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COREY BOST
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COREY BOST
“When I get drunk, my favorite thing to shout is, ‘Prove it!’ I love to fucking prove it.”
Elle King is sitting on her sofa in East Nashville, donning a yin-yang print cardigan sweater and switching between two bright yellow vapes as she shares one of her life’s mottos. Though the room is filled with road cases bearing her name, the house represents a transition for King, as it actually belongs to another musician friend. King and her husband, tattoo artist Dan Tooker, are right in the middle of moving to a home they purchased elsewhere in the neighborhood, with the nomadic Los Angeles native taking a major step toward establishing real roots in Nashville. Their son, Lucky Levi Tooker, sings and laughs upstairs.
And in case there’s any doubt, King sure knows how to put her money where her mouth is when it comes to proving it. After debuting with Love Stuff in 2015, King’s star quickly rose both within pop and alternative circles, buoyed by the strength of King’s songwriting—the clever, Grammy- nominated “Ex’s and Oh’s” is a master class in sass and swagger—her raw, soulful vocal performances, and her outsized personality, which is just as captivating in a personal conversation as it is during a sold-out show.
On Jan. 27, King will release Come Get Your Wife, her third studio album and her first proper country LP. Going country is a natural move for King, whose music has always found intersection points between many genres: country and roots rock mixed with rock and roll, soul, blues, and pop. And that’s not to mention her previous chart-topping country collaborations, like 2016’s Dierks Bentley hit “Different for Girls” and the smash Miranda Lambert-featuring anthem “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home),” which appears on Come Get Your Wife. King also reprised her musical partnership with Bentley on the album single, “Worth a Shot,” a clever mid- tempo duet about making a relationship last.
King took a roundabout approach to readying Come Get Your Wife, as she shares that prior to recording that project—while pregnant with Lucky—she made an entire pop album with famed producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Maren Morris). She isn’t sure when she’ll release that LP, but was glad to get the songs and feelings out of her system following the disruption of normal life wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I was like, ‘I think that the world is eventually going to wake up,’” King says. “‘Some form of society is going to have to move on.’ I felt very blessed that I got to make an entire pop album with Greg Kurstin, who is just the best. He’s a genius. I’ve gotten to become very close friends with his whole family, and they really did me a favor and let me come stay with them in Hawaii and we just made this fucking badass record. It feels insane that I am sitting on that.”
King credits “Drunk” with giving her the confidence to let that album sit until the time was right, explaining, “It taught me that everything has a life and timeline of its own. So, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is like a cool thing. Let me just tuck this away and wait because the time for that will come.’”
“Drunk” also led King to Come Get Your Wife, the kind of straightforward country album she’d long hoped to make but hadn’t yet had the chance to do. As the single climbed the charts, labels in Nashville began contacting her, wondering if she’d be interested in signing a deal. Though she was already signed to RCA Records, Sony Music Nashville still wanted to add her to their roster, with the two labels eventually devising a joint venture through which King would have support from both.
“I learned a lot about country radio,” King says. “It’s so different than pop and alternative. Pop’s like, ‘Get [the music] out quick and then just see how long it will last.’ With country, it’s like, ‘Okay, why should we play it?’ It’s a family. Everyone works together in this sort of thing, which I’m still learning about. So, they’re like, ‘We like you, Elle. And we love Miranda. But why should we play your song on country radio?’”
To prove her commitment to the genre, King began work on an EP of country songs. She tapped friend and Music Row mainstay Ross Copperman to produce the project, which quickly began to grow as King amassed more and more songs. Nominations for the 2022 Grammy Awards came out during this time, and the Best Country Duo/Group performance nod for “Drunk” had King’s entire team excited. What was supposed to be an EP would now become an album.
King had recently given birth to Lucky and, realizing the opportunity before her, decided to enlist several Nashville hitmakers to help make the album as good and “authentically country” as it could possibly be. A murderer’s row of co-writers on the album includes Copperman, Ashley Gorley, Shane McAnally, Bobby Hamrick, Ella Langley, and Charlie Worsham.
“I was like,‘Okay, you don’t have to twist my arm to make a record. That’s great,’” King says. “And then I said, ‘I just had this baby six weeks ago. And I don’t do anything half-assed. I’m not going to half-ass being a mother. And I’m not going to make a full-length country album half-assed, either, because I care deeply.’”
COREY BOST
Ready to do things the Nashville way, King put out a request for songs. She initially received several songs written specifically for women artists but quickly found that most didn’t “fit [her] vibe.” So, she reached back out, posing essential questions like, “What did Dierks not cut?”
“Then I got a bunch of songs written by Ross and a bunch of people that I have come to know, and we cut a majority of the record in two days,” she says. “Something magical happens when you’re singing while the band is tracking live to you. Most of the vocals are from that very day.”
That immediacy is palpable on the LP, which opens with the heartfelt origin song “Ohio,” dedicated to the place where King spent much of her youth after leaving Los Angeles. As she sings “Ohio” at the song’s chorus, her voice swells atop gently plucked banjo and massive power chords, with details from her early life peppered throughout the verses: “nice hills and they roll real good,” “some Coors in a cooler and a few fireflies,” “good old-fashioned mountain dancing songs.” King co-wrote the song with Langley, Bobby Hamrick, and Matt McKinney.
As for the songs King didn’t co-write, she says she only chose tracks that she wished she’d written herself. One of those songs is “Out Yonder,” a rowdy, swampy indictment of small-town drama written by Hamrick, Langley, and McKinney. That track feels especially emblematic of King’s transition into country music, as it sonically and thematically recalls earlier tracks like 2015’s “Kocaine Karolina” and King’s breakout hit “Ex’s and Oh’s.”
“I said, ‘Who the fuck wrote that song?’” King says, laughing. “I felt like it was written for me. The first lines are, ‘Who’s doing lines? Who’s huffing glue? Yeah, who’s got a wife and a girlfriend, too?’ And that was my experience with any song that I cut on the record that wasn’t written by me.”
Other highlights on Come Get Your Wife include “Crawlin’ Mood,” whose arrangement nods heartily to old-time string band music and vocally recalls the work of fellow left-of-center country artists like Margo Price and Nikki Lane. “Bonafide,” with its playful declaration of being “born a little wrong but that’s alright,” could have been a Dolly Parton cut. And “Lucky,” which no doubt intentionally shares a name with King’s son, is one of the album’s more vulnerable moments and shows a softer side of King’s agile, versatile voice.
King has worked hard to cultivate both her sound and career, but she credits spending time with her father, the actor and comedian Rob Schneider, as formative to teaching her how to navigate fame and the entertainment industry. She also learned a lot watching Lambert and Bentley, as the country music industry shares similarities with Hollywood but is still its own beast.
“I look at people like Miranda and Dierks and I see how they make people feel,” King says. “And that’s where some of my experience having a famous dad, or being around really famous people, comes into play. I do think that it did help me be somewhat prepared. Because if you have no idea what fame is like, in any way, it can be very extreme and very intense. Or you could crave it. I haven’t experienced anything more fun than country.”
While she’ll likely always have the heart of a rambler (in addition to L.A. and Ohio, King has called New York City, Philadelphia, and Copenhagen home), for now King says Nashville, like country music, feels like home. “I feel such an acceptance here,” she says. Our conversation comes on the heels of the CMA Awards, at which King joined the Black Keys to pay tribute to the recently departed Jerry Lee Lewis. They served up an appropriately impassioned performance of Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” a perfect song for King’s gritty voice and larger-than-life stage presence. The crowd ate up every note, with King’s piano spitting out literal flames at the end of their performance. Though it wasn’t her first CMA rodeo, the moment felt like something of an induction into the community, one that’s sure to only embrace her more upon the release of Come Get Your Wife.
“I feel like I have been given this freedom,” King says. “I don’t seek validation outwardly. But country music has given me this feeling of acceptance. I feel like I’ve been given the freedom to be myself, after many, many, many years of feeling like I had to be someone that I thought I had to be in order to be in music.”
And though King doesn’t feel she fits the traditional mold of what a country star is, she’s ready to show the world her take on the genre, and to do so as her full, authentic self. Reflecting on the pressure she put on herself earlier in her career to fit certain ideas or expectations of what kind of music she should make, she’s come to a place of acceptance and even celebration of the differences that make her an artist truly deserving of the word singular. You could say she’s proven herself.
“Once I let go of those thoughts, I was like, ‘Why do you do this to yourself?’ Just do things that you enjoy. Just do things that bring joy to your life. And it became fun from there on out. And I don’t know. Do I see the gloss? Do I see the shiny white teeth and the big hair? Yes. Do I think that I look different than that? Yes. I guess there’s a period at the end of that.”
Cover Credits:
T-shirt: Red Vintage Co.
Pant: American Apparel
Hoops, Turquoise Ring, Turquoise and Crystal Ring: Mud Lowery
"Ride or Die" Necklace, gold rings: Established Jewelry
Grill: Cap Master
CMA Fest Performance:
Jacket: Ricky Jeans from Gabriel Held Vintage
Bra: Smart and Sexy
Bustier: Dolce&Gabbana
Pant: American Apparel
Jewelry: Established Jewelry
Grill: Cap Master