Lou Turner’s ‘Strangels’ Celebrates Serendipitous Delight

In September 2024, Lou Turner encountered a strange angel. While on the road with Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, the Nashville indie-folk polymath and her partner Trevor Nikrant found themselves stranded by a flat tire. The pair managed to get their car to a shop, where a mechanic Turner would later describe as “very odd but sweet” fixed them right up. She dubbed the man her very own “strangel,” a term she coined on the spot. The idea became a wellspring of inspiration as she finished up her third solo album, which she’ll release Friday via Spinster.

As I chat with Turner over the phone during her afternoon walk, I hear a child’s voice in the background.

“I just met a little strangel,” Turner says. “We manifested them.”

To Turner, a “strangel” can be anything whimsical, wonderful and slightly off-kilter. The term captures the delightfully peculiar people she encounters out in the world: an enigmatic but kindly mechanic, for instance, or a fan who shows up to a set and makes dinner for the whole band, despite not knowing them.

“There are these people that let you stay at their house even though they’ve never met you,” Turner explains. “There’s magical cats that will follow you around a city and kind of seem to be like a spirit guide.”

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Though the term entered her mind in 2024, Turner had already been unknowingly working on Strangels for about a year. After spending the better part of three years on the road with Ryan Davis, MJ Lenderman and her own band Styrofoam Winos (of whom she’s one-third, alongside Nikrant and Joe Kenkel), Turner eventually realized she couldn’t flesh out an entire project while on tour. Instead, she jotted down ideas little by little, pocketing loose excerpts of memories, passing observations and fleeting scenes from her life — little things worth holding onto before they slipped away. Eventually, she returned home to Nashville to stitch those fragments together into a warm and reflective tapestry.

“The road’s great for that,” Turner explains. “Kind of just gathering scraps of ideas and images. Maybe a line will come to you and then you can kind of return to your solitude and make something more coherent.”

Much of Strangels took shape in solitude. Turner engulfed herself entirely in her own creative process, hanging out with her own mind and making something she recognized as totally singular — a collection of songs as weird and unique as she pleased.

“The feeling of being alone is really empowering,” she says. “It makes you play things you wouldn’t play if people were watching.”

While Turner played nearly every instrument herself, Nikrant aided in the creation process. He contributed pedal-steel riffs to a few songs and keys on “Strange Angels.” He also took on some of the logistical work that comes with producing an entire album yourself. 

“He kind of helped set up mics, and would press record and run out the door for me while I was on the drums or something,” Turner says. “And then make us dinner.”

Throughout the project, Turner finds her footing in the unifying theme. She populates the record with “strangels” of the animal world, critters ranging from snakes to beavers to fireflies. The menagerie embraces contradiction, whimsy and strange little connections between the natural and the otherworldly.

The result is a collection of folk fables. The enchantingly gentle “Beaver Moon” features a mesh of delicate instrumental performances as sound effects, anchored by airy acoustic guitar and pedal-steel riffs that you feel even though they’re barely audible. Understated arrangements leave room for the mirthful details of each song to emerge, leading to an intimate, slightly off-balance perspective in which the mundane and the magical feel like two sides of the same coin. The final two songs, “Ark” and “Strange Angels,” serve as twin love letters to the extraordinary, both played on Turner’s grandfather’s guitar using the unique tuning Joni Mitchell uses on Hejira. The powerful ballads tie the entire concept together with a “benediction” quality, as Turner describes it.

Though she has since stepped out of the self-contained ethereal imaginarium of her Strangels universe, Turner emphasizes the importance of maintaining a sense of wonder.

“I think there’s a lot of sheer determination in wonder. You have to go looking for it, and you have to sometimes try to create it. It comes down to choosing to be curious and to stay open to possibility.”

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