Who Does Lydia Loveless Think She Is?

With the release of her two new records, Lydia Loveless watches you watching her. Maybe you should listen, instead.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.”

– John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I.

It seems like an unwritten rule of rock journalism: when a woman is interviewed for a feature, within one paragraph you’ll know what she was wearing that day. A hundred words, tops. Maybe you could write it off to “setting the scene” or creating a sense of “being there”—maybe, if only men were usually described the same way. But how often do you get a catalogue-like description of Marcus Mumford’s fashion choices?

I decide to put my wholly anecdotal, no-way-anyone-has-the-time-to-research-this hypothesis to the test by randomly grabbing a rock journalism anthology off my shelf: The Sound and the Fury: A Rock’s Backpages Reader, edited by Barney Hoskyns. “Part 2: Close Encounters” starts with a feature on Joni Mitchell written in 1972 by the late Penny Valentine, one of if not the first female pop journalist in Great Britain.

The second paragraph begins, “[Mitchell] is wearing a pair of jeans, a tiny printed shirt and plain sweater over top,” and goes on about her appearance for another 50 words or so. The next three features are about Marvin Gaye, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan, and the closest thing to fashion in any of them is when Mick Brown informs us that Dylan “stroked the beginnings of an unruly beard.” Glenn O’Brien, writing for Interview in 1990, then notes in his feature’s second paragraph that “Madonna looked like a billion bucks in a Gaultier sheath with dangerous-looking silver nipples.”

This isn’t to shame any of those writers, or Hoskyns and his book; neither is the point to dismiss the ways women might identify themselves through fashion. It’s just one example of how musicians who are women have been and are still looked at differently than male musicians, “looked at” being the operative phrase. Too often a woman’s music is seen more than it’s heard, and seen only through a gendered lens of style, biography, sexuality, and the myths of essentialism and authenticity.

Or, as alt-country musician Lydia Loveless puts it to me more succinctly, “No one ever asks you, ‘What does it feel like to be a man?'”

II.

Loveless is like a basketball player who skipped college and went straight to the pros. The image that trajectory creates in the minds of some, an image of privilege or grace, obscures the reality of countless hours spent in the gym, or in Loveless’ case, dive bars.

Her career began at 14 when she and her sisters formed the band Carson Drew with their father on drums. The group’s first big-time, glamorous, gig of privilege? Bernie’s, a punk club on the Columbus, Ohio, High Street strip, the kind of place where the bathroom floor is always flooded with an inch of standing water or other liquids. Loveless kept at it, recording her self-released debut, The Only Man, but it was the strength of her voice and live performances that caught the eye of Bloodshot Records in 2010. By the time she released her first record for Bloodshot in 2011, the volatile cowpunk Indestructible Machine, Loveless was 21 and already a veteran.

So what did she do? She toured for two years.

Meanwhile, I followed the story in Columbus and heard the grumblings in the local scene: too much, too fast, who does she think she is? Loveless heard them, too. I wondered then, and still wonder, how much of that suspicion and jealousy has to do with Loveless being not only young and successful, but a young and successful woman. If some young dude with guitar scored a label deal, would the pressure be quite the same?

All those touring miles and, I think, that particular brand of pressure have forged Loveless’ strongest work on her two new recordings: an EP titled Boy Crazy and the full-length record Somewhere Else. Each veers away from outlaw country-punk into territory held largely by rock ‘n’ roll, where nothing is so easy to pin down. With a solid band behind her—Todd May on guitars, her husband Ben Lamb on bass, and Nick German on drums—Loveless’ vaunted brashness is still intact (“brash” being a word the press uses to describe a woman who talks plainly) but there’s also a maturity to the songs. If Indestructible Machine was an explosion from the gates, the quintessential cowpunk blend of twang, muscle, and up-yours energy, Boy Crazy and Somewhere Else sound like they’ve been made by someone who’s realized she can’t get all the way across the country at a sprint.

Having agreed to an interview for the magazine Ghettoblaster, Loveless suggests we meet at a restaurant called Betty’s, a narrow, busy landmark in the gentrified, artsy Short North neighborhood of Columbus, her home base. Sitting at a corner table by the front windows, she’s patiently stirring a foggy mixed drink when I arrive.

Shy but assured, Loveless possesses a wariness that, I think, must be the natural response to doing so many interviews, playing so many shows, and meeting so many strangers. But once she decides to talk, she talks, sometimes freely, laughing at herself, and sometimes thoughtfully, searching for the right word or revising what she’s just said. Either way, she’s honest, and we talk for nearly two hours, far more conversation than I can use for the Ghettoblaster feature.*

After we talk about the new records a bit, especially their warmer sound compared to Indestructible Machine, I note that I haven’t seen much mention in other features and interviews about her songwriting.

“That’s because I’m a woman,” she says with a laugh.

So we talk about songwriting. Finally taking a break from relentless touring, Loveless spent a fair number of frustrating weeks holed up writing new songs in an office in a Columbus neighborhood called Grandview, chucking away an entire album’s worth of songs. Ultimately, the time in the office was about “vacuuming all the extraneous shit out of my brain,” she says. “When I sit by myself for too long, I can get a little trapped in my head. I forget to experiment and let go. So at first it was very simple three-chord songs, and a lot of writing about ‘I feel boxed in by the country music genre’. And I was like, oh, this is boring.”

Loveless credits May with helping her get past the traps. “Todd and I do songwriting nights where we’ll just get together and play, and it’s cool because he has different influences and more guitar-oriented influences than I do.” When I ask what she means by that, Loveless explains how her tendency is to focus on the songwriting while May, a songwriter with a long and laudable history of Columbus bands, picks up on texture and production. “With the EP and the record, I’ve started to take more control of the guitar sound and focus more on production and what the whole thing is going to sound like instead of, ‘I’m here in this room writing this song and I’ll let everyone else decide what else goes on it.'”

The songwriting on Boy Crazy and Somewhere Else sounds effortless, possessing that combination of timelessness and immediacy. So I ask if there are moments in the writing process when everything comes in a rush. “I’d say most songs that I write to completion and actually end up recording and using are ones where I don’t remember sitting down and writing them,” Loveless replies. “I’ll just record a demo of something and completely do stream-of-consciousness stuff and then just not listen to it for a few days and forget about it. And quite literally it’ll sound like something I’ve never even heard before.”

Or she’ll dream them up, like “The Water”, a gorgeous ballad on Boy Crazy I’m afraid will get lost in the rush of Somewhere Else being released. “As a songwriter,” Loveless says, “you go to bed at night and sometimes you dream songs, and you’re like, ‘That’s great, I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.’ And then you wake up and it’s fucking gone. Shit.”

“But with ‘The Water’, I fell asleep and had a dream that I was hanging out with this guy on a beach on Lake Michigan, which is like my favorite place on Earth. I went to Interlochen, so I had this dream I was back there. And then I went into this cabin and put on a Deer Tick record—do you know that band?—and ‘The Water’ came out. Literally, fully formed. I had to adjust the lyrics somewhat, but that song came out of the record player in my dream, and it was Deer Tick playing it.”