Boom Or Bust

Even though Nashville-via-South Carolina country chanteuse Nikki Lane has been making waves for the last few years with her distinctive take on the outlaw country oeuvre, roping in The Black Keys’ frontman Dan Auberach to produce her second album All Or Nothin’ at his Easy Eye Sound studio in the country music capital — with its cache of vintage gear — was undoubtedly a good way to get more people paying attention.

 "I want [my records] to sound like a mix-tape. I don’t want you to be too particularly depressed or excited for too long."

Yet despite the presence behind the console of the much-feted Auberach — who also duets with Lane on the track Love’s On Fire — it’s the string of heartfelt songs and Lane’s twangy, expressive vocals that pack the real punch on All Or Nothin’, and one gets the impression that this is one lady who doesn’t need nepotism to open any doors.

“It’s been going really well, it seems — it’s the right timing definitely to make an album with Dan,” she enthuses. “It’s also good, I think, that it’s my second record so I already had a little bit going on, and I just think the build has been really good. I just wanted it to sound like it does, but I didn’t realise that sonically it would sound so great. Once you get a hold of somebody like Dan and Tchad [Blake], the guy who mixed it — that’s a whole other thing — I want the records all to have the same feel (I’m working on one right now) in that I want them all to sound like a mix-tape. I don’t want you to be too particularly depressed or excited for too long. Then I just write about what’s going on. When I was trying to figure out who I wanted to work with on the album, I just tried to figure out who was making dope records I actually listen to — because I don’t really listen to that much new stuff.”

In conversation, Lane is vivacious and friendly, with laughter punctuating nearly every utterance, and this enthusiasm is magnified exponentially when she discusses her impending Australian sojourn — no surprise, really, given that this tour represents her first-ever shows outside the United States.

“I’m so excited; I think this is going to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, this trip!” she gushes. “I’ve never been to Australia, and I’m bringing the whole band! I negotiated my fee in band members; I said, ‘I have to have them all! They’ll be mad at me if anybody gets left behind!’

"I can’t play alone. Especially if you’ve heard that record — I’m not that good on guitar. I don’t have to be — I do other jobs — but I have to have those guys with me. I’m choosing to break even — in terms of not coming home with any money — but if I do it that way and everybody likes it then maybe I’ll be able to come back again with the band. That’s the goal, and if I do it by myself you guys may not want to have me back, so it’s worth it.”

Yet even though Lane is bringing her full band contingent, don’t expect an exact replica of her songs as they’re experienced on the albums.

“Well, I think that [the new] record is beautiful, and to pretend that we could accurately reproduce that every night would be pretty far-fetched — we’d need even more band members, and I’d need a background singer (or three),” she continues. “I hope as a lover of music and someone who sees a lot of bands that people who see us realise that it’s different but still in line [with the album] and a realistic approach. I’ve modified little bits of songs, just in terms of, ‘Okay, that’s how it was written and that’s what we did early in August, but now we’ve played it three hundred times and this is how it goes. It’s better with two choruses — it just is’. So there are things that have changed, but hopefully in a good way.

"I also think that I sing some of them stronger now because I’ve sung them a bunch of times, and often-times when you’re recording you’re just getting to know something because you’ve just finished it — at least, that’s what happens in my case, because I’m a procrastinator and don’t write until it’s the last day”.

Does the writing process come easily for Lane or is it something that requires a lot of hard work and discipline?

“I think it’s either/or,” she ponders. “I don’t sit down and try to write very often like some of my friends — again, I’m not very comfortable with my guitar so I just don’t do it — but there are moments where something of elevated intensity happens and all of a sudden a melody or an idea comes to me and I’ll normally hold on it, and then when it’s time to spend a couple of hours on it, I can do it. If there’s a story line and a melody, I can finish it —  who’s to say how good it is, but I can finish that song. Then I just try to pick the twelve most captivating ones that I wake up singing, and try to document them so that you’ll hopefully be stuck with them as well.”

Does she work hard on the lyrics?

“No,” Lane giggles loudly. “It literally just kind of pops out. I try to make myself just sing it out loud and rhyme and then I’ll just listen to it like twelve times, and then work out the best way to piece together the stupid shit I just said. I think if you’re trying to make a point… I know people who fuss and fuss and fuss over words — maybe they write better songs than me, but I’m not sure — but I do know that I don’t have time to keep fussing until it’s like, ‘Which of those two words which rhyme make a better sentence?’, because half of the things I love about songs are where they seriously don’t make any damn sense, where you’re like, ‘How on earth could he have ever thought of that?’

"We’ve been covering the song Waymore’s Blues by Waylon Jennings, and there’s a line where he says, ‘Wanna get the rabbit out of the L-O-G/You gotta make a commotion like a D-O-G’ – what are you doing where you think, ‘You know what, we should spell out the last word at the end of those sentences!’ That either happens or it doesn’t — you can think about it all day long — but I think you’re just working towards trying to have that moment.”

"I’ll spend a couple of days getting onto someone else’s dude or girl who’s misbehaving — I just like calling people out."

And while Lane’s songs seem super-personal on the surface, she attests that they’re not purely autobiographical.

“They’re kind of autobiographical,” she admits. “It depends — most of them are pretty much just about what’s happening, but sometimes I’ll not try to beat up too much on my ex-husband, who didn’t really do anything wrong; he’s just the person that I’m talking about, you know what I mean? So I’ll spend a couple of days getting onto someone else’s dude or girl who’s misbehaving — I just like calling people out. But there’s also a lot of tongue-in-cheek things on there, like Sleep With A Stranger, which is obviously not autobiographical — I don’t go out there and select characters to sleep with — but it did sound like a fun song to put on a jukebox for college girls, although their mothers would be livid!”

Corrupting minors aside for a minute, Lake’s music touches upon a lot of genres — the country feel is abetted by flourishes of ‘60s groups and rock’n’roll — does this reflect a diverse taste in music growing up?

“Well, when I grew up, it was really diversified in terms of what I was being shown, but as a teenager my music taste was kinda not that good,” she smiles. “It wasn’t until my early twenties in California that I started listening to stuff that I still listen to — most of what I go back and listen to from when I was younger I’m, like, ‘Whoa, I cannot believe that I was into that! But that was a moment, I loved him and it’s cool’. But my parents used to listen to a lot of good shit — my mum used to listen to a lot of Motown, and my dad was really into ‘80s and ‘90s country, and I distinctly remember dancing next door as my best friend’s dad listened to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, so there was shit that we were listening to all of the time. But I was about fifteen in the early-2000s so I loved Blink-182, and got into punk and pop-punk — which was what I was talking about regretting earlier — but then in my early twenties hanging out in California, that’s when I started listening to Neil Young, Lee Hazelwood and a lot of that old country, and stuff like Flamin’ Groovies and The Gun Club, just the different stuff that was coming from that coast. I got really into it, and ultimately started playing music because of that sort of stuff.”

Fortunately, the scene in Nashville is really diverse too, her success there reflecting the duality of Lane’s appeal as an outlaw artist in mainstream country capital of the world.

“Totally, there’s a lot going on here and a lot of cool scenes,” she agrees. “It’s like that every night, it really just is all about the music. But there is a lot of it. When I play here, no one moves because there’s so much music that maybe they’re tired of it? My parents — especially my father — are as mainstream country as it gets, so I just try to make sure that during the writing process that he’s not looking at me weird. I don’t want to dumb it down. A lot of people say, ‘I don’t like country but I do like you’, or they’re like, ‘I love Kasey Musgraves and I also love you’. I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet and both sides are enjoying the record. I definitely think that the mainstream country world in general thinks that I dress weird — they’re all, like, ‘Why is all your shit old?’ and I’m, like, ‘I don’t know, I just like it!’ We got out of a bar one night and this guy was like, ‘Hey ladies!’ but then her realised that all of the boys in my band at the time had long hair and he was, like, ‘Ugh, don’t look like ladies!’ and that was it for us, we weren’t going to have a good show because of that guy. It’s over.”

Lane’s unique style means that back home she gets to play with plenty of country bands but also rock bands like The Whigs, although this diversity can sometimes come loaded with its own unique problems.

“I think it’s great,” she says of not being pigeonholed. “The idea is to get as many fans as possible, right? If you’re just dabbling in one world you kinda max out at whatever that capacity is, so it’s fun to be able to go out with different artists. You want your core audience of course — and that’s starting to come the more often we play — but we see such different people at gigs every time we play with someone new. It’s hard to even get those opening slots, because they don’t pay a lot and it has to be the right timing and the right situation to even go, but when you get asked you have to think, ‘Okay, are they going to be appalled by us?’ I went out with a band called Noah & The Whale once and I just felt that we had different audiences altogether. Maybe I was too old, that happens — I’m getting to that age where maybe I’m too old for some people. But I was playing last week and there was this fourteen-year-old girl who’d been to a couple of my shows and she was singing along, and I was, like, ‘Holy shit! That girl knows my songs!’ But then she was singing the lyrics to Sleep With A Stranger and I was, like, ‘Oh my god, why did I write that song? That’s terrible.’ Then when we got offstage my drummer said, ‘Wasn’t it weird how that young girl was singing Sleep With A Stranger?’ And I just thought, ‘Oh Jesus, I have to think about this! I wasn’t thinking that children were going to want to buy the record!’”

But obviously touring is more than just a litany of travails, there good times aplenty too like when Lane recently got to go on tour opening up for country-rock veterans the Old 97’s.

“They were awesome! Their crowd gets so pumped — I don’t know what it is, but they’re just ready to go. Not even kidding, I crowd-surfed the last night of the Old 97’s shows, and I told Rhett [Miller – frontman] that I was going to do it and he didn’t believe me,” she laughs uproariously. “And it was full-blown, they got me the whole way across the room and the bodyguard brought me back to the stage, I was, like, ‘This is a golden moment!’ I can’t name anyone else that I’ve opened for that has an environment like that, where you can just fall off the stage — I was delighted. But also the guys in the band were so cool — the thing about playing with guys who’ve been in this for a while is that they’re truly on the same team. They’re always happy to give you some advice, or let it slide if you’re a little late because you’re in the van or whatever — they’re good peers to be with on the road, especially if you’ve just started doing this. They’ll say, ‘Don’t worry, it gets better,' and I’m, like, ‘Okay, if Rhett Miller says it’s going to get better then I’m going to do it!’”