LEAVE YOUR
HAT ON
COUNTRY IS quickly
becoming the genre du jour,
making waves well outside
Golden Guitar territory. See:
masked crooner Orville Peck,
Kacey Musgraves’ left-of-fieldAlbum Of The Year Grammy
win and Canadian slack
rocker Mac DeMarco trading
his bucket hat for an Akubra-
style one for his latest album
Here Comes The Cowboy.
Then there’s the TikTok-spurred
phenom that is rapper Lil
Nas X’s “Old Town Road”
(lent some country clout by
Billy Ray Cyrus and remixed by
Diplo, who’s also announceda new, hillbilly-inspired moniker,
Thomas Wesley), which has
blurred genres – and stirred
controversy in the process.
Cardi B, Kelela, Anderson
Paak and Solange have also
dabbled in the trend that’s
become a nod to the historical
omission of African Americans
from cowboy culture – and is
perhaps best chronicled by
@theyeehawagenda.THE ELUSIVE
KELSEY LU
TALKS BEING
SINGLED OUT
BY RAP
GREATNESS
AND THE
POWER
OF WORKING
TOGETHERTHE CLASSICALLY TRAINED Kelsey Lu
(who prefers to go by “Lu”) got her start
lending her talent as a studio musician to
an impressive cohort of artists – namely
Lady Gaga, Florence + The Machine and
Solange, who she performed a cello
interlude for on the epic album A Seat At
The Table. But with a considered, soulful
sound of her own – albeit one that’s
impossible to pigeonhole into one genre –
the North Carolina-born up-and-comer is
quickly building an impressive following in
her own right. She recorded her first EP live
(just her voice, a cello and loop pedals)
in a Brooklyn church in the presence of
friends and family, has collaborated with
Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes and her
debut album Blood was released to
critical acclaim earlier this year.
When we meet her, she’s animatedly
telling a story of meeting rapper Ghostface
Killah backstage at one of his gigs, “maybe
eight,nineyears ago”. They made smallBLESSED SHE
talk, she complimented him on the show
and he passed the joint he’d just rolled. As
she went to leave, she says, “He took my
hands and said, ‘This isn’t the last I’m gonna
see of you. I’m gonna see you again in
a different light. You’ve got something
special.’” She adds with a coy smile, “I got
blessed by Ghostface!” Clearly, he was
onto something. Here, Lu in her own words...ON HER CLASSICAL TRAINING
“I started studying classical music when
I was five or six; playing violin, then piano,
then back to violin, [before] I switched to
cello. I was in a violin lesson and my
teacher had a cello propped up against
the window and I was drooling over it. I’ve
always loved the way the cello looks when
people are playing it. The physical aspect
of the body being wrapped around the
instrument, moving with it. When I try to play
violin now it’s so foreign. It seems tiny. The
finger spacing, I’m like, ‘How the fuck?’”ON COLLABORATIONS
“Collaboration with other people is
something we’ve done as humans long
before ‘art’ was a term, as a way of
expressing ourselves and communicating
whatever is happening in the world and
how we’re all connected to it. There’s
always going to be room for collaboration.
I think it pushes forward different parts of
self, something about yourself or some new
technique that you didn’t know before. It’s
transference of knowledge, and there is
always something to be learnt from that.”ON THE PROCESS BEHIND BLOOD
“I like things that are challenging; I don’t
like things to be too easy. It was certainly
a process; it took three years. It was about
finding a language in collaboration, and
about working with subjects that were
deeply personal and [figuring out] how
I wanted them to come across for the
listener. [Blood] is one chapter of many
chapters to come. It will always linger on in
some form. I think of [the next progression]
as moving into another room of the same
house – my house.”ON WHAT’S NEXT
“I’ve started to test the waters, but I haven’t
got into ‘This is what the next thing is going
to be’. That’s not how [Blood] came about
either. I think that’s my process, just allowing
myself to move freely, and when it feels like
it’s come to some conclusion, then it will be
a body of work. I would like to do little EPs
that are just one [concept], rather than
trying to put different [concepts] into one.”78
Cardi BAnderson PaakKelelaLil Nas XOrville Peck@iamkelseylu