Lola Kirke
On the day singer-songwriter, author and actor Lola Kirke made her Grand Ole Opry debut, she auditioned for a secretive film with the production code name Grilled Cheese. The director, cast and storyline were a mystery; all she knew was that the role required her to sing.
After she booked the role, Kirke discovered that Grilled Cheese was actually a movie called Sinners, directed by Creed and Black Panther auteur Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan. The film, in which Kirke plays Joan, a member of a roving band of singing vampires, now holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations in history.
“Ten-year-old me still doesn’t really understand that I’m in the most Oscar-nominated film of all time,” Kirke tells the Scene.
Two weeks before Sinners competes for Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards, Kirke will take the stage at The Blue Room at Third Man Records on Saturday for a stop on her TMI Tour. The New Yorker turned Nashvillian (who moved to Music City in 2020) will perform songs from her 2025 Daniel Tashian-produced LP Trailblazer and read excerpts from her book Wild West Village, a collection of essays released early last year.
“I wrote the book and the record at the same time, so I was like, ‘This is either going to be wildly self-indulgent’ — which it is — ‘or this could be a way of getting at something more universal,’” Kirke says. “I really do believe that the more personal we are with our work, the more universal we get to be.”
Michael B. Jordan stars in crowd-pleasing genre mashup, opening wide Thursday
The daughter of British rocker and Bad Company co-founder Simon Kirke and interior designer Lorraine Kirke, Lola Kirke had an upbringing that was anything but typical. She once unknowingly interviewed Joan Didion, who her teenage self knew simply as her friend’s “Aunt Joan.” Liv Tyler was her babysitter. David Bowie attended her family’s Christmas parties. Courtney Love both set fire to and flooded the Kirke family’s West Village home. But the themes of identity, loneliness and family explored in both Wild West Village and Trailblazer are universal.
Some of Kirke’s most powerful storytelling centers on family and home, exploring her relationship with her parents (“Marlboro Lights & Madonna,” “Zeppelin III”) and her sisters — artist, actor and director Jemima Kirke and singer-songwriter and doula Domino Kirke. “Mississippi, My Sister, Elvis & Me” was inspired by a road trip to Graceland with her older sister Jemima.
“The longing for my sisters’ love and attention was such a huge part of my experience as a youngest child,” Kirke says. “If I were to write my book now … it would be a completely different book. I think life has a way of writing itself. There are things that have changed the narrative [and] little events that have impacted the larger shape of the narrative that I could have never foreseen. One of those things was this union [and] harmony that I found with both of my sisters. [‘Mississippi, My Sister, Elvis & Me’] is my postscript to the relationship that I write about so much in the book.”
Waiting decades to see a dream fulfilled is something Kirke is used to. Despite finding success as an actor in films such as Mistress America and Gone Girl and the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle, it was a decade of stops and starts and shattered dreams in Hollywood that led her to create a life-affirming country album and land a role in one of the most acclaimed films of this century. It’s a recurring theme in Kirke’s life and a tenet of Trailblazer: “If I got what I wanted,” she sings on the album’s title track, “I never would’ve gotten to me.”
“When we don’t get what we want — and country music is filled with people not getting what they want, it’s filled with longing — we have the opportunity to have our character grow,” Kirke says.
Kirke also found the complex characters she’d long searched for in Hollywood in the songs of Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells.
“The presentation of femininity in country music is so incredible,” Kirke says. “There’s this very dynamic grit and glamour that’s intrinsic to the founding foremothers of country music. That ability to be both incredibly glamorous and also incredibly authentic and real through the things that you sing about is really exciting to me. That’s a complex character. As an actress, complex characters are really what I look for, and I think they’re really present in country music.”
Country music even had a hand in landing Kirke her role in Sinners. To showcase Kirke’s singing chops, the casting associate sent Coogler the video for “All My Exes Live in L.A.,” in which Kirke appears to stroll down Gallatin Avenue in the nude. (Kirke clarifies with a quip that she’s actually wearing “full-body Spanx … a far more unflattering piece of clothing.”)
In her book, Kirke reflects on feeling like an outsider in Nashville while attending a disheartening conference hosted by a major music-streaming service. The ’80s and ’90s neotraditional country of The Judds, Randy Travis and Vince Gill that Kirke had fallen in love with was no longer the driving force on mainstream country radio.
“In the years that had passed since I first fell in love with country, the music had changed a good deal,” Kirke writes in Wild West Village. “There were a lot more references to trucks, fishing and trap music than I’d ever really gone in for.”
Kirke, who was born in the U.K., yet again began to wonder where she fit in.
“I wondered at the connection between my two passports and my two professions,” Kirke writes. “Had I just run to Nashville because I didn’t know where I’d fit in Hollywood the way I’d once tried to be American after giving up trying to be British? Where would I run to next? Who was I kidding that I was a country singer anyway? I had been desperate to escape the one farm I’d ever spent time on and I was currently wearing loafers.”
These days, Kirke recognizes that being on the outside is sometimes more of an asset than a detriment.
“I definitely feel like an outsider — not just in country music, but music in general. That’s something I’m beginning to feel more at peace with. I spent so much of my life wanting to rectify my outsider status by becoming an insider somewhere. The real remedy for that … is just to embrace that outsider status and don’t give it up for anything. It’s a unique perspective when you’re on the outside.”
