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In a long-term relationship, you’ve gotta spice things up occasionally.
Just ask The Lone Bellow. After a decade of richly textured, often dark and emotionally stormy Americana, the trio took a new approach for their fifth album—and they did it with help from one of Nashville’s famous rock ‘n’ roll mansions. With Love Songs for Losers, the acclaimed band recorded 11 new tracks in the late Roy Orbison’s former home on Old Hickory Lake, now empty but perhaps still holding some musical magic. And according to the band, it sparked something special.
“I think we’re having the most fun right now that we’ve ever had,” says band member and co- producer Brian Elmquist. “I feel the most free and creative, and the most like myself with our band than I ever have before.”
“Yeah, we made it through that seven-year itch,” Zach Williams adds with a laugh, earning a playful chuckle from bandmate Kanene Donehey Pipkin as well.
“My number one goal in making this record was to find and keep that spark,” Elmquist goes on. “Like, we’re ten years in. It needs to be fun.”
Marking the follow-up to 2020’s Half Moon Light (a set now described by the band as a pre- pandemic pinnacle), Love Songs for Losers does indeed feel fun. Still thick with emotion and celestial harmonies that come close to “out-of- body” in effect, the band shook up their creative process by retreating home to Nashville during the pandemic and focusing their writing somewhere new. Well, new for them, at least.
“I remember having a conversation with Zach a couple of years ago, and I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to just write a bunch of love songs?’” Elmquist recalls. “I was talking about corny love songs, but this is our version of it, I guess.”
After that, the band convinced their label to let them co-produce – another new endeavor – and looked into a space to inspire the recording. With the “love songs” theme in mind, it was Zach who eventually found out that Orbison’s lake house was empty, and after contacting the current owner, The Lone Bellow spent eight weeks working and sometimes even living there. All along, they felt the presence of greatness.
“It was crazy being able to turn Roy Orbison’s house into a studio, and I really feel like it helped make this a folklore kind of record,” Elmquist goes on. “Setting is a pretty big part of [recording] for us, and I think it’s such a special house for the city of Nashville. It’s one of the most surreal, beautiful places—spooky, too—and we were right in the middle of it. It’s kinda like the dream scenario to make a record.”
Located on the banks of Old Hickory Lake, just down the street from the burned down remains of Johnny Cash’s home, the house represents a different era of Nashville’s music history. Designed by master builder and architect to the stars, Braxton Dixon, the home was more than a mansion—it was a physical manifestation of Orbison, like a Nudie Suit you could live in. Dixon built it using using non-traditional methods, often cobbling together repurposed slices of a quickly-disappearing American landscape, and in Orbison’s case, he created one of Nashville’s great “party houses.” Fusing elements of old barns and cabins with beams from a forgotten cotton
factory, huge stained-glass windows and more, the band’s home-away-from-home can be described as almost haunting. At almost 7,000 square feet, it’s an almost entirely open entertaining space, including room for an indoor pool which once took up the middle of the building.
“It was the party house, a really sweet place,” Elmquist says. “It had a certain fun feeling in the daytime, and then as the sun went down, it got a little more spooky. I definitely felt the ghost of Roy Orbison in there a little bit.”
What emerged is an album with added energy. After spending their whole career with iconic producers like The National’s Aaron Dessner and Dave Cobb, Elmquist ended up co-producing with friend Jacob Sooter, and it seems as though some of Orbison’s dark-meets-light aura rubbed off. The album begins with the steady drip of “Honey,” a love song with the feel of a creeping shadow. Driven forward by ‘80s pop undertones, the song features a pair of romantic partners who seem to know something about them has changed, and the track bubbles and builds into a cavernous call to turn back time, made all the more poignant by Orbison’s great hall.
Elsewhere, first single “Gold” stands as a thematic outlier – a glittering heartland rocker that actually documents the crumbling of small- town America, crushed under the weight of an opioid epidemic. “Unicorn” almost prances across the dance floor with a twinkling ‘50s-rock vibe, and the brassy “Caught Me Thinkin’” employs blasting horns for a soul-rocker full of “Oh, Pretty Woman” fixation – plus a quirky reference to shopping at Target. “I’m In Love” chugs along like a thumping heart with more of that early-rock whimsy, and in “Cost of Livin’,” Donehey Pipkin takes the lead to mix jazzy Americana with poodle skirts and pompadours – plinking piano, backup singers and all. Although Elmquist co-produced the set, it was Donehey Pipkin who handled the trio’s vocal output, employing a sibling-like ability to push her bandmates.
“We’ve been singing together for over a decade by now, so I know what the best from everybody can sound like,” Pipkin says. “I was given the green light to push a little bit ... so I tried to bring out as much nuance and quiet, subtle vulnerability [as possible] – singing for somebody rather than singing at somebody.”
In the end, it all combined into something the band members truly love. Ten years in, The Lone Bellow has officially kept its spark alive, and are now on the road for a headlining fall tour. And who knows, maybe the band will do some more adventurous record making in the future. “I think it’s actually way harder to write from a place of gratitude, hope and joy than, like, in the darkness,” Williams admits.
“It was such an interesting alchemy of the surroundings and the times that we had just come out of,” Donehey Pipkin adds. “It was a really intense time, but we saw each other through it, and I think it’s kind of amazing when you think back on all of the circumstances that had to come together and all the stars that had to align for this to happen.”
“It was a lot of fun,” Elmquist agrees, wrapping up his thoughts with Orbison-esque clarity. “I would totally do it this way again.”