Take a walk with any one of Nikki Lane’s three albums, and you’ll quickly get wrangled into some rowdy honky-tonk and plenty of fast-living yet lonesome highway songs. There’s also a lot of darkness worked into the vintage guitars and ’60s rock swagger, but the common thread running through nearly every minute of her catalog is a thick layer of refreshing authenticity. It’s the hallmark of a new, fresh generation of songwriters coming out of East Nashville (read: Margo Price, Jason Isbell), and it’s not always easy to put down on paper.
“Music was always vulnerable for me. I don’t think I ever got over it,” Lane, 34, tells CL, as she explains the hand-wringing that goes with writing, then releasing songs about death or other family issues.
“But then I do it, and I go on tour, and I meet one lady at this place, or a girl at another place, and they immediately tell me a story that reminds me of when I wrote the song. It’s the same type of heartache — and that’s where I say, ‘This is what makes it worth it.’”
Lane’s voice — almost always full of energy during interviews — turns a little hushed, soft even, when she shares that sentiment. She says that the empathetic side partially comes from her mom, a Southern Baptist woman whose job in human resources opened her up to many different walks of life.
“She worked with so many people that it changed her perspective on everything. [People] came off of the streets, [worked] a job and then went back to being homeless. She was there to facilitate and give people a chance,” Lane says. “And she was a single mom. She really didn’t have anything to give monetarily, she just had her time.”
Lane — whose music is inspired by Lee Hazlewood and Alex Chilton, but constructed on top of the foundations built by Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson — makes the most of her own time, too. On the day she talks to CL, she is fresh off a win at the 2018 Ameripolitan Music Awards. She’s also shopping for lumber to use at Where Is The Hideout, a Texas music festival she’s throwing on a friend’s property southwest of Austin, and she’s just hours away from announcing that Stagecoach — one of the largest country-music festivals in the U.S. — has tapped her to curate a vintage clothing marketplace featuring American-made merch, art and clothing.
Lane once moved to L.A. and New York to pursue fashion, and she operates an East Nashville vintage shop called High Class Hillbilly; the best finds from her travels end up on the racks. For a while, revenue from the shop allowed her to do music. Now Lane — who has shared stages with Chris Stapleton and even appeared above Isbell, Son Volt and Ryan Adams on some radio charts — uses music revenues to help run the shop and employ four other women who are the backbone of the operation. She doesn’t bat an eye when a conversation about songwriting turns to fashion or vice versa.
“I do a lot of things, so I don’t need to be pigeonholed. I like being a hustler. There’s people to feed,” Lane says. “I look at my single mom and my redneck daddy and I want them to have the houses they want to be in when they’re older, so I work my ass off, like they did for me.”
That redneck daddy was a Greenville, South Carolina asphalt paver who dabbled in country music. His grit is probably somewhat responsible for the songs that Rolling Stone once described as being “as unapologetic as Johnny Cash’s middle finger.”
Lane won’t take shit from anyone, but says her run-ins with sexism happen more frequently in everyday life than they do in a studio or record label meeting; she has found a label (New West Records) and band that gets it. Her 2017 album, Highway Queen, and its inevitable follow-up could make Lane a fixture on the country and Americana charts for years to come, but she isn’t afraid to admit that arrogance or ego has occasionally trumped her better judgment.
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“I remember telling someone that I didn’t like somebody — like, out loud and because it’s my honest opinion — and the person saying, ‘No shit. I’m his mother.’ It was a humiliating moment in my life. I immediately manned up and went right back in full speed and apologized,” Lane explains. Those are moments when cockiness gets in the way of empathy, and Lane starts to think out loud while noting that confidence probably helped her land a record deal.
“They always say your best thing is your worst thing; hopefully arrogance isn’t my best or worst thing specifically. Anything that gets you in the door will get you kicked out just as fast,” she concludes. From the outside, it doesn’t really matter if arrogance is Lane’s best friend or worst enemy because following her gut leads Lane down paths to new songs — and for now those tunes are changing her life, the lives of some of her fans and the lives of everyone whose checks get signed by Lane.
“I experience all kinds of emotions. I hope I get better at handling some of them, but I think that I’ll always experience them,” Lane explains before she has to jump off the line to help with that lumber.
“I hope it doesn’t sound so unhappy or unhealthy, because I feel like it is a
good thing.”
Full disclosure: From 2013-2016, this writer helped coordinate social media efforts for GMF
gasparillamusic.com
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2018.
