Calling the shots

The Jack White-produced second album from the startling singerstring player. By Lois Wilson.

SUMMONING A giddying carousel of fiddle, acoustic guitar, mandolin, organ and drums, Lillie Mae sets out her manifesto on Dance To The Beat Of My Own Drum, the closing track on Forever And Then Some, her spectacular second album, produced by Jack White at his Third Man Studio in Nashville. “And I dance to the beat of my own drum/And I sing all the words to my own song/ And I hum to a tune of my choosing,” she sings, her voice trembling, childlike but soulful, as she lays it on the line. It’s a key moment, Mae lost in the thrill of music making, her emotional abandonment coupled with a technical precision elevating singer and listener to a blissful state. But the 26-year-old multi-instrumentalist has travelled the country road. Born Lillie Mae

Rische in Illinois, she started singing aged three, picked up the fiddle at seven, then with her father, Forrest Carter Rische, hit the highway in an old motor home playing in the family band. Aged nine, she and her siblings, brother Frank and sisters Scarlett, Amber-Dawn and McKenna Grace, broke away to form Jypsi. Under Cowboy Jack Clement’s tutelage, they played six days a week at Layla’s Bluegrass Inn in Music City, then signed a deal with Arista Nashville, resulting in 2008 US hit single I Don’t Love You Like That. Four years later Mae was playing fiddle and mandolin in The Peacocks, Jack White’s all female touring band, and duetting with him on 2014’s Lazaretto. White may have been her boss then, but it’s Mae who calls the shots now; a storyteller in the grand tradition,

with the instrumental skills and a crack band – including The Dead Weather and QOTSA’s Dean Fertita on wobbly organ plus Old Crow Medicine Show’s Cory Younts on piano – these songs tell her story, of a hard-lived life, of love won then lost. On Wash Me Clean, a classic country confessional, her voice is warm and husky; a delicious, rich crumble of Dolly and Stevie Nicks as she laments, “There ain’t enough land for me to run from who I am and who I’ve become”. On Honky Tonks And Taverns, a perky coming together of strings, soundtracks, regret and repentance. “Oh the things I almost did/Oh the signs I almost read/All the damage that I’ve done/Is not lost and still lives on.” Over The Hill And Through The Woods, the album’s haunting lead single, meanwhile, co-written with sister Scarlett and featuring Carey Kotsionis’s close harmonies, has her declaring, “I never saw you after/Years of control mean nothing now.” White calls her “one in a billion”. He’s not wrong.