Lindsay Lou Details the Inspiration Behind ‘Queen of Time’ with Track by Track

Acclaimed singer/songwriter Lindsay Lou recounts a chapter of loss that led to a journey of personal rediscovery with her latest album. Queen of Time, available now, comprises ten stunning tracks that thoughtfully dive into an array of complex emotions and experiences. 

The project is Lou’s first full-length release in five years and offers a swirling, lush soundscape that perfectly accompanies her captivating vocals. The Nashville-based talent finds solace in self-discovery while navigating through the end of her marriage, the death of her beloved grandmother, and the intense stressors in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To help tell these stories, Lou joined forces with an array of incredible musical talents from her creative community, including Billy Strings and Jerry Douglas. The result is a powerful, honest look at survival, connection, and the many moments that make up our fleeting lives.

Below, Lindsay Lou shares the stories behind each song in an exclusive track-by-track guide to Queen of Time. 

“Nothing Else Matters” (feat. Jerry Douglas)

(Maya de Vitry, Phoebe Hunt)

I first heard this song when Phoebe Hunt sent me a few tracks to learn for a gig we had together. She told me that she had written it with my dear friend Maya, and I thought for sure she had been thinking of me and the transition I’m going through with my divorce from my longtime bandmate and life partner. Maya had been one of the first people I called. We met up at Shelby Park and laid down a blanket among the big trees, and I told her everything…

Turns out, the song wasn’t written for me specifically, as it felt to me when I heard it. It was written a year prior. Still, it feels like it came to me right when I needed it, and they’ve given me their blessing to record and release it.

It was a dream to have Jerry Douglas join me on this one; his dobro playing is unmistakable.

“Nothings Working” (feat. Billy Strings)

(Lindsay Lou, William Apostol)

I started this song with Billy years ago when we were living across the street from each other in East Nashville. We sat down, and he started talking about some of his hometown friends in Ionia who, like he said, “Worked their whole lives, and tried to be good and do right, and still have nothing to show for it.” 

It’s about people in towns like Ionia who’ve been gripped by vice and/or just caught in a cycle of poverty. I wrote all the lyrics for the most part. I was thinking of a family member who has schizophrenia and feels persecuted by a system that doesn’t support him (try as my family might to keep him out of legal trouble and debt) and another relative who robbed two banks in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I grew up, to support her gambling addiction.

Billy started playing this open B riff that was on his mind from a pick he had had recently with Bryan Sutton. He started playing that riff, and I started singing some words I had written down from when he was talking about his friends in Ionia. We had only gotten two verses in and hummed through something that could be a chorus, and we left it at that.

A couple of years later, I was on a string of solo dates opening for the East Pointers in Canada but ended in the U.P. for my cousin Emily’s funeral (29 years old, heroin overdose framed as a car accident). It was mostly on the plane rides during that run of travel that I wrote more lyrics to finish out the form of a full song. 

Then, in the summer of 2020, we finally got together on my front porch and played through it. When he left my porch, the floodgates felt like they had opened. Two weeks later, I turned my life upside down.

Billy also recorded this song with his band and released it on Renewal.

“I Can Help”

(Billy Swan)

My Grandma Nancy put music into two categories: bubble gum or Bob Dylan. She’d declare that the latter actually has something to say and uses music to say it. I’m no Dylan. Not by a long shot. I didn’t even write this song. But I chose it for this record because, as you may have noticed, I have a few things to say. I guess I’ve set out to dispel some lies, as much for my own benefit as for whoever is listening.

This song directs its gaze at the “self-made person” lie. A friend introduced me to Billy Swan’s rendition during a time when friendship was literally getting me through to the next day.

Grief is real. Grief is love with nowhere to go. Grief tries to tell you that you’re all alone, but you’re not. Hear me out: The only way out is through, and we get through it together or not at all.

“On Your Side (Starman)”

(Lindsay Lou, Jon Weisberger)

Some bit of this song, I can’t remember what it was, dropped into my head during a rehearsal for a tour. I got together with Jon to write it but only ended up keeping the chorus of what we did together. I revisited it with the Sweet Water Warblers during a writing retreat at my family’s hunting camp in the U.P., but again walked away with nothing that stuck.

Finally, at a host’s house in North Carolina, I penned the verses and felt like it was written and done. My host had just lost their oldest son to an overdose, and I was struggling with band dynamics on the road…When I retreated for the evening to the guest house in the woods, the words seemed to fall from my tongue like they finally knew what to say.

“Love Calls“

(Lindsay Lou, PJ George III)

I wrote the first line of this song down after my mom told me one morning a few years ago, as a mother doting over her all-grown-up baby girl will do, that I “had a face that could launch a thousand ships.” I had never heard the Helen of Troy reference before and thought, “Damn, Mom. That’s poetic as hell.”

From the line, I started to create a story of a woman who holds her power with such grace; her light alone is enough to hold space for a shift in our understanding of reality. Instead of inspiring men into war and death, she gives them strength by disarming them.

The story came together with PJ soon after. He laid down the bass line and requested I sing a high static-like melody.

This rendition had pretty expansive solo sections after we laid down the basic track. When I played the rough for my girlfriends, they said they wanted to hear more of me in those sections – but “What form of Lindsay?” was the question that rang in my head. Then, during a listen-through in the studio, it dawned on me. The Lindsay that sits at Grandma’s feet listening to her stories: that was the key that gave this song context.

I recorded 25ish hours of our conversations over the last three years of her life as she recounted her life story, and I knew just the bit I wanted spliced in there.

Of my Grandma Nancy’s 12 children and 90ish grandchildren, we had a special relationship. I slept on the couch beside her, where she slept in her lazy boy, for weeks after I left my marriage in the fall of 2020. The rainbow gatherers knew her as Mother Nature. She died in March of 2021.

“Queen of Time”

(Lindsay Lou)

The title track of my album, I wrote this song back in 2016 thinking about Absalom, the caterpillar who challenges Alice to claim who she is. Its title is ironic to me because time management isn’t my forte. Ultimately, though, it’s about the duality of human experience. Sometimes, you feel like the social butterfly flying high, and sometimes, you feel like the caterpillar who needs to cocoon. Sometimes, you feel like the queen of time, and sometimes, you feel like a wishing well. The truth is you’re always both, and all of it at once. It can feel overwhelming, but there’s so much power in self-knowledge.

“Rules”

(Lindsay Lou)

I recorded this with our little East Nashville pandemic band, Superflex, plus my regular drummer and guitar player. I feel a little bit like the Carter Family with this one. Not because I left my husband for my cousin, haha. It’s just raw… about me and my ex-husband venturing into the unknown land of polyamory, performed with the man I’m now with and a couple of our close friends.

“Needed”

(Lindsay Lou)

I started this song the day before the pandemic hit my life. I was meant to have an entire month to be home alone and write. My now ex-husband was going on tour with our friend, Miss Tess. Two days later, he came home to stay. I finished this song that very day and did the first run-through of “Nothin’s Workin” with the lyrics I’d be working on.

I then went on to finish “Shame,” which was pretty foreshadowing of the divorce that followed, even though I wasn’t admitting to myself at the time I wrote it that I knew for sure it was imminent. Self-knowledge…deceptively simple.

“Shame”

(Lindsay Lou)

I don’t think shame does us any favors. There’s this lie that’s been passed down and around that we need shame, that it keeps us safe or something. I’m calling B.S. on that, and I’m not alone.

This song and its companion video keep on with the theme of duality that my new album embraces. We contain multitudes, and each aspect is as deserving of love as the next. May we all embrace the balance of feminine and masculine aspects in our nature. May we reclaim our own self-expression and uncouple ourselves from systems that aim to oppress or cast shadows of shame on the beauty of our bodies.

“This Too Shall Pass“

(Lindsay Lou, Grandma Nancy)

This is a snippet of a conversation I had with my grandma where I was having a psychotic break of sorts, imagining a world I want to live in, afraid of never seeing it, and losing my mind about losing her. She talks me through it, and I will never forget the words she spoke to me that day.

“Silent”

(Lindsay Lou, Phoebe Hunt)

I wrote this chorus after a rendezvous during the open relationship era of my marriage. My producer, Dave O’Donnell, picked it out as a song fragment to be finished from a handful of voice memos I sent to him when we first started out on this album journey. So, when Phoebe came over to hang and write two days after the tornado swept through Nashville, which was four days after the pandemic shut all our gigs down, I went back to it and wrote two verses. 

Photo by Dana Kalachnik, Courtesy of Missing Piece Group