“I am obsessed with emotion,” Leah Lavigne, the lead singer of Ok Cowgirl, tells me as we swing from a hanging bench on a porch in East Nashville. She grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and started playing music on piano, where she felt hemmed into making music that sounded…pretty. “Life isn’t always pretty. And I couldn’t figure out how to express that until I got behind a guitar and stomped on an overdrive pedal.” It was a revelation. “I felt like, this is the kind of sad that I am trying to get across.”
Intense emotion expressed through slamming guitars is the hallmark of Ok Cowgirl’s new album, Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut, our Record of the Week on WNXP. All Record of the Week interviews, including this one, can be heard via Apple and Spotify podcasts.
On growing up in Michigan
“My goal was to just get the hell out of Michigan,” Lavigne laughs as she tells me. “I mean, I love Michigan and I love visiting these days but as an 18-year-old I had had my fill. I’m half Asian and I always just felt kind of weird growing up in a super white community. I was really interested in being around more diverse people where I felt maybe I would be better understood and be seen as Leah and not ‘oh the Asian girl from down the street.'” She found those people in New York City.
On starting the band
Lavigne went to NYU. After being frustrated by the limitations of the piano, she borrowed a friend’s guitar and found a ragtag band in some unlikely spaces. The NYU laundry room was where she first met her drummer Matt. Lavigne used to be a regular at the dive bar, One Stop, in Brooklyn, which is where she met Ok Cowgirl’s guitarist, Jake, who used to tend that bar.
“Once I started finding these spaces where musicians and artists congregated in Brooklyn it was like, ‘Oh my god! I have found my people!’ I’ve felt so seen and so at home in the Brooklyn community.”
On “Little Splinters”
To be well liked can feel so small
when you just want one to love your all
“So tell me if you relate to this,” said Lavigne. “I was feeling lonely and isolated and I manically posted a thirst trap to Instagram. I just kept refreshing my phone to see how many likes it got. It kept ticking up but no matter how many likes it got, I felt unsatisfied. Maybe if my crush had commented I would have felt like it was worth it. Really what I was looking for in that moment wasn’t a bunch of acquaintances to high-five me on the internet, I was feeling lonely in a very deep way and wanted to connect with someone in a really deep way.”
On “Mars Cheese Castle”
On the drive between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Michigan, where Lavigne is from, there is a beloved roadside attraction called Mars Cheese Castle. It is exactly what it sounds like, a “castle” that sells many cheeses and also Wisconsin beers, sausages and kitschy memorabilia. It’s an icon to Wisconsinites and a very silly thing to mention in a song.
“Something that I have been exploring is introducing a bit of comedic relief into my songs that are super heavy,” the artist explains. “John Prine is a songwriter who was the best at talking about real stuff and sad stuff, but also getting a laugh out of you.”
The song “Mars Cheese Castle” by Ok Cowgirl is actually a song about grief. Lavigne was dating a partner from Wisconsin and when they were there once his mother was diagnosed with cancer. On the drive back to Michigan the news hung in the air.
“I remember having moments where I didn’t know what was going to happen or if he was going to be OK. He was so depressed and I didn’t know how to support him or make things better. It was out of my control. We were feeling so panicked and stuck. But we drove past Mars Cheese Castle after 20 solemn minutes and he popped his head up, pointed kind of laughed and said, ‘Hey, it’s the castle.’ That little chuckle was so reassuring to me. In that moment I knew that everything would be OK.”
