound should sound very full as is.

RRX: How far along are you?

SF: We need to figure out when we’ll record, and exactly how we want the songs produced. After that, it’s album cover and announcing.

RRX: Have you been road-testing the material live?

SF: Yeah, we played a song at the in-the-round at Caffe Lena, and at one of Laura’s Lena shows last year. We also tested one on socials — a minute-and-a-half song — and someone at the Eddies came up to us and said he’d listened to it a hundred times.

RRX: When will the EP be out?

SF: Hard to say. We both have our own music careers going. But I don’t see us stopping writing. We’re already co-writing songs that will come out under one of our names — not duets, just co-writes. This isn’t a one-off.

RRX: Laura, what does Sawyer bring out in your songwriting that you don’t access on your own?

LBJ: Sawyer brings heart to everything they do. Writing with Sawyer challenges me to get to the heart of the song sooner, and to show up fully in the process.

RRX: Sawyer, same question back.

SF: Laura brings a more hopeful sense to my writing. Something I can’t really do on my own. And structure — there are two types of artists, the kind with a million unlabeled voice memos, and the organized kind. Laura’s the organized one.

RRX: You come from different lanes — Laura’s confessional, Sawyer’s Americana folk. Where do they meet?

LBJ: In the song. I come from a confessional poetry background. We have emotion-first values when it comes to writing.

SF: Music for the people. That’s what folk music is. Stories you put time into telling, so people can connect.

RRX: What’s something you’ve learned from each other that has nothing to do with music?

LBJ: The importance of loving on your people. Sawyer is a very loyal friend, and I strive to emulate that.

SF: Laura’s also a very caring, loyal friend. Very gift-giving. It’s inspired me — you can get your friends gifts.