Lola Kirke – ‘Trailerblazer’ album review: liberated and poignantly personal
THE SKINNY: Lola Kirke is in a period of intense public vulnerability right now—and it’s golden. Alongside releasing Trailblazer, her most intimate album to date, she’s also promoting Wild West Village, a collection of personal essays. Both projects were not only released around the same time but created in tandem, each feeding into the other. The result is a record that’s deeply revealing, sharply written, and musically liberated.
If a box had to be picked, Lola Kirke is a country artist. She now lives in Nashville and is utterly immersed in the sounds and traditions of that genre. But really, a woman like Kirke, with the kind of family and life she’d had, was never, ever going to be easily defined. As a kid, she was at parties with David Bowie. Her father was busy touring as a founding member of Free and Bad Company, her mother was busy owning the favoured vintage shop of New York’s creative elite, and her siblings were all artists in their own right. Kirke herself is now not only a musician but also a writer and an actor, so picking one lane is not in her nature – she has always been surrounded by too much creativity and inspiration for that.
The decision to embrace that is heard in every song of Trailblazer. While still undeniably a country-led album, especially on tracks like ‘241s’ and ‘Mississippi, My Sister, Elvis & Me’ which feel quintessential with their rich slide guitars and obviously country-influenced lyricism, there are nods to her rock and roll heritage too. It’s an album that sounds free and unshackled, as if Kirke has let herself go with whatever sound best articulates the story at hand.
That’s the only way it could’ve been, given the personal nature of this record. Released near enough alongside Wild West Village, some of the songs come across as the shortened, anthemic, musical version of the stories she tells there as if writing that book finally freed her up to find the exact right words to articulate things like her feelings of being an outsider in both her family and in the normal world, as well as more hyper-specific things such as her relationships with her parents and siblings.
But the album is at its best when Kirke gets most personal. In its closing run of songs, beginning with the near-perfect ‘Zeppelin III’ and ending with the ode to her home on ‘Bury Me In NYC’, it’s the ultimate example of Kirke’s artistic ethos that the personal is universal and the more honest you are, the better your art will be.
For fans of: Crying in a cowboy hat.
A text I sent my friend while listening to this album: “Does anywhere in London do line dancing???”
Trailblazer track by track
Release date: March 21st | Producer: Daniel Tashian | Label: One Riot Records
‘Trailblazer’: Beginning with exactly the kind of affirmation Kirke clearly needed to hear, the album’s title track is a bolstering breath of confidence she takes before diving into the depths of the outsider feelings this track celebrates. [3.5/5]
‘Easy On You’: A lot has been written about addiction and attempting to love someone through struggles, but Kirke’s country-rock offering strips the big topic back into something simple and hooking; “I’ll go easy on you baby cause you’re so hard on yourself.” [4/5]
‘241s’: While Trailblazer shakes off the pressure to be a pure country album, Kirke indulges in it in moments like this. ‘241s’ is exactly the kind of song you’d want to hear in a classic dive bar, giving heartache the Coyote Ugly treatment. [3.5/5]
‘Marlboro Lights & Madonna’: Trailblazer is mainly about family, specifically Kirke’s own unconventional family. Here, she delivers an ode to her mother, her enigmatic nature, the ways she looked up to her and the lessons learnt from her. But mostly, this is one of the most gorgeous instrumental moments of the album with such rich slide guitar details. [3.5/5]
‘Hungover Thinkin’’: Once again, we’re going full country. Heartache and headaches surely have to be two cornerstones of the genre, and Kirke has them both here. But in the instrumentation, an undeniable rock and roll spirit still seems to come so naturally to her. [3.5/5]
‘Raised By Wolves’: The Kirke family national anthem! It is also the national anthem for anyone raised by an unconventional family, where that kind of social oddness seems to be bred into them by nature. [3.5/5]
‘2 Damn Sexy’: Another affirmation song that Kirke, and all of us, often need to hear. This could be the newest anthem in the grand history of women’s empowerment country hits. [4/5]
‘Zeppelin III’: In these three final songs, just how special this album feels is truly revealed as Kirke gets hyperpersonal. First up, she’s musing on her relationship with her father, a man who shaped her forever but always and inevitably had to leave. Packed with deeply specific imagery, it’s the ultimate example of Kirke’s ethos of the personal being universal. [4/5]
‘Mississippi, My Sister, Elvis & Me’: From the title alone, you already know this is going to be a great country song. But again, it’s Kirke’s specificity that makes it special. Now, contemplating her relationship with her sister, actor Jemima Kirke, the piece perfectly captures the strangeness of sister relationships where arguments and pure admiration are in the mix. [4/5]
‘Bury Me In NYC’: While now based in the South in the heart of country music and though born in England, Kirke is well aware that NYC made her. As rock and roll take equal place on this album alongside her chosen genre, it’s only right that the finale song honours this other side of her heart: New York, its music and her eclectic childhood there. [4/5]
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out New Music Newsletter
All the latest New Music from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.