Celebrated Nashville singer-songwriter Lindsay Lou announces her new album Queen of Time will release on September 29 via Kill Rock Stars Nashville. Produced by Dave O’Donnell (James Taylor, Sheryl Crow, Heart) and featuring a gamut of special guests including Grammy Award-winners Billy Strings and Jerry Douglas, Queen of Time finds Lou on a path filled with heartbreak, discovery and resilience. She explores the continued theme of duality on the lead single and title track, which releases today along with a magical, hallucinatory music video. 

Lindsay Lou on the debut single: “I wrote ‘Queen of Time’ back in 2016, when thinking about Absalom, the caterpillar who challenges Alice to claim who she is. Its title is ironic to me; time management is not my forte. But ultimately, it’s about the duality of human experience. Sometimes you feel like the social butterfly 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 self-knowledge is the ultimate power.” 

Queen of Time is the result of a deeply personal spiritual journey that unfolds across eleven tracks of tender, heartbreakingly beautiful music. After the loss of her grandmother, the end of her marriage, and the overwhelming turmoil of COVID lockdowns, Lindsay Lou sought out a hallucinogenic ritual that would not only inform the way she processed the waves of grief ahead of her, but led to a profound realization. “I saw a literal manifestation of the sacred feminine, and had this profound sense that I was meant to embody it,” she recalls. With this new vision of womanhood in mind, Lou began to see a throughline from her grandmother, to herself, to the art she was creating. In a quest that first began with her 2018 release, Southland (recorded with her former band, The Flatbellys), Queen of Time sees this theme deepen.  

“It started with my grandma. She was the unattainable woman in a way,” Lou explains. “She had 12 kids and ran homeless shelters and was always taking people in. She felt that her calling was to be a mother to everyone – this communal caregiver – but it also meant that in belonging to everyone, she also belonged to no one. I realized that this is the catch-22 of anyone who is a woman unto herself. Women, first and foremost, belong to themselves, so nobody can really have them; but, there’s also this element of self-sacrificing and giving to the idea of the feminine.”

The daughter of a literal coal-miner and millwright, and the granddaughter of a teacher gone Rainbow Gathering healer, Lou honed her style with her bluegrass-inspired band, Lindsay Lou & The Flatbellys, as well as the Michigan supergroup, Sweet Water Warblers. She has become a beloved live performer, taking the stage everywhere from Telluride Bluegrass Festival to Stagecoach, Celtic Connections to Australia’s National Folk Festival, and a “Can’t Miss Act” at AmericanaFest. A strong companion to her songwriting, Lou’s voice is a molasses-sweet instrument that slices deep into the soul, garnering critical acclaim. On Queen of Time, she captures a new arc of haloed beauty, becoming unattainable in her own way—a vibrant, powerful woman who can share herself with the world, and yet define a mystic sense of inner self. 

Photo Courtesy: Dana Kalachnik