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Country music is cool again. Everybody keeps saying it. Just last week alone, British daytime TV show This Morning and the Evening Standard both declared it to be so. Except, it isn't. Not really. Not like actually cool. It might be cool to be country, but on the whole, country music itself isn't cool. Not in the way Julian Casablancas or Kate Moss or Jane Birkin are cool anyway. Country music is definitely not cool by their measure. In fact, it's often cringe inducingly, bum-tinglingly uncool.
But Lola Kirke is cool. Lola Kirke is the kind of cool people often refer to as "effortlessly" cool, mainly because of her proximity to and ease around other actual cool people: she's friends with Zoë Kravitz and Rosanne Cash; she was in "a feminist country band" with Marianne Rendón at Bard College; her sisters are Domino and Jemima Kirke; and because she effuses an easy-going, self-assuredness that most of us would have to try very hard to pull off.
The youngest of four children born in London to a rockstar father and a fashion designer mother, Lola Kirke moved with her family to New York City when she was five years old and grew up in the Manhattan neighborhood of West Village where her mother, Lorraine Kirke, opened the legendary NY vintage clothing store, Geminola.
Lola Kirke was cool when country wasn't cool, and along with artists like Caitlin Rose and Margo Price - who looked beyond the conventions and constrictions of Nashville - she's now become a spiritual pioneer for a fresh wave of left-of-centre stars epitomising a new kind of Nashville cool.
"I love a lot of these younger artists that are really killing it in country," Kirke says. "Like Maggie Antone and Willow Avalon and Kaitlin Butts. I love hanging out with people who are different from me, and finding the ways that we overlap."
The history of country music has always been written by the outlaws, the outsiders, the misfits and the renegades. Whether it was Waylon and Willie and the Outlaw movement standing up against the Nashville Sound in the late '60s, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris in the '70s or Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam and the first wave of New Traditionalists reclaiming country’s roots again in the ‘80s.
"I think that there is a part of me that is always determined to be an outsider, because I'm probably more comfortable that way," Lola Kirke says, smiling. Lola Kirke always seems to have a wry half-smile when she talks about being a country singer.
It's one of the things that makes her take on country music so refreshing at the moment: her ability to laugh at herself. Country music didn't always take itself so seriously. It used to allow itself to be a little ridiculous sometimes, to be a little bit playful and self-deprecating, to laugh at itself now and then. Whether it was Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty trading barbs on 'You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,' Barbara Mandrell letting her lover know he can eat 'Crackers' in her bed anytime or Johnny Cash making fun of his own public image on 'Chicken in Black,' country music's tropes were often delivered with knowing winks and eye rolls as often as they were with hand-on-heart pathos. Sure, Dierks and Brad are still at the back of the class these days, flicking spitballs off their shatterproof rulers, but on the whole, thanks to the doleful earnestness of Zach Bryan and everything that floated up to shore in his wake, country music is having a moment with the Great And Serious Male Artist™ and it's very much not in the mood for any silliness.
That's why there is something so subversive about Lola Kirke being able to laugh at herself at the same time as she's able to dig deep and deliver some of her most unflinchingly honest and personal songs yet on her latest album, Trailblazer.
Co-written with some of Nashville’s finest songwriters – including Natalie Hemby, Ashley Monroe, Jon Decious, Jason Nix, Delaney Ramsdell and Liz and Caitlin Rose - she teamed up with GRAMMY-winning writer and producer Daniel Tashian to conjure up a delicious blend of warm ‘70s West Coast yacht-pop, Ladies of Too Slow to Disco and twangy honky-tonk country that sounds like nothing else coming out of Nashville right now.
It shouldn't be all that surprising. Lola Kirke has never been afraid to add a little screwball to her NYC cowgirl persona. She hitchhiked naked down Gallatin Avenue in East Nashville for the 'All My Exes Live in LA' video, dressed up in a Bud Light bottle costume to promote her '241s' single and appears on the cover to Trailblazer in clown make up.
"I feel like a lot of my content lately around music has been meta content," she explains. "Making fun and kind of poking holes in what content is like. Like car singing videos or unboxing videos."
"Being an artist is inherently demeaning," she laughs. "Like, most of the time, it's demeaning, and then sometimes, you know, it's glorifying. You have to be incredibly grounded to sustain it. I'm not all the time, but I think you see people lose their minds because they're not in touch."
"In the process of releasing this record, it's been so intense that it's broken me," she says. "I have fallen apart trying to market this record, and I've put myself back together again, and I feel so much better. It's kind of revealed where the engine was not working and oriented me back to how I really want to be in the world, which is not a person on social media desperate to get people to pay attention to them. I think that's been a much-needed revelation for me."
Fortunately, Lola Kirke and her creative director, Gabe Dreschler, came up with something that was always going to grab attention regardless. The cover of Trailblazer is a portrait of Lola Kirke standing in front of a New York skyline dressed in a bright red two-piece power suit with a matching cowboy hat, hearts drawn on her cheeks and white clown face paint.
"On the song 'Trailblazer' the chorus is 'When you feel like a failure, well, maybe you're a trailblazer,'" she says. "And both that song and '2 Damn Sexy' were songs that I wrote that I needed to hear, because I often feel like a failure, I often feel like I'm not fucking sexy, or I often feel just very bad about myself, because I think we live in a society that really would like us to feel that way so that we buy more shit and go online more and just basically give up our freedom and individuality. I think those kinds of reminders that you don't need these other things - and that maybe the reason that you don't fit in is because you're supposed to stand out, or because standing out isn't really bad - these are just the kinds of sentiments that I needed to hear in my life."
"When I was thinking about what images go well with that idea - because we had named the record Trailblazer - I was trying to think about something that's always trying, but always kind of feels like they're failing," she explains. "That's the essence of the clown. What is the humor of the clown? It's that they are always trying and always failing. But also, the clown occupies this other kind of interesting archetype, which is the truth teller, but they tell the truth through humor."
"Then I just thought rodeo clowns looked cool," she adds laughing. "Plus, I just had all these things in my house. That's the real answer. I had that shit in my house."
In a lot of ways, clowning is about the freedom that comes from an acceptance of our own failures and our limitations. It's about accepting a more authentic self by deconstructing conventions in a humorous, self-deprecating way, giving us some relief from all our self-doubts and second guessing. Clowning is like wrestling with reality, it allows you to be playful just to see what comes of it - and what comes out usually reveals a deeper truth.
For Lola Kirke, it's a deeper truth that she also digs down into in a revelatory memoir-in-essays entitled Wild West Village (Simon and Schuster 2025), that came out in January. In it, she chronicles her dysfunctional upbringing in London and New York City with her parents and sisters Domino and Jemima Kirke; the highs and lows of her career as an actress in Hollywood; being an "adult" of divorce; and her unusual path to Nashville and country music, touching on everything from her learning Patsy Cline songs from Jumpin' Jim's Ukulele Songbook in her senior year to that time she accidentally, unknowingly interviewed Joan Didion when she was in ninth grade.
Filled with hilariously revealing anecdotes from her misguided youth and quippy one liners, Wild West Village is the kind of book that you will want to carry around the world with you in a burlap sack - just like Lola Kirke's friend Ada does in the book with Trout Fishing in America - because it will mean so many different things to you at so many different points in your life.
Released in March, a month or so after the book, Trailblazer almost feels like a companion piece to Wild West Village, or perhaps the other way around, with musical interpretations of the themes and stories from Kirke's extraordinary book.
"I was writing the book for longer, maybe around the same time, but I was definitely inspired from writing the book to write songs," she explains. "So many great writers I know write from prompts. I think when you write so much you kind of need to have something to inspire you. I think that just being in the habit of writing personally, as I was for the book, gave me more of an eye towards how I could write more personally about my life."
"My Family puts the fun back in dysfunctional," she writes in the book, recalling how she identified with a magnet she saw on her math's tutor's fridge, and much of the book and Trailblazer is themed around her family dynamics.
On the introspective 'Zeppelin 3,' she reconciles with a strained paternal relationship (“I guess he tried his best, and I have to believe he would have taught me how to love but all he knew was how to leave”), and 'Marlboro Lights and Madonna,' written with Natalie Hemby and frequent collaborator Jason Nix, is an unlikely anthem for daughters of unconventional mothers everywhere. Meanwhile, the road trip to Graceland she takes on 'Mississippi, My Sister, Elvis and Me' unpacks the complicated relationship she has with her older sister, the actress Jemima Kirke, known for playing Jessa Johansson in the 2012 HBO series, Girls.
"I am kind of the consummate youngest sister," Kirke explains about the song. "It's really - unfortunately - basically my entire personality. I spent so much of my life hoping that my extremely cool older sister would want to hang out with me, thinking it would never happen, and then I guess she had nothing to do one weekend, so she decided to come visit me, and we took a road trip from New Orleans to Memphis, because her hero is Elvis, while my hero is, of course, her. It was such a singular experience in my life that I wanted to preserve it forever, and I kind of started writing the song about that trip while we were still on the trip. I felt like a true artist writing the lyrics on the back of a cocktail napkin on Martini three at the Peabody Hotel bar."
The dynamics of the three Kirke sisters are one of the book and the record's most satisfyingly covered themes.
"I thought about Blue Sisters because I love that book, and I was thinking it'd be fun to be in that movie or TV show," she says about Coco Mellors’ recent novel, centred around three estranged sisters who are forced to confront their grief and past traumas after their sister Nicky unexpectedly dies. "I was thinking, ‘Which one would I play?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I'm not gonna work out, so I can't play Bonnie. Lucky, she's too young. I have to be Avery’. And honestly, Avery depresses me a bit."
In the book, Avery, the eldest daughter, is a strait-laced lawyer living in London, and a recovering heroin addict in hiding, who self-destructs over a secret that could undo her marriage. Despite it being the only part she feels she could play in an adaptation of the book, Avery's isn't a narrative that Lola Kirke herself ever took on.
"I couldn't have been a lawyer, I have no skills," she laughs. "That's why I'm here. I don't have any useful skills for anyone else. My whole life that was drilled into my head. It's wonderful to encourage your children to do art, but I couldn't do anything else. My mom did my French homework for me. Math, no one did it. Science, absolutely forget it. I always knew my family were abnormal. We didn't value things other people valued, we valued being beautiful and good at art, and everyone else valued emotional well-being and marketable skills."
The honesty of the wonderfully warts-and-all Wild West Village and the lyrics and the imagery of Trailblazer are also reflected in the actual sound of Lola Kirke's voice, too.
"I'm singing from a different place, and it just feels more natural," she says. "I think it's the first time in a while that I've just let myself sing and not try and sing in a southern accent I don't have. I fucking don't know what this accent is. When I was like nine, I just really kind of gave it up. It was kind of like carrying around a broken satchel. I gave it up, like a drug habit," she laughs. "I'm like, sober for my British accent, because it was very affected, and it was weird. It was weird, but now I sound like this. And I don't know what this is."
"Everything feels more natural," she says about Trailblazer. "It's a live band record, which Country Curious was as well, but this has really minimal overdubs. We had seven days to make the record. We did it in five. There was so much ease with making the record, which is probably why it's been so fucking annoying marketing it and putting it out. It just felt really solid and breezy and true and I feel that there's a maturity that I have now that I think is in the music itself. So that feels good."
She credits a lot of her newfound self-belief with working with songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Tashian on this new record, which also perhaps explains why Kacey Musgraves' Golden Hour feels like one of the few contemporary country records that shares a kindred spirit with Trailblazer.
"I think Daniel was really encouraging me to be as truthful as I could be as an artist with this record and sing the songs that were...not ‘truthful’ in a boring, annoying way, but truthful in the way of what felt the most authentic," she says. "So, I think that that's why the record does kind of bend genres a little bit. It's increasingly difficult to market music and it feels increasingly like the onus falls on the artist. In a lot of ways, there's beauty in that, if that's something that you really want to take on. But for me, I'm a little older. I'm not just a musician. There's a way in which being online kind of cheapens other areas of what I try and do. I'm not just trying to be a country artist. I'm trying to do a lot of different things. I'm kind of trying to do things that I now realize maybe are a bit arrogant to try and do, because they've never really been done before; like, 'She's a memoirist, a country artist, an actress.' But also, I think that it's just been important for me to really find out what makes me be a better artist, rather than holding onto this idea of trying to be a bigger artist."
"Country Curious was very much just like an experiment in genre in some way," she says of her previous EP, pitched as "Bro Country but for girls" and produced by Elle King and featuring collaborations with First Aid Kit, Rosanne Cash and Katlin Butts. "My album that I did with Third Man, Lady for Sale, was too. Those were personal songs, and we were doing a kind of country pastiche, '80s synth thing. But with Trailblazer I wanted to see what it's like to write songs, and then we'll see if they come out country."
Disarmingly funny, with an intimate, dry sense of humour, the songs on Trailblazer strike a perfect balance between being quietly hilarious and deeply poignant. There are unflinchingly personal songs like the radio-friendly country power pop of 'Easy on You,' written about loving someone in the throes of addiction or '2 Damn Sexy,' a song about loving yourself when society would have you feel otherwise, while she puts her own twist on tearjerking countrypolitan with '241s' and lead single 'Hungover Thinkin,'' co-written with mother-daughter songwriting duo Liz and Caitlin Rose.
Listening to the songs on Trailblazer feels like your best friend telling you all their wildest secrets after two bottles of wine, which probably explains why every woman I know wants to be best friends with Lola Kirke. She has become universally adored by women in the same way that people like Tina Fey, Meryl Streep and Dolly Alderton are. With her hard relatable pop song-sized disquisitions on female friendship, sisterhood, romance, heartache and humiliation, she's cleared a gap in the sawdust covered dancefloors of classic country for her own peculiar brand of wit and wisdom.
If Nora Ephron had ever made a country album you imagine it might have sounded something like Trailblazer by Lola Kirke. Poignant, witty and self-deprecating, it feels like the spirit of New York City still runs through Lola Kirke even if she doesn't tend to run through New York City so much herself anymore. Despite the album closing with her love letter to the city she grew up in, 'Bury Me in NYC,' it's Music City, not the Big Apple, that's become her home in recent years.
"I don't want to live in New York," she says. "I like my house in Nashville. I like my life. I like being different. Even though sometimes it's annoying."
In her quest to stick out and do things on her own terms in a genre that isn't always known for its artistic freedom, she's found a place where she perhaps belongs after all. Just like country music's great misfits and outsiders of the past, Lola Kirke always had it in her to lead the way to somewhere more exciting than where the genre was going before, and Trailblazer seems to have liberated that little bit of main character energy that Lola Kirke needed to find her own voice.
"I'm Carrie, I'm Jo March, I'm always gonna be the main one," Lola Kirke says, deciding which one of various fictional sisters she would be. "Which one from Hocus Pocus? The hot one. Sarah Jessica Parker."
"I'm always the hot one or the main one."
Trailblazer is out now on One Riot Records. Wild West Village is published by Simon and Schuster.
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