Lydia Loveless: Honest Evolution
Bare-bones honesty has always been the beating heart of Lydia Loveless’ music.
The Ohio singer-songwriter-guitarist writes with a flood of blood and guts and emotions, and between her country-punk breakthrough Indestructible Machine (2011) and the uncompromising and direct Somewhere Else (2014), Loveless emerged as a creative force ready to transcend styles and themes.
Now, the 25-year-old returns with Real, an album that’s everything its title promises, an examination of authenticity, dreams, goals, maturity, death and having the self-awareness to handle all those ups and downs.
“It’s a record about what it means to be authentic, what it means to me, and that stuck,” Loveless says. “I’ve always been pretty honest lyrically. Maybe this one was a little bit bolder in some ways. Certainly I had to be pretty brave to talk about some of the subject matter. It’s definitely my strongest album, so it seemed a fitting title in that sense. I felt really comfortable with whatever I was doing at the time. Normally I’m nervous and not really sure.”
The first song Loveless wrote for the record was “Real,” which became the closing tune for the record, the anchor that held the other songs together.
“I usually tend to write the title track last because I’m weird and I work well under deadlines and cramming stuff together,” Loveless says. “But that came first and the mood of it was sort of poppy and a little bit retro for me, so I wanted to go from there and make a super poppy record, for me anyway. Real is a solid name and the word comes up a lot in these songs. Probably an embarrassing amount.”
The songwriting took place over a year that Loveless says felt like her greatest period of development, personally as well as musically. But the awareness wasn’t immediate, even after writing “Real.”
“It definitely took some time with the songs to realize what the album was about. That’s also how I assess where my life is at,” she says. “I don’t sit down and say I’m going to make a record about authenticity and death and perspective. I was going through weird loss and change and that all shaped up to reveal the record to me.”
Another song that came early in the writing process, “Out On Love,” also began pointing Loveless in the direction she’d take for the rest of the album: emotionally fearless and musically adventurous.
“It was that one that I think really solidified that I was finally doing something really cool,” she says. “It felt totally different when I was writing than anything I’d ever done.”