Lindsay Lou Is Poised to Be the Next Bluegrass Queen
It’s one of the first cold fall nights in the mountains of East Tennessee and Lindsay Lou is tightening her winter coat as she prepares to take the outdoor stage at CaveFest, an Americana and bluegrass gathering held southeast of Nashville at the Caverns, an underground venue with an aboveground amphitheater.
“I feel more deeply connected with myself and everyone around me,” the singer-songwriter tells Rolling Stone backstage. “Even if my life blew up for a few years.”
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Lou, an artist who has been deftly weaving bluegrass into ethereal, indie-folk explorations since moving to Nashville from Michigan in 2015, has been through the ringer. While gearing up for her new album, the exquisite Queen of Time, she faced what she describes as a period of “radical transformation.” Lou got divorced, discovered the concept of the “divine feminine,” and lost her north star, her maternal grandmother.
“When you don’t embrace [sadness] and sit with it — acknowledge it, ask it what it wants to teach you, ask it how it’s a part of you — then you’re never going to climb out,” Lou, 36, says.
The songwriter found inspiration for a path forward in a pair of books that introduced her to feminine spirituality: Alan Watt’s seminal 1951 work The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.
“I had read this line [where Watts] was comparing art to a woman, whose appeal is the inability to own her, keep her or keep her the same,” Lou says. “And that led me down this journey of my mind being opened to the idea of the divine feminine, which was a concept I wasn’t hip to or ever thought about…It sent me down this path of self-discovery, self-knowledge, understanding and seeing myself in a different way.”
You can hear Lou’s transformation on Queen of Time, a confident 11-song document that combines Americana, folk, indie-soul, and Lou’s brand of progressive bluegrass. That broad musical pedigree is what’s made her such an easy collaborator with marquee names, including Billy Strings, Sam Bush, Sierra Ferrell, Jerry Douglas, Molly Tuttle, Greensky Bluegrass, Peter Rowan, and Leftover Salmon.
“Like Bob Dylan says, ‘I contain multitudes,’” Lou grins.
Strings, one of Lou’s longtime friends, appears on the song “Nothing’s Working,” a rumination on compassion and transparency. But, the most personal cameo on the album is the voice of her late grandmother.
Lou taped more than two-dozen of their conversations for posterity and used them to tie together Queen of Time. One recording, an interlude titled “This Too Shall Pass,” can give comfort to even the loneliest of souls.
“Lindsay, I taught you so many things and those things are my spirit,” her grandmother says in the recording. “My spirit is going to stay with you…And I know that when I’m gone, you’re going to feel real bad…This too shall pass, nothing can stay bad forever.”
“My grandmother had a very radical perspective on Christianity,” Lou says. “She didn’t believe in hell. She believed everyone’s going to heaven, that God was going to leave no one behind.”
Raised in the Upper Peninsula region of Michigan, Lou was surrounded by a strong sense of family. Long, frozen winters and fleeting, lazy summers in this remote area of the country helped forge tightknit bonds — over bonfires, while fishing or snowshoeing, or in musical jam circles — between kinfolk and friends.
“My mom was one of 12, so gatherings were huge. When I was a little girl, I would listen to my cousins, aunts and uncles jamming together,” Lou says. “I wanted so badly to be part of that. So, I learned the songs that they would sing, learned how to sing harmony and started to sing along with them.”
While in college at Michigan State University in East Lansing — she graduated with bachelor’s degrees in human biology and Spanish — Lou eventually found her way to a local instrument shop. A worker there heard her singing and playing a guitar off the racks, and suggested that Lou check out the open-mic night at the nearby Dagwood’s Tavern.
It was kismet. At Dagwood’s, Lou crossed paths with the Flatbellys, a self-proclaimed “half-ass bluegrass” ensemble featuring multi-instrumentalist Joshua Rilko, who helped turn Lou on to bluegrass.
“Josh gave me the whole Bear Family [Records] catalog of Flatt & Scruggs, Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe,” Lou says. “I would ride my bike to work or to class and listen to nothing but. I fell in love with the whole cannon of bluegrass songs.”
Lou and Rilko joined forces to form Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys. The group gained steam around the state, showcasing a bluegrass tone and skillset elevated by Lou’s songbird voice. Soon they were running in the same circles as other Michigan bluegrass and string acts, like Greensky Bluegrass and Strings.
“Billy’s mom saw a picture of us in the local newspaper and told him about us,” Lou says. “And later, Billy and I were both playing the Traverse City Film Festival. He just waltzed into our green room and we became friends.”
Like Strings, Lou would eventually pull up stakes and head south for Nashville. “There was a lot of exhaustion, nervousness and anxiety,” Lou says of those early days of finding her place in music. “Now? There’s none of that.”
Lou and Rilko lived together in East Nashville, right across the street from where Strings and Molly Tuttle, another rising guitar prodigy, were roommates at the time. The foursome would often hang out on Lou’s porch and play, memories held closely with everyone scattered about nowadays in their own creative endeavors.
Today, standing sidestage at CaveFest, Lou sees no difference between an intimate picking party on someone’s front porch and an amphitheater stage. It’s all about losing herself in the performance, and making peace with the rough waters she’s navigated to get here. And her grandmother’s voice lives not just on Queen of Time, but daily in Lou’s head.
“I went through a lot of grief. It comes in waves and it never goes away altogether,” she says, “But, I also get way more glimmers now.”
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