Lauren Lovelle & The Midnight Spliffs light it up

Photo Courtesy of Lauren Lovelle

For Lauren Lovelle, being involved in music was inevitable. At the age of four, she was  singing Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart” with her dad’s band, Two Way Traffic, in Wichita. It’s no surprise, really, given the musical history on both sides of her family.

“My mom comes from a musical family,” Lovelle says. “Her grandpa was buried with his harmonica in his hands, and everybody said he was a legend. Like, he was a shredder.”

Lovelle’s dad grew up a preacher’s kid and got his musical training through the church and singing hymns, but that whole side of the family was also into folk, country, and blues, continues the singer, with her paternal grandfather going on to teach Lovelle how to play guitar herself.

“And then my dad’s grandpa—who died when my dad was young—at one point was in the Muskogee Jail for bootlegging whiskey,” says Lovelle. “And he wrote songs about it. He has songs recorded in the Muskogee Jail way back when, so it’s definitely in the bloodline, for sure.”

After high school, Lovelle’s musical journey took a bit of a detour, singing in a Top 40 cover band she declines to name, as they did not split up on good terms, which the singer says she’s not too ashamed about.

“I was very young, in comparison to everybody else in the band,” Lovelle recalls. “I was literally 19, 20, and 21, and the guys were all in their 50s and there was lots of drugs and lots of late nights and lots of like, ‘Here, I have this tiny little outfit that you should wear for us on stage,’ and it only took a little while of me being like, ‘Okay, the money is not worth it.’”

More to the point, it also wasn’t the music Lovelle wanted to be playing. Listening to Lovelle’s new EP, Other Dreams, it’s hard to imagine her happily singing Katy Perry or AC/DC songs, even though you definitely know she’d kill it with her clear, powerful voice. The four-song release, produced by Hembree’s Isaac Flynn, marks the first recordings from Lovelle and her band, The Midnight Spliffs, even though they’ve been performing steadily throughout the area for two years now.

Photo by Deanie Chen

The group’s gone through a few a lineup changes since it first started, but it’s now solidified into a murderer’s row of local talent, with Landon Hambright on bass, Christopher Langwell on drums, Bradley McKellip on guitar, and Devon Teran on pedal steel, with the bandmembers’ collective resume encompassing the likes of Terri Quinn, The Roseline, Timbers, Flash Floods, and more.

“It’s so funny,” says Lovelle. “My band is just made up of guitar players. It’s all guitar players and singers.”

Given the strength of her songs and the musicians bringing them to vibrant life, it’s no surprise that the songs that comprise Other Dreams are incredibly strong, and are tunes in which Lovelle and The Spliffs have been playing for a good while now. While it’s only four tunes, they are diverse. The first track and first single, “Anxiously Attached”, swings with Teran’s pedal steel, while the second song, “Won’t Tell You Goodbye”, puts Lovelle’s voice and lyrics in the forefront behind quiet drumming from Langwell.

“Very Last Time” rides a nod to the Cars’ “Best Friend’s Girl” until the wheels fall off before Other Dreams closes with “In My Jeans”—a track which simultaneously makes you want to dance, thanks to Hambright’s bass work, while also tearing up as you catch the emotional heft behind Lovelle’s joking asides.

“It just kind of lightheartedly touches on ‘the creep that burnt down all my dreams’ and then passes off into some new topic,” says Lovelle of “In My Jeans”. “That was really helpful for me, and that was one of my first songs that I wrote actually delving into stuff that’s not so pleasant or not necessarily like, ‘Yay, let’s dance.’”

That way of songwriting was a really safe way to get into dark subject matter, continues the singer, because that back-and-forth between lighthearted joking and dark lines like, “There’s nothing left to eat to keep from dying, but the happy little pill that keeps me smiling,” eventually led to Lovelle getting really honest and writing things which would leave her shaking and somewhat nauseous as they forced her to revisit some things that were not quite comfortable yet for her body.

“I have a few songs that I’ve written that I have to be in a really good place to play them live,” Lovelle admits, pointing to one of her most emotional songs, “I Will Sing”.

“It’s about sisterhood and violence toward women on a global and ancestral level and how it’s my experiences, but how they’re so much bigger than I am and how it all connects,” continues Lovelle, explaining that she sometimes has to warn her friends, because it’s deeply personal for them, having gone through some of that with her. “Time is a powerful thing because time has allowed me to feel safe, comfortable, confident, and at peace in my body and still be able to sing those songs.”

Lovelle’s had some times where she was playing those songs live, and it did get the best of her. She did choke up, her voice cracked, or she started shaking.

“It started to just be kind of like I was yelling and ranting, rather than singing,” the singer says. “And I try to let that happen, and people have had some really beautiful interactions with it when I just let myself do what I need to do.”

Lovelle admits that she can be a perfectionist that wants herself to sound vocally perfect all the time, but has come to let that go when she needs to.

“Sometimes, it’s a good reminder when I’m watching other live musicians just be very emotive and raw [that] it’s actually really not about being beautiful or at least what I’m trying to do,” says Lovelle. “There’s some really powerful things in just being rugged, raw, messy, upset, shaky, and scared, doing it while you feel all those things.”

Lauren Lovelle and The Midnight Spliffs open for Hembree at Liberty Hall on Saturday, August 16.

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