Last week, World Cafe landed in Nashville to kick off World Cafe Nashville, a series of upcoming studio sessions and events showcasing the broad, vibrant musical landscape of Music City. There's definitely something in the water there, and with World Cafe Nashville, we'll be tapping into what makes that music scene tick. At our Oct. 28 show at City Winery in Nashville, we recorded "The Intoxicating Sounds of Steelism and Nashville's Femmes Fatales" for an upcoming broadcast. Who are those Femmes Fatales, you might ask? That would be Ruby Amanfu, Caitlin Rose — and Lera Lynn.
Lynn, whom many folks know from her appearance last year on HBO's True Detective as a singer in the dive bar The Black Rose, released the beguiling Resistor earlier this year. She embarks on a tour Tuesday, and when we saw her last week, she'd just released a new song, "Image." We're premiering the new video for "Image" here.
"Image," Lynn says, "is a reflection on American culture, our infatuation with celebrity, infamy, shock value and drama. Each of us plays a role in the creation and proliferation of that dynamic and the success of toxic, vapid people and ideas, simply by allocating even the smallest amount of attention to them."
Lynn mines a noirish, loungey, eclectic and magical musical territory similar to the kind that Tom Waits explored in songs like "Singapore" and "Clap Hands," from his masterpiece Rain Dogs. In "Image," Lynn takes us down a dark, sultry, Americana-tinged path imbued with a heightened paranoia. She captures the tension of the current media environment, singing, "I am a headline, I am the undermine."
"Image" is out now on Resistor Music.
Copyright 2016 XPN
