Spotlight: Lindsay Lou

photo: Dana Kalachnik

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“I was just holding on for dear life, putting one foot in front of the other and doing the best I could to get through the day,” Lindsay Lou discloses, as she looks back on a series of events that informed her eloquent and expressive new album, Queen of Time.

The opening track “Nothing Else Matters” not only frames the record but also manifests the sorrow she ultimately assuaged in the process of making it.

“The song speaks in the most broad strokes of my situation, where you’re in the grips of change and the ground is falling underneath you,” Lou reveals. “I was losing my grandma, the matriarch of the family, and I was also losing my marriage. I had been in a band with my husband [Joshua Rilko] for 13 years and we’d built this whole thing together. So there were some very huge life-shaking changes happening, knowing that I had to leave him, knowing I had to lose my grandma, but also knowing that at the heart of it all, I love Joshua beyond explanation. ‘I love you, nothing else matters’ is the beginning and the end of the story and of the process.”

Lou was a student at Michigan State University in 2008, when she happened upon a bluegrass band, The Flatbellys, at an open mic night. Although she had grown up singing and writing songs, encouraged by a sizable family—her mother was one of 12 children—Lou explains, “I was going to go to school to be a doctor because I had seen my brother go through the healthcare system and it was not what I thought it needed to be.”

However, that chance encounter at Dagwood’s Tavern altered her trajectory. She recalls, “Being able to get together with people and sing three-part harmony with this canon of songs that everybody knows really reminded me that I feel most connected to myself and my purpose when I’m singing for people.”

This connection resulted in the formation of Lindsay Lou & The Flatbellys, and it also facilitated Lou’s marriage to Rilko, the group’s co-founder and mandolin player.

Lindsay Lou & The Flatbellys recorded their debut album, Release Your Shrouds in 2012, followed by Ionia in 2015. Three years later, with the original Flatbellys all having moved on with the exception of Rilko, Lou released Southland under her own name. With each successive recording, she garnered further acclaim for her evocative songwriting and mellifluous vocals.

Her music then caught the attention of producer Dave O’Donnell (James Taylor, Sheryl Crow, Bettye LaVette), who reached out to Lou’s management expressing interest in working with her. She acknowledges, “I was hesitant to take on any collaborative commitments because of how much I could feel my world transforming. But right before the pandemic hit, we went in and started to record a couple of songs. When I listened back to them, they felt like demos of me working through what the vision of the record was going to be.”

She was preparing to hone that vision in March 2020 by writing songs while Rilko was off on a brief tour, when the pandemic hit.

“I had written just the very first little bit of ‘Needed’ and ‘Shame,’” she remembers, “but then the whole world shut down. He came back home and I couldn’t finish any songs. I felt stuck.”

Later that summer, Lou, who had relocated to Nashville in 2015, finally was able to break through, thanks to another Michigan transplant, her friend Billy Strings.

“Sometime in July or August, Billy came over to my front porch and I showed him the lyrics that I had been working on for ‘Nothing’s Working.’ We played through it for the first time as a song, and it felt like the floodgates had opened. I finished ‘Needed’ and ‘Shame’ later that day. Then a month later, I began the process of divorce with my husband. So I sort of started this project and blew up my life all at the same time.”

Lou entered the studio intermittently in 2021, adding songs and building on the narrative of the record. Still, it wasn’t until she incorporated a few choice moments from the 27 hours of recordings she had made of her late grandmother that it all finally came together.

“I’ve got my grandma talking to me in ‘Too Shall Pass.’ She’s someone who made a shelter of herself for anybody—the least wanted, the most outcasted, the addicts, the homeless people. They all had a place with her. When I put that in, it became the cherry on top that pulled everything together and sealed the deal. She’s talking me through a total freaking nervous breakdown about many things, one of which was having to lose her and not knowing what I was going to do on the other side of that if I needed her. I felt like that gave the record its full breadth. It captures a lot of reckonings through self-discovery, transformation, grief and loss. Then with all of this happening, she says, ‘This too shall pass.’ So it makes you hang on to the sweet moments a little dearer and take the difficult moments a little less personally.”

As Lou tours in support of the album, she has opted to play Queen of Time in its entirety. She notes, “I start and end the show with a handful of my most requested songs but, in between, I play the whole record front to back. I live in this whole jamband world and it’s very non-jamband to play the same set, but I’m really looking at this record as a performance piece.”

Queen of Time has enjoyed critical acclaim and chart success, but Lou takes particular comfort in other aspects of its release. “It feels so good to have people come up to me who are going through some serious shit and experiencing loss. They talk about how it’s helped them not feel so alone and move through their own grief. That’s been really humbling. It also gives me almost a peaceful feeling now that I’ve been able to move through everything and come out the other side. What I set out to do has been done.”