Playing a stoic, shoe-gazing dive-bar singer, Lera Lynn was an unlikely bright spot on the otherwise dull second season of HBO's star-studded crime series True Detective. The Nashville-by-way-of-Athens, Ga., singer-songwriter, who was already buzzing in Americana circles, landed four original cuts on the show's soundtrack, inspiring a parody at the Emmy Awards and drawing a whopping 35 million YouTube views. Riding that exposure, she'll swing through 3rd & Lindsley Saturday, Oct. 17, on her biggest headlining tour to date. In anticipation of the jaunt, Lynn opened up to the Scene about how she ended up sharing screen time with Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn, how it felt to let her dark side out and where she goes from here.
"It seems almost impossible to get people to respond to slow, sad music," she says. "So that's been great. Now I'm like, 'Oh cool, I can do my thing.' Maybe there is an audience for it."
The singer also talks about how she found a champion in roots-music sherpa T Bone Burnett. After she finished her second full-length, 2014's The Avenues, Lynn's manager introduced her to the revered super-producer. Burnett, acting as True Detective's music supervisor, was scouting songs for the show and the title track off Lynn's 2013 EP Lying in the Sun made his shortlist. Then, over a lunch and a happy hour, Burnett explained the project and asked Lynn if she'd be interested in writing together in L.A. It was an offer the singer didn't have to sleep on.
"I was like 'Of course, hell yeah!' " she recalls. "I thought [T Bone] was really interesting — he actually knew all the chords to 'Lying in the Sun,' and he was talking about a half-step chord change that's in the song and how he really liked that. He's a super musical dude, very sophisticated in that way. When I was on the plane [to L.A.] I remember having a pep talk with myself, going, 'All right, get your shit together. You've gotta do something!' "
Burnett was one step ahead of her, though. He already knew Lynn had just the right touch of dark depravity to create the foreboding aesthetic behind "The Only Thing Worth Fighting For," "My Least Favorite Life," "Church in Ruins" and "It Only Takes One Shot"
She explains, "T Bone just kept saying, 'This girl is fucked up. All the characters of the show are down and out. The tone of the music has to match this girl and this shitty dive she's playing in.' But that's about as much information as I was given. ... But that's a part of my artist-self. I've always heard, 'Sorry, but this isn't gonna get played on the radio because it's too slow.' Or, 'There's gotta be more hope in the songs, people want hope. Nobody's gonna latch on to something that's depressing — tempo, tempo, major key!' So to have somebody like T Bone sit there and say, 'Yeah, make it as fucked up as you can. Darker, darker, go there.' That was great."
In just a few short days, the pair wrote and recorded four songs in a sparse guitar-and-vocal style, and then Burnett had one more surprise for Lynn. He suggested she play the unnamed dive-bar singer, rather than try to teach someone else how to emote her songs. While fans who turn up to see her play at real bars will certainly get a taste of that sad-sack character, Lynn cautions that she doesn't actually share much in common with her onscreen persona.
"It's not close at all," she says with a laugh. "I never sit, I usually have a band and I usually 'perform.' ... It's usually a little more exciting, although I will say it does come down at points to get very stripped down and quiet. It's dynamic."
As such, onstage Lynn gives audiences a mix of everything she's done, from the deepest recesses of True Detective grit, to the pleading, obsessive love of "Standing on the Moon" and the breathless country of her newest tunes — which, in keeping with her cinematic excursion, would sound right at home as the twangy theme song of a new 007 movie.
"I hope it's a journey of some sort," she says of her live show. "It's designed to do that, to be for someone who truly listens. It's very subtle."
Lynn plans to have her third album ready for release by the time her tour wraps in January. With eight songs already in the can, the singer's taken everything she learned from her True Detective experience and built on it, including the knowledge that there's a place for her dark side after all.
"That's not to say that it's all going to be like that, or that it's gonna be much like the True Detective stuff at all," she explains. "But I think I'm exploring a little bit more. With every record I think the goal is to grow into yourself little by little, and with this one it really feels like that's happening. I'm enjoying it, I think it's going to be interesting."
Email Music@nashvillescene.com
