Nine Songs: Lola Kirke

Having been brought up in a near-mythic New York household, with a mother who owned a vintage boutique and a rock drummer for a father, Kirke possesses that rare quality of someone who is able to turn her life’s experience into art. For example, her resituating of that very childhood in the fictionalised locus of the ‘Wild West Village’, into the witty title of her semi-autobiographical debut book, Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1)

Kirke’s own music speaks similarly to the experience of coming into yourself through the medium of narration. Her upcoming third album Trailblazer aptly reflects a cinematic writing process, driven by some of Nashville’s finest collaborators, but also through a Hollywood veil of approval – the singer/songwriter has admitted to tweaking and finalising songs while in movie trailers (yes, she can act too). The result is so characterful as to become authentic, so authentic as to become characterful.

In the music video for the record’s first single “Hungover Thinkin’” Kirke, clad in cowboy boots, stamps a slice of pizza on the sidewalk before picking it up and eating it. She then laments ‘I was the life of the party’ and ‘wherever my car is, is anyone’s guess’, before lurching into a solipsistic meditation on being hungover: ‘Who did I piss off / Who’s ear did I bend’.

The track was co-written by Liz and Caitlin Rose (the latter famous for her work with American national sweetheart Taylor Swift) and speaks to a universally relatable anxiety, but not without a certain charm.

Both the literary and the literal play havoc with Kirke, who from a storied upbringing has now found herself rooted in Southern Americana, due to her great ability to twist a terrific tale through song. “Hungover Thinkin’” and its follow-up single “Raised by Wolves” together showcase a blend of influences that has heralded Kirke a beacon of “sparkle country” by some, a creator of “smoky pop/rock” by others; it’s therefore no wonder she is attracted to songs that combine great lyricism and scene setting with new takes on old classics, and various resistances to genre.

As Kirke speaks about her early relationship with escapism, the sentimental music that reached her ‘adult child’ brain with free spirits and broken hearts, it reveals how they left a lasting mark on her now nuanced relationship with lyric writing and performance.

Reflecting on her relationship with being an artist now removed from Manhattan, Kirke explains, "I don’t think I can really shake the New York off me, I don’t know how many kids in other places were listening to The Strokes at aged ten…" The sentiment seems to be typical of the songwriter, who spent her youth discovering the distinct and zeitgeist music that spoke to something alive and unusually mature within her. The impulse to sing herself is therefore a reciprocal desire to ‘help people’ in the way she was, ‘or’, she adds contrarily, ‘to get laid’.

Even as she enters a significant period of success, marked by a near impossible trifecta of accomplishment – a recently published book, the release of an album, and beginning work on a new film – Kirke is still able to take a minute to sit back and acknowledge the formative imprints on her storytelling through her Nine Songs choices.

She is just as enamoured now, speaking about a great song’s ability to transcend circumstance, as when she first heard the haunting solos of Rick Danko, of Irma Thomas and David Bowie – those icons who each, in turn, gave an artist her own musical instructions to ‘truth’, ‘explanation’, and most significantly, ‘understanding’.