The road song is an essential part of our American musical DNA, holding a particularly special significance in country music. Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” is a love letter to living “like a band of gypsies”; John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” romanticizes the opposite sentiment, its protagonist telling us that country roads deliver him homeward, “to the place I belong.”
Nikki Lane’s forthcoming third LP Highway Queen, out Feb. 17 via New West Records, doubles down on the idea of the road song: It’s a road album, inspired by and written during what were sometimes grueling but often revelatory days out on tour.
Written in the wake of the success of her sophomore album, 2014’s All or Nothin’, Highway Queen marks a new chapter in the life of the self-described “First Lady of Outlaw Country” — one where the musical career she once felt was a side project has taken center stage, and her touring van has become her home base. Lane came up with the name Highway Queen months before she’d written its first song, and the resulting collection eventually started taking shape around the concept.
“You get out there and — I grew up reading a lot of Western novels, so I love going out and traveling and falling into a daydream of letting your imagination roam as you’re out on the road — but after a while it all starts to run together,” Lane tells the Scene. “I started to notice after a while I didn’t know if I was really the ‘First Lady of Outlaw Country’ or any of the silly things I had said along the way to market myself or to cut up with people. But I did know that I spent more time in a van on the road than most humans.”
Highway Queen’s opening track “700,000 Rednecks,” an ode to the area surrounding her hometown Greenville, S.C., was the first song Lane wrote for the album, its opening “yippee ki yay” setting the tone for the traditional-leaning 10-song set that follows. “I wrote that probably two months into touring All or Nothin’ and just happened to be at a party with the band in Electric Lady [Studio] and was drunk and wrote the song real quickly, kind of in a group setting,” Lane recalls.
She recruited Dallas musician Jonathan Tyler to co-produce the album, with members of the revered Texas Gentlemen serving as her band. The group split time between Echo Lab Studio in Denton, Texas, and Nashville’s Club Roar.
“It was the most collaborative thing I feel like I’ve gotten to do,” Lane says of working with Tyler. “I enlisted someone to take control and oversee the process, but I felt really comfortable voicing my opinion and trying to get what I wanted out of things, even if I wasn’t perfect at being able to verbalize it.”
Lane’s newfound confidence and artistic freedom is evident all over the record, particularly in the triumphant mythology of the title track, in which she declares, with matter-of-fact defiance, “The highway queen don’t need no king.” And while the album dabbles in the deeply personal — Lane’s divorce is the subject of the heart-wrenching closing track “Forever Lasts Forever” — it’s also imbued with a palpably heightened sense of humanity that Lane attributes to (you guessed it) the road.
“The stories that you’re telling belong to other people, you know,” she says. “Taking on that weight and realizing that you’re writing for more than yourself, I think I’ve just learned that no subject is off the table when it comes to such a wide variety of fans and listeners. You’re writing for all of us.”
While Lane has certainly found herself singing of her times on the road in the key of Willie (“It is hard to give your full attention to something when there’s an entire life to nurture 12 miles down the road,” she says of traveling to Texas to write and record), she also feels the pull toward home expressed so well by Denver’s tune. She’s still at the helm of her Gallatin Pike store High Class Hillbilly, hoping to expand its reach as a haven for musicians and artists in her community. She also feels a deep gratitude for the city that paved the way for Highway Queen.
“It literally created it,” she says of Nashville’s effect on her career. “From the first show I played here, which I remember most fondly, which was at The Basement. In this job, there are moments where you try to back out when it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go the right way. Those people have brought me in and kept me moving.”
Email music@nashvillescene.com
