Lola Kirke

Lola Kirke was weathering the perils of touring when I caught up with her on a Zoom call to Seattle. She’d just checked into – and quickly out of – the “world’s scariest hotel” and her original tour manager had gone down with Covid. But she was delighted to be out again post-pandemic and promoting a new album, Lady For Sale, her second release following her 2018 debut, Heart Head West. The sound is alt-Country meets 80s/90s disco and rock. It’s a big production. Locked down with producer Austin Jenkins, she had “nothing to do except obsess over music,” she explains: “We demo’d the shit out of those songs!” Despite some upbeat grooves, “it’s actually kind of a sad album. It’s dealing with a lot of doubt and pain and longing. But the narrative of the record does become triumphant.” “Triumphant” surely describes the video accompanying the lead single, ‘Better Than Any Drug’, which finds Lola cavorting around the house as if drunk on a new love.

Though born to a musical family – her English father, Simon Kirke, was drummer with fabled bands Free and Bad Company – Lola is perhaps better known as an actress than a singer-songwriter, having notched up the lead in hit Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle and several acclaimed movie roles. How does she compare the two activities? “At the level I’m at you make no money as a musician – but it feels a lot more creative.” She gets a buzz from making music videos: “I haven’t felt that way on a film set in a really long time!” And then there’s the thrilling realisation when she hits the stage with a live band that “we’re all making sounds at the same time, and they work!”

 

Early reference points for her music included Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Alice Coltrane, but a recent move to Nashville introduced her to another cultural world. “I was inspired in a different way,” she reflects. She’d always listened to classics like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, but Tanya Tucker emerged as a big influence for her recently, alongside younger discoveries like Miranda Lambert. New genres can require using your vocal capacities in new ways. She tells a scary story about acting a film scene with her sister Jemima (also an actress). The script required her to scream at her sister. She “went for it, but not in a healthful way” and burst a blood vessel on her vocal cord. Specialists advised surgery but Lola was too busy with work at the time. Happily, there was no lasting damage to that already smoky voice.   

 

The title track of the new album, ‘Lady For Sale’, distils a theme she returns to several times in our conversation, the need to sell her work – sell herself – in the marketplace. “I didn’t feel I was being validated. I’ve spent my whole life wanting to connect with others and ultimately that’s not going to be possible unless I really try to sell myself.” She’s on a “roller-coaster of self-worth” at the moment, buoyed up by fans’ compliments, buffeted by online abuse about her appearance. She sounds envious of the simpler world her father grew up in, before Twitter, before Instagram: “I don’t know what it was like to live in a world where you weren’t always interfacing with your own press.” Lola’s solution is to “create, like, another self that you’re OK with sharing with others.” She admires Billie Eilish in this regard: “she’s still selling, but there’s something really potent about what she’s selling.”

 

Lola Kirke plays London's Moth Club on September 13th. 

(First published in RnR magazine.)