NIKKI LANE
Nikki Lane grew up First Baptist, but always felt like an outsider; her parents were divorced, and
didn’t have a lot of money. Before music, fashion was Lane’s outlet for creative expression. She
remembers being a teenager in Greenville, South Carolina, dressing up for Christian punk shows
her parents allowed her to go to. "Remember the Aerosmith video where Alicia Silverstone
changed her outfit in the car? That's really what the fuck I did.”
DENIM & DIAMONDS
She dropped out of school at 17 and within two years had moved to Los Angeles, which led to
New York City, and then down to Nashville, where she began writing her own songs.
2011 saw the release of her debut album Walk of Shame, which proved Lane could sing anything
from swampy rockers to tender love ballads. It was a stepping stone for her more ambitious
second album, 2014’s All or Nothin’, which was produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys,
whom she met while selling clothes at a Nashville flea market. Auerbach helped Lane amp up
her sound, touching on doo-wop, surf-rock guitars and funky rhthyms. It worked - the stomping
opener “Right Time” has racked up more than 10 million Spotify streams. It was then followed
by 2017’s Highway Queen, where she made no secret of her big ambitions. The album received
wide critical acclaim and was featured on multiple year-end best-of lists.
But then she wasn’t sure she wanted to make another one.
She was tired of saying yes and tired of the touring grind. She had lived up to her Highway
Queen persona, touring from Boston to Barcelona, and back again. Lane did it all - driving the
tour van, keeping track of the merch she designed, performing, meeting fans. “It was hard
playing all the roles. There was very little left,” she says.
When the grind came to a halt, she was happy staying home, hanging out with artists like Sierra
Ferrell (“One of the most raw, original talents I’ve ever heard - She's my favorite”). Lana Del Rey
enlisted Lane to write and duet with her on last year’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club (Del
Rey has also become known to jump on stage during Lane performances). Lane also
collaborated with Spiritualized on their acclaimed Everything Was Beautiful.
“I hadn’t made a record in years and did not really feel interested in making another one,” she
says. But Lane had been secretly stashing away ideas. “What I realized was how many little
nuggets I was sitting on,” she says.
Enter Joshua Homme.
She and the Queens of the Stone Age frontman connected over the phone in May 2020 when the
world was shut down. Like Lane, Homme was feeling overwhelmed with everything happening.
“Neither of us knew what the year was going to hold and if it was going to work or if it was going
to be easy.”
Energized by their talk, Lane and Homme found themselves in his Pink Duck Studios months
later. Lane came in with new songs and Homme put together a studio band of big-budget talent
including his Queens of the Stone Age collaborators Alain Johannes on guitar, Dean Fertita on
organ & Michael Shuman on bass, as well as drummers Matt Helders of Arctic Monkeys and
Carla Azar of the acclaimed post-punk band Autolux. Homme asked Lane to bring a bandmate
of her own, and she chose her steel player Matt Pynn. Since Lane felt out of her element, Pynn
became a crucial support system in a room of new faces: “I’d be like ‘Did we get that vocal?’ And
he’d be like, ‘Fuck yeah.’”
On Denim & Diamonds, Lane combines her love of Nuggets-era bands like The 13th Floor
Elevators with the back porch wit of Loretta Lynn - an artist Lane hadn’t discovered until she
was in her twenties (“MTV was my babysitter growing up,” she admits). Later, Lynn
immediately felt a kinship upon hearing Lane’s sharp-witted biographical vignettes. “She’s a lot
like me,” Lynn told CBS’ Anthony Mason. “I just feel like we always knew each other. We might
have met in another lifetime.”
Homme helped Lane take her sound to new places. He took her empowering kiss-off, the title
track, “Denim and Diamonds,” and turned it into “the most Homme song on the record,”
complete with a swaggering blues riff and dynamic snare-drum pummeling; On the heavy “Black
Widow,” Lane uses spider superstition as a parallel to warn about a dangerous lover.
One song Lane keeps coming back to is “Pass it Down,” a buoyant folk singalong that came out
of a phone conversation about her relationship with her father and her deeply religious
upbringing. “It could be about religion, it could be about AA,” she says. “It’s about getting it off
your chest in order to move on.” Lane realizes she may have stumbled upon the theme running
through the entire record. “I'm attracted to things that might catch me on fire, because that's the
inkwell,” says Lane. “I got my confidence back in some ways. I remembered what I was good at.
I’m in a good place.”
For Lane, Denim & Diamonds was a chance to take stock of her first decade as a songwriter. She
traces her story of origin, from her religious youth in South Carolina to Nashville Rebel. It’s a
wild, heavy journey into the mind of one of today’s most talented songwriters.
For more information, please contact
Asha Goodman, Cami Opere, Ethan Jacobs or Carla Sacks at Sacks & Co., 212.741.1000.
