Chelsea Lovitt finally got around to making her debut album two years ago in Nashville, but it took until October 2018 for the finished record, You Had Your Cake, So Lie in It, to hit the marketplace. A Mississippi-born singer, songwriter and exponent of literate garage-soul-country-rock, Lovitt needed the extra time to sort out the logistics of releasing her oddball genre record, which describes various forms of self-delusion that characterize the Trump era. You Had Your Cake doesn’t exactly take a dim view of human nature, but Lovitt’s lyrics make a political statement that includes an analysis of how selfishness and excess erode human happiness.
Despite its Music City origin, You Had Your Cake doesn’t register as a Nashville record. Lovitt’s style references both Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Memphis-style pop subversion, with stunning results. Lovitt recorded You Had Your Cake, So Lie in It at Nashville’s The Bomb Shelter recording studio during a week in August 2016. Working with studio owner and producer Andrija Tokic, Lovitt recast the conventions of post-punk-Americana, so she sounds equally comfortable with garage rockers and post-Gram Parsons narratives. Tokic, whose résumé includes production work on albums by country singer Margo Price’s previous group Buffalo Clover and neo-soul stars Alabama Shakes, helped Lovitt turn her subversive ideas into a kind of multi-tiered cake that she decorated with eccentric designs. Lovitt’s thematic concerns come through clearly throughout You Had Your Cake, but it’s an allusive, cohesive slice of rock ’n’ roll.
“It was a very ambitious sort of concept,” Lovitt tells the Scene from a seat in an East Side eatery. “All right, you pretty much have everything going, you know. You’ve reached the top with all this [and] you feel like you’ve made it. And then what, you know? [Tokic] wanted to do a psychedelic surf record; I just wanted a record that sounded like Blonde on Blonde.”
Lovitt was born in Hattiesburg, Miss., to what she says is a “Faulkner-esque and dysfunctional family.” She tells me she’s around 30. Lovitt may be concerned about getting older in a business that looks askance at aging, but she doesn’t come across as a musician obsessed with presenting a glamorous image. She is, however, aware of Mississippi’s mixture of conservative politics and cultural experimentation, which she says has shaped her art.
“I think it makes you very self-aware, and also hilarious,” Lovitt says about growing up in Mississippi. “Your sense of humor is on another level. It’s from a place of dysfunction and complete backwards, at times, mentalities. I’ve basically played music since I was 10 or so. I figured I’d go to college, do the right thing, and get a degree.”
It didn’t work out that way for Lovitt, whose mother, a nurse, encouraged her to go to medical school. (Lovitt’s father is a doctor.) She worked in a music store while she was in high school and studied philosophy and English literature at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. When she graduated from Millsaps, Lovitt moved to Nashville, but her first sojourn in town, in 2008, didn’t work out as expected either.
“I knew I didn’t want to be in Jackson, Miss., so I figured I’d move to Nashville,” she says. “I was here for a year and ended up working this terrible temp job, thinking I would get a job on Music Row. I was getting in trouble because I was writing songs on note cards. I guess I knew that whole general mystique of Nashville when I first moved here: You’re this bright star, soon to be discovered.”
Lovitt’s first stint as a soon-to-be-discovered Nashville star ended when she moved to Valenciennes, France, where she taught English and gave guitar lessons. She lived in France for a year and then went home to Mississippi to regroup, before moving between New Orleans and London over the next five years.
She recorded a set of acoustic tracks in Nashville in 2015 that included a vignette titled “Truckstop Waitress,” which suggested Lovitt could easily travel down the Americana-country highway favored by the likes of Elizabeth Cook and Nikki Lane. Lovitt’s music is superficially similar to Cook’s and Lane’s, but You Had Your Cake, which has been released by a small Knoxville label called Fat Elvis Records, presents Lovitt as an all-purpose rocker with an abstract, literary bent.
Funded by a grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, You Had Your Cake is refreshingly sardonic, as in the opening track, “If I Had a Dollar.” Over a garage-rock-meets-alt-country guitar riff, Lovitt sings about her inability to take control of her life. “If I had a dollar for every time that I said, ‘Should’ / I’d be shitting gold in the neck of your woods.” Guitarist Marc Ottavi, whom Lovitt first met and collaborated with in Paris, contributes slangy guitar licks that strain at the limits of the song.
The rest of You Had Your Cake is similarly acerbic. Lovitt essays country-soul in the six-minute track “State of Denial,” which threads its way through a maze of chord changes. “Baby, I was born in a state that dug the ditch for denial,” she sings. Ottavi’s guitar figures threaten to derail the song, but Lovitt’s vocals ride easily over a loose shuffle groove.
You Had Your Cake makes hash out of the conventions of alt-country and indie rock. Lovitt’s sensibility is closer to that of Memphis or New Orleans than it is to Nashville’s, though you may hear similarities between her work and that of Nashville rockers The Blackfoot Gypsies, whom Lovitt met when she lived in town during 2008. Lovitt’s music evokes Blonde on Blonde, The Kinks, The Velvet Underground and Alex Chilton. It’s one of the most original records released in Nashville in 2018, and deserves the kind of recognition that, say, Lane has garnered for her recent work. As Lovitt tells me, it took her two years to get her songs properly published and the record mastered to her satisfaction.
Lovitt seems comfortable as a shape-shifting artist who can turn from alt-country to garage rock, and her bright, sibilant voice evokes memories of rockabilly queens like Wanda Jackson. Still, her insights into America’s culture of excess make You Had Your Cake a unique example of the political album. Lovitt is a moralist operating on the edge of absurdism, which puts her in the line of Chilton and other Memphis/Mississippi artists who set out to change the world by playing rock ’n’ roll.
Lovitt’s record is a breakthrough for an idiosyncratic artist, and she seems proud to be part of a tradition of plain-spoken, laconic iconoclasts.
“What I would hope I was doing,” she says with admirable concision, “is preserving a traditional element of the New Orleans thing, or the Memphis thing.”
