Artist: Lydia Luce
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Tangerine”
Album: Azalea
In Their Words: “I started taking contemporary ballet classes at the Nashville Ballet where I met Erin Kouwe who teaches these amazing classes. We started chatting about doing a creative project together and I sent her my recent record Azalea for her to pick a song to create a choreography to. She picked my song, ‘Tangerine.’ Erin does a lot of work with Nashville’s contemporary ballet group called New Dialect. She hired several incredible dancers most of which are or have been in this group.
“The videographer/editor David Flores also a member of New Dialect. It was so lovely getting to work him because he knew what he wanted to see in our movements as an incredible dancer. Both Erin and I feel the importance of cross collaborating between artistic genres. Nashville may be known as a music city but there is an abundance in variety of arts here and I’d love to find new ways to keep collaborating with other types of artists.
“I wrote ‘Tangerine’ with Ian Fitchuk and Todd Lombardo last year. We were sipping on some Tangerine La Croix when inspiration struck. Todd is an incredible guitar player and he started playing the part that you hear on the track. Ian picked up a banjo and started using it percussively and that’s actually the sound that drive the song in the recording as well. It worked so well when we were writing it we decided to track it that way.
“‘Tangerine’ has a similar story to Dolly Parton’s song, ‘Jolene.’ The narrator is comparing themselves to this enchanting Tangerine character who she assumes has this great power of seduction that she doesn’t have. In the bridge she is asking her lover, ‘If I were more like her, would you look at me the same way?'” –Lydia Luce
Photo credit: Kane Stewart
