Lindsay Lou brings ‘Southland’ to Bend

Published 12:00 am Thursday, October 25, 2018

Lindsay Lou Rilko felt an immediate connection when she met her future bandmates in The Flatbellys at an open mic night at Dagwood’s Tavern in Lansing, Michigan, in 2008.

The members of The Flatbellys (including husband Joshua Rilko) may have felt differently at the time.

“I saw them and I was like, ‘Ooh’ — I definitely felt an instant calling (or) feeling of finding my people, finding home and just being really interested in what they were doing,” Lindsay Lou Rilko, who performs as Lindsay Lou, said from her home in Nashville, where she and her band recently relocated from Michigan. “I really liked the way it sounded, and I loved the harmony singing — that was one of the biggest things that stood out to me, was the harmony singing.

“And then (my friend) Tiffany and I got up, and we played, and we sang our harmonies, and one of the guys in the Flatbellys, the original bass player, nudged Josh and was like, ‘Oh, we should ask them to come back and jam,’” Lou continued. “And Josh said — I think he’s kind of embarrassed about this now — but he said to his friend, ‘Eh, I don’t have time to teach.’ Because I was playing folk music — I was playing like the Indigo Girls — and so he was in this mindset of, ‘I only want to play bluegrass.’ When I first met Josh, he was like a bluegrass evangelical.”

Of course, the fateful jam session happened, and Rilko and Lou — and the rest of the band — hit it off. Soon after, The Flatbellys evolved into Lindsay Lou & The Flatbellys and released two bluegrass- and blues-leaning albums, 2012’s “Release Your Shrouds” and 2015’s “Ionia.”

That band (of which Rilko and Lou are the only original members remaining) will finally make its debut at Volcanic Theatre Pub on Sunday after some near-misses with Central Oregon, including a slot at last year’s canceled Sisters Folk Festival. But it will do so as simply Lindsay Lou, a change that was a long time coming.

“The band was The Flatbellys and then I started singing with them; The Flatbellys disbanded, but I started playing with two of them,” Lou said. “And they had already been touring, so we were just like, let’s keep The Flatbellys name, since we’re gonna play shows around Michigan. But the Michigan band The Flatbellys really was no more a long time ago, and we kept it on I think longer than it made sense to. Finally, when we decided to move into the electric world a little further and start playing with drums, I (thought) it was time to release that name altogether.”

This year’s “Southland” album, the first by the band to be released under the Lindsay Lou moniker (Lou released a solo album, “A Different Tune,” in 2010), continues the growth begun on “Ionia.” The record was inspired in part by the band’s move from Michigan to Nashville, where Lou co-wrote a number of songs with other writers for the first time in her career.

“Writing a song is such a personal, intimate process that I didn’t have a vision of how that could be shared really,” she said. “Josh and I co-wrote ‘My Side of the Mountain’ together on a record called ‘Release Your Shrouds,’ but that was like, he had a chorus and chords, and then at a completely separate time I put lyrics and a melody to the verses because he told me that I could. But it wasn’t like sitting down with somebody and saying, ‘OK, you and I together right now are going to create something that is new and completely born out of this moment that we’re in right now together. And that is a big part of ‘Southland.’”

As Lou mentioned, many songs feature a full drum kit, electric guitars and (on the soulful romp “Sugar”) a horn section, while stylistically, the band veers into Beatlesque rock and pop, swing and jazz. The record brings her writing full circle from the bluegrass she discovered with The Flatbellys — as a kid, Lou would often sit in on jam sessions of Beatles or Crosby, Stills & Nash songs at family reunions, she said.

“We learn from those who came before us and those who we admire, and we start to build our own voice with tools given to us from the past and from our fellow musicians,” Lou said. “At the end of the day, we’re all finding our own voice, and that thing is a hard thing to name, and it’s also a hard thing to — what do they say — pigeonhole. If we’re all being authentically us, then it’s hard to really pigeonhole a sound or the sound that we’re making.”