While she’s currently getting blood-spattered in Ryan Coogler’s vampires-in-the-Mississippi-Delta horror film Sinners, singer-actress Lola Kirke has also released one of the sleeper country albums of the year. Trailblazer, the follow-up to her 2024 LP Country Curious, is a combination of woozy, mesmeric country songs elegantly paired with indie vibes. It also shows off the performer’s gift for lyrical flair and performance art: Trailblazer’s cover photo depicts Kirke as a rodeo clown — in 1980s shoulder pads and brightly colored makeup.
“Trailblazer is so much about failure, but also the growing ability to change the way you talk to yourself: ‘What if I’m actually not as horrible as I think I am? What if, instead of a failure, I’m a trailblazer?” Kirke says. “And I kept thinking, what’s always trying and always failing? The clown.”
Kirke, born in London but raised in New York City and now residing in Nashville, also explores what shaped her in her debut book, Wild West Village. She wrote the coming-of-age memoir at the same time she was writing the songs for Trailblazer and filming her latest movie. Says Kirke: “It was an intensely creative period.”
The very first line of the album is “If I got what I wanted/I never would have gotten to me.” Why did you want those words to announce Trailblazer, both the LP and the title track?
When you put it that way it sounds like bad wall art at Walmart. [Laughs.] Sometimes I feel a little silly saying that, because I’ve gotten a lot of things that I wanted. I feel so lucky in this life, but there’s also been a lot of challenges and heartbreak and frustration. Learning that there is so much value in the struggle, that the struggle actually makes you more resilient and more creative, has been the greatest gift of my recent years. So much of that experience comes with being an actress, or a performer of any kind, and the constant rejection. I’ve experienced that with music and writing too. This desire to connect, that artists have, is one that will demand that you become very thick-skinned when it comes to having people go, “Well, we don’t want to connect with you….” But moving to Nashville, I got an education in songwriting and in communication, and people are able to connect with me better, because I am able to better connect with what I wanted to say.
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Did Daniel Tashian, your producer and co-writer, help with that?
Daniel is guru-esque. His attitude is so perfect for helping me find a much more authentic way of expressing whatever I wanted to express, because his heart is in the right place when it comes to music. He’s encouraging and supportive and helped me take what was maybe a nebulous idea and make it into something clear. Like “Mississippi, My Sister, Elvis & Me.” He and I wrote that a week before we tracked, and that’s one of my favorite songs on the record.
That’s just one of many detail-oriented titles on the album: “Marlboro Lights & Madonna,” “Raised by Wolves,” and “Zeppelin III” each make you want to hear them just to see what they’re all about.
I’m so glad that comes across. Like many Nashville songwriters, I am a title collector. I have long, long lists of titles. Sometimes they’re just like a weird bumper sticker I saw that, I’m like, “What would that song be like?” I mean, “Marlboro Lights & Madonna” — I want to name my life that. And “Zeppelin III” is one of my favorite song titles. We thought about calling it “Taught Me How to Leave,” and I was like, “That’s so boring. It’s called ‘Zeppelin III!’”
“Raised by Wolves” allows you to let loose and rock out. Where’d that title come from?
That was the first song Daniel and I wrote together. I was writing my book and I was nervous and I wanted to impress him, and I said, “Can I read you some of my unpublished book?” Thank God, he didn’t think that was, like, the most self-indulgent thing ever…. So, I read him the introduction of the book where I say I was raised by wolves — “if the wolves in question repurpose vintage night gowns as dinner dresses, and the wilderness was the West Village brownstone.” And he was like, “Oh, we have to write that song.” I really wanted to make a straight down-the-middle country record, because I’ve been really interested in the genre and love country music, but I’m really glad that the rock part of me was allowed to come out.
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How did you balance writing your memoir and the album at the same time?
I think the book was kind of my compass of what stories I wanted to tell. Getting to write about my life in that way crystallized it for me and showed me what I could offer to people. And I was like, “Some of those stories could be great songs. I’ve never heard a song about that before, but I know that that’s an experience that a lot of people have.” Some of those songs did make the album.
You covered “Sip the Wine,” a solo song by the Band’s Rick Danko, a few years ago. Are you a Danko disciple?
I have Rick tattooed on my leg. I fell in love with Bob Dylan when I was like 12 years old, and then someone gave me Music From Big Pink and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard in my entire life. I became a huge Band fan and I ended up going to college across the river from Levon [Helm’s] house. There’s something about them, Canadian kids singing about America, and their longing to be different from who they are that I really related to as a kid.