Lera Lynn

When Lera Lynn started to conceptualize her latest album, the Nashville singer-songwriter had the underlying feeling that, perhaps, she was heading down the wrong path. She’d often wake up in the middle of the night, pouring over the songs that she’d been co-writing with others—in short, she knew something was up.

One of the indelible images from True Detective’s unfairly maligned second season features the Nashville-based singer/songwriter Lera Lynn sitting in the middle of a vacant stage in a bar buried in a dark corner of Vinci, a fictional rendition of Los Angeles. Slightly hunched, with a guitar slung over her shoulder, Lynn’s unnamed singer is the show’s ethos channeled into a single tertiary character. This singer looks perpetually strung out, eyes glazed over and teeth yellowed. The central song to this second season of True Detective’s soundtrack, which Lynn co-wrote with Roseanne Cash, is called “My Least Favorite Life”, and the lyrics match the unrelenting bleakness of the series itself. “A lifetime goes up in smoke,” Lynn sings, the beauty of her voice cutting through the sorrow of her tune. The lead characters played by Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughan turn to the singer, recognizing her lament as theirs, too.

In the midst of a pandemic that brought an abrupt and unexpected end to touring and, consequently, a primary source of revenue for most artists, Lera Lynn experienced both sorrow and joy. Like so many, she has dealt with the ramifications on her career and livelihood, and of course, the isolation brought on by COVID. At the same time, she wrote, recorded, and produced an album, aptly titled On My Own, and gave birth to her first child. If there is a silver lining to the stay-at-home orders, it’s that she has been able to spend unlimited time at home with her newborn son.