In our hyper-connected society, amid countless forays into reality television, the championing of celebrity culture and the crafted realities presented on social media, how do we define “real”? Its meaning is oftentimes fluid. Historically, the concept of authenticity has been inherent to discussions on music and art, but that can be a slippery slope devolving into matters of taste. Another facet comes from within: Under what conditions is a person exuding his or her authentic self? It’s this philosophical approach that Ohio singer-songwriter Lydia Loveless tackles on her fourth full-length record, Real.
“Real has a lot of different meanings and I kind of let people come up with their own,” she says. “But it’s also about, as a person who is, you know, pretty depressive and socially anxious and shy and closed off and trying to every day put on a show and people are always like, ‘Who’s the real Lydia?’ It’s like, ‘I don’t know.’”
Lydia Loveless with Aaron Lee Tasjan
The Southern Café and Music Hall
November 12
Released in August, the album cover features Loveless sitting on a sidewalk, wearing a deadpan expression and an outfit whose tassel hat is reminiscent of circus-monkey garb.
“That’s kind of why I’m dressed as a monkey on the cover,” she says. “Performance and, you know, sort of the charade that I feel like everyday life is. Not to go too dark, but what’s the real in anybody’s personality? Everyone kind of has different sides.”
Living out her formative years as a working musician, the 26-year-old has shared a different side of her personality with each of her creative outputs. She took up the bass at the age of 13, forming a family band with her father and two sisters. Having hit her stride on guitar by age 16, Loveless focused on writing her own music after the group disbanded, and she signed with independent label Bloodshot Records in 2010. Her first two records, The Only Man and Indestructible Machine, were wrought with the guts, snarl and twang that solidified her much-heralded brand of country-punk fusion. But when it came time to record her third album, Loveless scrapped a whole set of country songs she had written and started anew. The result was 2014’s Somewhere Else, in which her honky-tonk tales were infused with signature elements of pop. On Real, she cruises straight into the territory of sinewy pop-rock, tossing a slight nod to the alt-country moniker in the rearview mirror. She says there’s nothing contrived about this sonic shift.
“A lot of it was just boredom,” says Loveless. “We had been playing the same record for two years, so it wasn’t really like a conscious [decision that] we need to make a really pop-sounding record. It was just kind of a natural progression to expand everything because I didn’t want to do the standard thing that we could all do with our instruments.”
Among Real’s expansive harmonies and polished arrangements, Loveless has made room for the fierce wit, sharp hooks and unabashed honesty that have become her calling card.
“I grew up kind of in the heyday of emo and confessional bullshit music, so it kind of always was what I wanted to do,” she says. “I feel like everyone’s really open and raw right now, so I hardly even feel like I’m doing anything that brave anymore when I do that. I feel like we’re really in a pretty confessional era again.”
While the biting commentary on her songs is often straight-from-the-diary, Loveless says she also relies on conversations she has—and even conversations at the next table over—for source material.
“I think I find that the more personal my songs are, the more people can relate to them,” she explains. “But I’m also a chronic eavesdropper, so a lot of the stuff that I’m writing is not necessarily totally me, which is a problem when people go out in public with me. They’re like, ‘Why aren’t you listening to what we’re talking about?’”
As a performer, Loveless can be just as unforgiving as the songs themselves. Pouring energy into the vocals, brandishing her guitar and thrashing about on the floor, her live show is a display of take-no-prisoners rock ’n’ roll.
“It’s really emotional,” she says. “Performing is pretty draining and energizing at the same time, if that makes any sense.”
In fact, Loveless was a performer recommended to film director Gorman Bechard when he felt bored with music. Known for his rock-music documentaries, such as 2011’s Color Me Obsessed about The Replacements, Bechard made Loveless the subject of his latest work, aptly titled Who is Lydia Loveless? Loveless says the title echoes the question journalists frequently asked her when she was filming the movie, but it seems to be a further manifestation of the questions surrounding authenticity on Real.
“We’re both huge Replacements fans so we started off sort of talking about that,” Loveless recalls of meeting Bechard. “And I could tell he was working up to ask me, because he was like, ‘I just wanna do one more rock documentary,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, sure, I will do it,’ thinking, ‘How hard could it be to just be yourself?’”