Lawrence Sam Goldings was born on August 28, 1968, in Boston. His father was a classical music enthusiast, and Goldings studied classical piano until he was twelve. Through his father he met the New England pianist Dave McKenna, whose habit of walking his own bass lines became a lasting model, and he studied with Ran Blake and, briefly, Keith Jarrett. As a boy he listened to 1970s pop, and learning Billy Joel and Steely Dan songs by ear drew him toward richer harmony and then toward standards, with Oscar Peterson, Red Garland and Bill Evans among the pianists he has cited. In 1986 he left the Boston area for New York to enroll at the New School, whose jazz program had just been started by Arnie Lawrence; Goldings was in its first graduating class. His teachers there included Jaki Byard and Fred Hersch, Lawrence got him the Sunday house-pianist job at the Village Gate jam session, and Roland Hanna took him to Copenhagen for three days of private concerts with Sarah Vaughan, Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Harry "Sweets" Edison and Al Cohn. Before graduating he toured with the singer Jon Hendricks, and Jim Hall, who taught at the school, brought him into a collaboration that lasted nearly three years and includes the albums Subsequently (1992) and Something Special (1993).

The organ came a little later and almost by accident. Around 1988 or 1989 he began playing a portable organ, and around 1989 or 1990 he formed a trio with guitarist Peter Bernstein, whom he had met at a summer jazz program at the Eastman School of Music in the mid-1980s, and drummer Bill Stewart. Maceo Parker then heard him and hired him for his band, where, as Goldings later put it, he learned the Hammond B3 on the gig; he plays on Parker's Roots Revisited (1990), Mo' Roots (1991) and Life on Planet Groove (1992). His own first record, Intimacy of the Blues (1991), was an organ trio date with Bernstein and Stewart, and it made him known as an organist before he had meant to become one. The trio followed it with Light Blue (1992), Moonbird (1999), As One (2001) and Sweet Science (2002), and Goldings's own biography quotes the New York Times calling it the best organ trio of the last decade. Between those records came larger projects: Whatever It Takes (1995), with guests including Joshua Redman, David Sanborn, Fred Wesley and Parker; Big Stuff (1996); and Awareness (1997), a piano trio session with Larry Grenadier on bass and Paul Motian on drums. The New Yorker named Big Stuff and Awareness its jazz albums of the year for 1996 and 1997, and the Jazz Journalists Association chose him organist/keyboardist of the year in 2000 and 2001.

From the late 1990s his bass-line organ playing took him into other people's bands. He is the organist on Michael Brecker's Time Is of the Essence (1999), with Pat Metheny and drummers Elvin Jones, Bill Stewart and Jeff "Tain" Watts, and he toured with Metheny and Brecker in 1999 and 2000. With John Scofield he made Hand Jive (1994) and Groove Elation (1995), and later joined Scofield and Jack DeJohnette in Trio Beyond, whose live album Saudades (ECM, 2006) earned a Grammy nomination for best jazz instrumental album, individual or group. His own Quartet (2006) put him mostly at the piano with the trumpeter John Sneider, bassist Ben Allison and drummer Matt Wilson, plus Madeleine Peyroux on one track. He played on Peyroux's Careless Love (2004), produced by Larry Klein, and toured with her regularly in the mid-2000s.

His best-known pop association is James Taylor, with whom he has recorded and toured since 2001. The two worked as a duo on a two-year world tour that produced One Man Band (2007), where Goldings's organ bass lines made the one-man-band idea possible, and he also appears on Taylor's October Road (2002), Before This World (2015) and American Standard (2020). He is on John Mayer's Continuum (2006), plays on records by Curtis Stigers (three of which he also produced), Sia, Norah Jones and many others, and has composed for film and television, including Jeff Garlin's Dealin' with Idiots and the Netflix series Self Made (2020). He took part in the Sundance Institute composer fellowships in 2012 and 2013. Offstage he has a comic alter ego, Hans Groiner.

He has also worked with the Steve Gadd Band, whose Way Back Home earned a 2017 Grammy nomination for best contemporary instrumental album, and in 2018 he released the first album of a funk project, Scary Goldings, with the group Scary Pockets. His recent leader work ranges from the solo-keyboard Earthshine (2021) and the live piano trio album I Will (2025) to Big Foot (2024), a collaboration with the tap dancer Melinda Sullivan. In 2022 the Goldings, Bernstein and Stewart trio made Perpetual Pendulum for Smoke Sessions, and in August 2026 the same label released their follow-up, Rhombus, after about thirty-five years together. DownBeat named him organist of the year in both its critics' and readers' polls in 2024 and again in 2025.

Goldings plays the Hammond B3 as a pianist who learned to walk bass lines from Dave McKenna: his left hand and pedals carry the bottom while his right hand shapes melodic, harmonically careful lines that critics have often compared to those of Larry Young. Besides McKenna he names Billy Preston, accompanying Aretha Franklin, as a first model on organ, along with the organ records of Wes Montgomery with Mel Rhyne and Jimmy Smith, and the playing of Shirley Scott, Chester Thompson, Joe Zawinul and Jack McDuff. His 1990s years with Maceo Parker gave him the voicings and rhythmic comping of James Brown-style funk, which he carried into the trio and later into Scary Goldings, while his piano work, from the Quartet sessions to Earthshine and I Will, keeps the song-minded harmony he first absorbed from pop writers and standards. He moves between a straight-ahead organ trio, a funk band and a singer-songwriter's tour, and has been named organist of the year by the Jazz Journalists Association and, in 2024 and 2025, by both DownBeat polls.