Kevin Bronson on March 24th, 2019

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One Thursday night in July 2017 during Psychic Love’s residency at the Satellite, a friend located the L.A. quartet’s frontwoman, Laura Peters, in a booth in the back room of the venue. She appeared distressed.

“How are you doing?” the friend asked with more than the usual earnestness.

“Well,” she said, gesturing to the venue and letting loose that hardy Midwesterner’s laugh of hers, “we’re all here.”

It was always we with Laura Peters, never I. A musician, artist, designer, craftswoman and activist, Peters was an anomaly in an often me-first city. She helped build a collective where none existed before and threw substantial energy into promoting the artists around her, yet still managed to make a mark with her own project. And when Peters died suddenly in January at age 32, it sent friends, family, bandmates and those associated with the Play Like a Girl (PLAG) collective she co-founded reeling.

“I’m still in shock and disbelief,” PLAG co-founder Kimi Recor says.

Tonight at the Bootleg Theater, Peters’ life, art and the music of Psychic Love will be celebrated. Bandmates and friends will perform two sets of Psychic Love music — the quartet’s 2016 album “The Hive Mind” and music from the 2019 follow-up album that Psychic Love was beginning to roll out. (Two songs, “One & Two” and “Go Away Green” had been released at the time of her passing.) In addition, the factory room at the Bootleg will be turned into a gallery displaying Peters’ visual art.

Peters, a native of Aspen, Colo., originally moved to Los Angeles to pursue film and acting. She was drawn to music, too, and settling in Echo Park, she was in the right place for it. She also had the right house for it — in the front yard of Peters’ place on Echo Park Boulevard was a building that once housed a butcher shop. Putting her handyman skills to use, she converted it into a DIY performance space dubbed Vega’s Meat Market. The room sounded and looked great. She built the wooden stage herself. And it became the birthplace of a mini-scene.

“She didn’t have a community, so she created one,” says Recor, frontwoman of the band Draemings. “She was in baby bands that couldn’t get booked, but playing shows at Vega’s was a way to create a following. The great thing is, nothing was genre-based. It wasn’t for cool kids. It was really a scene for outsiders.”

Singer-songwriter Emma Cole first met Peters when the pair performed in the Most Best. “She was the first female artist friend where I never felt she was being competitive with me, but being inclusive with me,” Cole says. “I was living in a studio apartment in Hollywood, paying rent and trying to pay to get my recordings done, and she said, ‘I have an extra room at the house; why don’t you move it and you can pay less rent?'”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever met a more generous person,” says Mikel Corrente, the L.A.-based publicist who was handling the rollout of the new Psychic Love album. “She didn’t have a bad bone in her body. She was so quirky and funny. And she always had so many ideas.”

“She was always creating something,” Recor says. “When we first started PLAG, it was always like that — just hanging out coming up with ideas.”

The nights at Vega’s were more than just shows, with their impromptu Polaroid sessions and various artistic things going on. When Psychic Love was building toward their first album release, Peters designed trading cards for each song on the album, with a photo on the front and lyrics on the back.

(For the Buzz Bands LA eight-year anniversary and birthday show, Peters designed and had printed a booklet containing her sketches of the blogger and his dog, and things like a word puzzle of local bands’ names.)

“It was amazing how much time she poured into her friendships with people,” says Maxwell Harrison, whom Peters recruited to play in Psychic Love and eventually was one of her tenants at the Echo Park house.

Harrison remembers how badly he wanted to see Radiohead at their 2017 L.A. date. He had no ticket. “She told me I should just go and try to get a ticket, but I didn’t think I had a prayer,” Harrison says. “She made me a sign — a very pretty one — that said ‘MAX IS A SWEET GUY AND A TRUE FAN,’ etcetera. And even though I felt dumb, I went and held that sign up outside the venue. And I got a ticket in five minutes.”

Like many others close to Peters, Harrison wonders if her largesse detracted from her own exploits.

“I’d get asked, ‘Is Psychic Love a band or a solo project?’ And I never knew quite how to answer,” he says. “She gave us a lot of freedom — she never told us, ‘This is what you’re gonna play.’ Before Psychic Love, she had never been in a band before. No lessons, no gigs. I went to music school. But she had these amazing instincts and this amazing confidence onstage.

“Plus, I’m an L.A. native and was taken by her complete lack of pretension. It’s not like she sought any ‘status.’ She was very modest about her own talents, almost self-deprecating … Being in a band with her, sometimes you wish she believed in herself a little more, but she didn’t think she was hot shit. She just thought she was doing her best.”

Says Recor: “With everything at Vega’s and in PLAG, she put a lot of other people before herself. And sometimes I think it really weighed on her. You know, ‘Should I be focusing on my own art?'”

Cole remembers how Peters worked on two of her music videos — and even hand-made the dress that Cole wore in one.

“Sometimes I feel like she didn’t see her own greatness. She did see it in others, and she did her best to support it.

“It feels heavy and empty without her.”