Lillie Mae Rische may as well have been born with a fiddle in her hands. Her family might have preferred that she was. Born into the Forrest Carter Family Band, a traveling outfit named for her father, Rische was handed her first instrument when she was barely out of diapers. She hasn’t stopped playing since.
“I’ve had no choice, since I was 3 years old, as a member of a traveling full-time family band,” she tells the Scene, laughing. “There was never a choice, or an option, or even a week off to think about doing anything else. My dad is a crazy bass-player-hippie-slash-Christian, very strict. It’s an odd combination.”
That musical birthright has landed Rische, 26, who now performs as a solo artist under the name Lillie Mae, some of music’s most coveted gigs. As a preteen, she palled around with the legendary Cowboy Jack Clement, who saw enormous potential in the budding artist. As a teenager, she and her siblings, playing under the names Jypsi and The Risches, maintained a residency at famed Broadway honky-tonk Layla’s Bluegrass Inn for several years, and released a Clement-produced album through Arista Nashville in 2008. Since 2012, Rische has been part of Jack White’s touring band, playing fiddle and mandolin.
It’s that last gig that has led Rische to her latest project: her debut solo record, Forever and Then Some. Out April 14 via White’s Third Man Records, the album establishes Rische as a formidable new voice in country and roots music. The record follows a two-song 7-inch Rische released as part of Third Man’s Blue Series in 2014, a project she pursued at White’s insistence.
“I can’t ever be quiet, so I was always singing songs and stuff after gigs, before gigs, whatever,” she says. “Jack always pushed me in that direction, and he always made room for me and listened to my songs. I had written some things while we were on tour and he was like, ‘We gotta record that.’ ”
What began as a one-off project quickly developed into something bigger, as White saw the makings of a solo artist in Rische.
“He had offered me the chance to record an album, and it made sense,” she says. “It felt like home and the right thing to do. I had a bunch of songs, and had this really awesome opportunity to get to record them. It was one of those things in life that fell into place.”
As Rische describes it, White was “hands-on” throughout the process of making Forever and Then Some, but the finished album is still her project through and through. It even features two of her siblings, Frank Carter and Scarlett, on guitars and mandolin, respectively. The album’s 11 tracks display Rische’s virtuosic musicianship, her singular singing voice — which, with its quiet agility and quavering strength, lands somewhere between those of Natalie Maines and Stevie Nicks — and a storyteller’s ear for lyrical detail.
Tracks like the sumptuous lament “Wash Me Clean” and the bluegrass-tinged first single “Over the Hill and Through the Woods” indicate an artist far more seasoned than the word “debut” suggests. The composed defiance of the latter song gives Rische room to show off her preternatural sense of melody, while the former — which gently plays with the trope of baptism over layered, swirling strings — is the rare kind of song that already sounds like a classic upon first listen.
Even so, despite Rische’s natural gift for songwriting, the songs on her Third Man releases are the first of hers to be recorded.
“I’ve been writing pretty solid since I was 14, but we never recorded — my family didn’t — we never recorded any songs I had written,” she says. She did have a publishing deal as a teenager, but that deal fell through because she doesn’t “work on the spot.”
“I’d show up to a writing appointment and be so awkward, and come up with nothing, and that happened 98 percent of the time,” she says with a laugh. “So I just realized that, as much as I do write, I couldn’t do that.”
Forever and Then Some, then, is a breakthrough of sorts, a chance for an extraordinary voice to finally make itself heard. Like labelmate Margo Price, Rische has had a long, winding road to her first solo record, but one that ultimately landed her just where she needed to be. While she has no shortage of compliments for White and the rest of the folks at Third Man, she looks back to her origin story when considering how she’s ended up where she is.
“[Music]’s in so many people, and if you’re not in the situation that allows you to do it professionally, there’s not always time to pursue it,” she says. “I’m blessed that I was put on the right path at a young age.”
