The Lostines Have Arrived

I discovered the Lostines in 2019, when their songs “Playing the Fool” and “No Mama Blues” appeared on Vol. 1, a compilation recorded by Mashed Potato Records in New Orleans three years prior that also featured their peers, like Duff Thompson and the Full Grown Men, Twain and The Deslondes. “Playing the Fool” was an especially pivotal moment, one that opened my world up to a clip of Casey Jane Reece-Kaigler dueting on Michael Hurley’s “O My Stars” with fellow New Orleanian Chris Acker at Langhorne Slim’s house, or their self-titled EP (also recorded at Mashed Potato Records) from 2018 that features one of the best folk tunes of the last 10 years—“It’s Been Wrong.” It sent me down a path of better understanding the near-mythical world of Bayou music, from Zydeco to Cajun to R&B and, in turn, the Lostines were a band that, during COVID-19, became a refuge of warmth, friendship and harmony during profound periods of grief and isolation. And now, at long last, Casey Jane and her singing partner, Camille Wind Weatherford, are releasing their debut LP, Meet the Lostines.

Pairing elements of Motown and Spector-era girl groups with the timelessness of Gulf Coast dancehall and campfire country, the Lostines make love songs and ballads built to last through tongue-in-cheek lyricism, astral harmonies and, above all, a sincerity catalyzed by two voices and a symbiotic, earnest and adoring friendship. Casey Jane and Camille both grew up in different parts of Oregon, but they didn’t officially meet each other until more than a decade ago in New Orleans. After Camille took a stint singing backup vocals in one of Casey Jane’s old bands, the duo formed an a cappella doo-wop group called the Carondelettes with some of their friends in Louisiana, including Sam Doores, John Hatchett and Emma Eisenhower. They used to busk on Royal Street in the French Quarter and make more money on the streets than at dive bars or house shows. All of it has, for better or for worse, greatly shaped who the Lostines are in 2024, no matter how far away from that world Camille and Casey Jane have strayed.

“It gives you a lot of unpaid—or low-paid—practice,” Camille laughs. “Busking isn’t as easy as it used to be. They used to shut Royal Street down to traffic in-between certain times.” Camille learned guitar as a teenager after watching her mom jam out with family friends for years, eventually moving to New Orleans and developing bonds with folks Sam Doores and Pat Reedy and Riley Downing. While Casey Jane comes from a family of musicians, busking was her first time ever playing for an audience. “You have to sing a lot louder and you have to put yourself out there in this way that you don’t get to do [at shows],” she says.

“You have to put up with hundreds of people just walking away and giving you a dollar or less, or asking questions as you’re singing,” Camille chimes in. When she first moved to New Orleans back in 2013, busking was the only way she made money for the first six months she was in town. “I would go out with two of my friends every day and we would wear matching outfits and busk in a band called the Good Gollies. I would pay $800-a-month rent busking. I haven’t done it in a long time. And I’m kind of grateful for that.” “I do love that we’ve had that experience together and our music has gotten to grow and we’ve gotten to grow as musicians,” Casey Jane concludes. “What we’re putting out now feels the most like us than anything we’ve done in the past.”

Fast-forward to 2015, 2016 and, after naming themselves after a tributary of the Wallowa River in Northeastern Oregon, the Lostines started recording songs at Mashed Potato—becoming more and more integral to the fabric of New Orleans’ musical DNA. “Mashed Potato put a lot of New Orleans musicians on the map for people that didn’t live here, and what they did was super crucial,” Camille says. But the hamlet the Lostines shared with folks around the city germinated in the years before then. “We were having fires and sitting around campfires on Deslonde Street and sharing songs with all of our friends for years,” Casey Jane continues. “When [Duff Thompson, Bill Howard and Steph Green] came to town, they made it affordable for any of our friends—who are songwriters—to be able to record. There was this magic that happened during time and there were so many people who were crucial to that community years before that, when our friendship was building and we all got really close around those campfires on Deslonde.” “It was a special backyard,” Camille adds.

Once their EP went out into the world, they laid low for a bit until cropping up again in 2021 when The Lostines saw its first-ever physical release. Camille and Casey Jane sang harmonies on Skyway Man’s The World Only Ends When You Die and, in August of that year, returned with new music via Western AF, who put out a video of them singing “Last Night” outside of the Mashed Potato house in New Orleans. Mashed Potato Records was where their friendship bloomed and “Last Night,” the opening song on Meet the Lostines, was written while Camille was in Portland—where she moved back to earlier that year and gave birth to her daughter—and missing the home in Louisiana that had adopted her many moons before.

Before signing with Arkansas-based label Gar Hole Records, the Lostines simply never had the funding to make a full record and, with Camille living across the country, it was unsure whether or not she and Casey Jane would have the capacity again to finally do it. But then Camille returned, briefly, and they made “A Tear” together on a whim—for the sake of not knowing when that chance would come back around again. “We jumped on the opportunity when Camille came back. We only thought she was going to be visiting for a moment, and we recorded ‘A Tear’ and ‘Last Night’ just to record something, because it had been a really long time since we recorded,” Casey Jane says. “I was hoping,” Camille adds. “But we didn’t know if I’d be able to stay or not.”

Gar Hole then wanted to make an EP split between the Lostines and Nick Shoulders—Heart of the Night—pairing “A Tear” and “Last Night” with an electric recording of Shoulders’ “Rise When the Rooster Crows” and his cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Doing that opened the door for Meet the Lostines, which Camille and Casey Jane recorded in 2022 and have been sitting on ever since. Meet the Lostines was recorded as the Tigermen Den, Valcour Records and Deslonde Studios, and it features a coterie of players alongside Camille and Casey Jane—including a main band of Ross Farbe of Video Age, Doores of the Deslondes, multi-instrumentalist Howe Pearson, Americana practitioner Gina Leslie and James Wallace, aka Skyway Man.

But it doesn’t end there, as musicians like Joel Savoy, Kelli Jones, Sam Gelband, Peter and Thomas Bowling, Jordan Odom, John James, Sam Hollier and Casey McAllister also feature on five of the songs. It’s a true portrait of the New Orleans scene and, for a band that came up on the streets of the French Quarter, getting those people in a room together was pivotal. “That was really important to us,” Casey Jane says. “A lot of those people have been in our band. Sam Doores has been in our band since almost the beginning. Ross, who engineered and co-produced with us, plays in our band regularly. Same with Gina Leslie. Howe has been in our band since the beginning.”

The Lostines EP was only four tracks and arrived as close to lo-fi Americana as you can get without it feeling like a DIY bedroom tape. This time around, Camille and Casey Jane aimed to expand their own ensemble and put as much intentionality behind each and every recording—filling out the Lostines sound with 12-string and baritone guitars, lap steel, omnichord, violin, viola and cello, fiddles, organs and tubular bells. The songs stretch out across genres, glueing together snippets of singer-songwriter folk, Southern rock, Cajun, country, bluegrass and, even, dream pop.

“When we recorded with Mashed Potato, there were only three microphones that we placed perfectly throughout the room, to pick up the band with the right levels. We would do a few takes live and that was it, so the vocals on the EP are really raw. And we were still learning how to sing. We were young. But this is the first time that we’ve gotten to spend time with these songs and really develop them and how we hear them and how the band hears them. It was a huge collaboration with our band, who is incredible, and that was important—to create a space where everybody felt like they could bring their own piece to it. It’s really exciting to be able to take time for that.”

While the songs on Meet the Lostines make stops in Los Angeles, Texas, Denver, Portland and Nashville, the Mississippi River, the Industrial Canal and Camille and Casey Jane’s friendship remains the magnetic, beautiful core. I listen to these tracks and it sounds like not just an entire lifetime playing out across an hour, but an entire lifetime shared between two people. They’ve been singing together for such a long time now that the harmonies come naturally and, though the Lostines didn’t consciously set out to make an album about their friendship, it was impossible for the sonic composite of the energy surrounding the album to not mirror the chemistry Camille and Casey Jane have long shared with each other in music and beyond it. “What [Meet the Lostines] turned out to be—I know there’s not songs about our friendships on there, but what we’ve seen each other go through and what we’ve worked through together over that time,” Casey Jane says.

The first song the Lostines recorded for Meet the Lostines is “Full Moon Night,” a dainty lullaby that transforms into a dreamboat orchestra of strings from McAllister and the Bowlings across five minutes of esoteric country touchstones reconfigured into contemporary vibrancy. Camille wrote the track at the genesis of the pandemic and, through fantastical longing, attempts to make sense of a newfound mirage of acute loneliness. “Full moon like tonight, make me feel young again,” she sings. “Like I could do anything.” Though it’s the album’s lead single, Camille and Casey Jane didn’t initially gravitate towards “Full Moon Night” after writing it. But, once they took it into the studio and laid it down with the band, the aura was undeniable.

“There was just a magic in the room that happened, and it went in a direction we weren’t expecting,” Casey Jane explains. “It was one of those songs that took off on its own and worked,” Camille agrees. “We didn’t have to fuss with it a lot.” Meet the Lostines collects songs that have lived a lifetime someplace, somewhere, already—featuring new, up-cycled and polished renditions of “Playing the Fool,” “No Mama Blues” and “Southwest Texas.” But then there are newer tunes, like “Neon Lights” and “After the Party,” which take you to levies where the boats on the Mississippi run higher than the houses or transports you on an interstate trek across the West Coast.

As New Orleans, the Bayou city that adopted them more than 10 years ago, aches through even the tracks set furthest away from the Gulf Coast, Meet the Lostines isn’t the introduction the title suggests. Instead, this album nurtures every listener towards a place where every note and every harmony ring familiar. It’s cosmic, cohesive and full of fortune, color and wall-to-wall folk bliss, like a sock-hop in the swamps. The Lostines are storytellers, doling out vignettes about lost and longtime relationships, wandering above and below sea-level and watching cross-country nights be set aglow by stars. And, when the last few notes of “Last Night” fade out, you’ll swear you’ve known Camille and Casey Jane for as long as they’ve known each other—that you, too, have lived out a version of these songs wherever it is that you call home. “These songs cover the distance of our entire friendship,” Casey Jane explains. “A lot of them are about experiences and relationships that we’ve seen each other go through for the last 10 years. It feels like a good record of our lives.”

Watch the music video for “Full Moon Night” below. Meet the Lostines is out April 26 via Gar Hole Records.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.