“I don’t appreciate things without an erotic charge,” says Lera Lynn, a singular wanderer on the Americana borderlands of country. “I know people really love Taylor Swift, but there’s no sex in that music — no sex or death. That’s what I find lacking in some pop music.”
To Lynn, who has declined big label approaches to lay her own trails through seven albums, including this year’s Comic Book Cowboy, music needs to explore all our raw ways and shadows. Without sex and death, without hunger and termination, “it’s kind of like eating a dish that doesn’t tick all the flavor profile boxes. They’ve gotta be present,” says Lera, who plays not to one flavor but flows through them all. “That’s just who I am.”
More from Spin:
- Report: Rob Reiner, Wife Murdered By Son At L.A. Home
- Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires Fest Returning In ’26
- Peter Gabriel Salutes Josh Safdie For ‘Touch’ Sync
The spellbindingly grim end of things was evident when bruised, filthy, her teeth yellow and veins marked from needles, Lera Lynn stood where she was told, for two heavy-duty men in the Black Rose to look at. “I wasn’t sure how to react — it was awkward,” she says. The bar was an ever-dark corner of a grim industrial town on LA’s fringes. Everyone was dirty inside. Ahead of coming in that day to start her run as the resident doomed junkie bar-siren giving a melancholic musical respite to season two of True Detective, she’d been told: “We need you for eyeline.” “I was like, ‘What is that?’” Being eyeline, she learned, is being an offscreen mark for onscreen people to occasionally glance at. No singing this day. She stood on her X. When the men, Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell, walked in and looked at Lera, it was her first eye contact with either: “an intense moment.” And then off came the unseen track marks, yellow teeth, and other signifiers of life lost. Day over for her.
Did Lera do it right? Was she good eyeline?
“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t want to distract them — I understood that much.”
A different day in the Black Rose, scuzzed out again but now on camera, she’d sing “My Least Favorite Life,” a bleakly tantalizing song (“the blue pulls away from the sky”) conjured up for the show by Lera, T Bone Burnett, and Rosanne Cash.
Lera was here because T Bone Burnett, True Detective’s music producer, had sought out the Nashville-based singer-songwriter. T Bone had heard and sensed something in her that was right for the neo-noir anthology. “He’s a perceptive guy,” says Lera, who doesn’t need to read Bukowski — although she does (“I like how he was a no-bullshit kinda writer”) — to know dive life.
This story starts way back when Lera was a child moved by her parents around Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia, as her mother sang and her father drank and drugged and chased work as a mechanic fixing heavy machinery.
“He had a brilliant mechanical mind but he couldn’t get it together. I can’t imagine having water bottles full of Canadian whisky all day long and ever expecting to have a functioning life,” Lera says. “Meth was in there, too. Probably a little of everything.” Amidst the instability and its toll, or accentuated by instability and its toll, or simply as adolescence is, Lera’s teenage years were “full of ecstatic moments and traumatic moments — everything is so extreme, right?”
She sang and learned instruments, with her victory in a high school talent show giving her the confidence to land a residency in a duo at a lively, two-storey Mexican restaurant. The friend who played guitar alongside her “taught me how to smoke weed and how to play bar chords. My Mom represented me as my manager and told them I was 21 — when I was 15 — so they hired me and gave me margaritas,” says Lera. “At 15, but I looked older. I’m tall. I’ve always been tall. I’m 5’9” and almost 6’ with heels on.”
Lera had grown up with her mother singing, doing songs like Brenda Lee’s “Break It to Me Gently” (but the Juice Newton version). For the diners’ entertainment, Lera covered Nirvana and No Doubt, among others.
When she was 16, her parents divorced and Lera stayed with her mom. “My father was very unstable and unhealthy. He was an addict and that was a tough thing to navigate, being an only child and trying to figure out by myself what all of it meant.” The father and daughter grew estranged “because he was never sober and we couldn’t communicate. There was so much scar tissue — impassable barriers,” says Lera. He’d call from time to time, asking why she didn’t love him, so as the years went by and with Lera juggling anthropology at college, bartending, and singing in Athens, Georgia, she stopped answering.
And then one day, with Lera 22 and her dad 44, he died.
As next of kin, Lera went to his house but didn’t get in. “His girlfriend and her kids were there and when I knocked on the door they threatened to shoot me. Then they called the police on me and the police made me leave,” she says. “I was not allowed to enter the home for a while.”
Her father died with $200 in the bank, a broken down truck, a dilapidated house with a defunct mortgage, some tools, and a few personal effects: his old belt, boots, and sunglasses. Before Lera could get in, the vultures broke into his toolboxes and stripped what they wanted — including the belt, boots, and sunglasses — leaving a grieving, angry 22-year-old to watch the ransacked house foreclosed.
“It was dark, dark stuff,” she says. Her state of mind? “Furious; furious and grieving at the same time. An emotional basketbase. And angry at him, too, for not having his shit together and for dumping all this on me and for having $200. I didn’t even have the money to cremate him. I was just a college student, bartending, trying to scrape by.” In some ways grieving a dead addict is more a continuation, or even aftermath, than it is a whole new shock, because “I’d already grieved the loss of him.”
Multiple times her father appeared: “like his ghost,” says Lera, who eventually had to tell him, out loud, to leave her alone. “And then that stopped. Maybe that was all in my head, but it worked.” The music she found herself listening to through this time included Ray LaMontagne’s Till the Sun Turns Black (with blue gems like “Empty”, in which Ray quietly sings: “I’ve been to hell and back so many times / I must admit you kinda bore me”).
In the thick of it all her boss from a bar back in Athens reached out. “I don’t use this word often, but this cunt,” says Lera, “my boss, this sexist moron, was like ‘I know your dad died or whatever but when are you gonna be back at work?’ I was like, ‘OK, I’ll come back to work.’ He would always sit at the bar and tell me, ‘Make me something.’ And I would make him a drink and he would never like it. But he would never tell me what he wanted. And he did that to me that day — my first day back at work. I was like, ‘Can you tell me what you want today?’ and he was all ‘No.’ So I said, ‘You know what? You can go fuck yourself. I quit.’”
Harrowed, steeled, liberated, untethered, hurt, alive, ecstatic, bold Lera Lynn grew and grew as a songwriter and performer, gigging more and touring further afield, shifting the balance from interpreting others to becoming who she is.
In her late 20s, she set up in Nashville and released her first album, 2011’s Have You Met Lera Lynn, following it up with The Avenues, the opening song of which, “Out to Sea” (a sublime performance of which she gives on Late Show with David Letterman) opens with lyrics that chart a course for the borderlands of Lynn. “Take me to the land’s divide,” she sings. “Let the waters rush out to tide / For this is all a dream / And I’ll let it all go.”
T Bone Burnett heard the call, Lera thinks, because “you can tell when somebody’s been through some stuff and they’re writing — you can hear it.” He asked her out to LA, and had her cast as the castaway siren of the Black Rose, where she sings her way back through the rings of her formation. One charged number, “Lately”, follows Vince Vaughn’s declaration that “everything’s ending: time to wake up.”
On cue, our soiled siren then gets to work performing in a deserted bar. “Lately I’m not feeling like myself,” she sings. “When I look into the glass I see someone else.”
“That’s meta,” says Lera.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
