How Lydia Loveless Turned a Brutal Breakup Into an Empowering Record

Lydia Loveless is in a Portland, Oregon, hotel waiting for her breakfast to arrive. It’s just before noon on the morning after her show there, but the singer-songwriter needs to get on the road soon for the three-hour trip north to Seattle, where she’ll be performing that night.

It’s only been ten days into her current tour to support her new album, Nothing’s Gonna Stand In My Way Again, but Loveless has already embraced the chaos of the run, which winds its way from the West Coast and down through the Rockies before wrapping up by mid-February with four shows in Texas.

“Right now, I’m pacing around in a hotel hallway and waiting for a smoothie to be delivered. I feel very insane and annoying right now,” she admits, adding that she wanted to visit the famous Powell’s Books before leaving the City of Roses behind, but there was no time.

Loveless will be in Denver on Saturday, February 3, for a show at Globe Hall with Jason Hawk Harris and Cousin Curtiss of Telluride, presented by local radio station 105.5 The Colorado Sound.

Loveless wrote most of her latest album on the road, specifically while making trips back and forth from North Carolina to her home in Columbus, Ohio, after a bad breakup. But touring and road-tripping are not necessarily the same, Loveless explains. The tour grind, she says, is not nearly as inspirational.

“It’s too stressful,” Loveless says. “If I have time to stop and do things, traveling can be very inspiring. But touring is like, ‘Get up, you have to go, you’re going to talk to a billion people today.’ I don’t have any mental space on tour. ... I try to always be doing something creative just to stay sane, but right now, touring, I’m definitely going through some sort of identity crisis and not writing anything."

She’s still waiting for her meal. It’s brunchtime by now.

“But when I think about it and say that, I will write about this period of my life soon, probably,” she continues. “You have to allow yourself to actually experience things sometimes. I’m not sure it’s always healthy to be having word vomit about every single thing that’s going on.”
Loveless, who’s in her early thirties, has been wearing her heart on her sleeve for more than a decade now, writing and recording her life for all to listen to. That’s still the case on Nothing’s Gonna Stand In My Way Again, but it’s not a “breakup record,” as it’s been dubbed since its September 2023 release.

“I went through a breakup and made this record, but I don’t know, it’s tough to say. My last record [2020’s Daughter] got pigeonholed as a divorce record — which, it was written years after my separation from my husband at the time,” she shares. “This one was written in the midst of the worst breakup of my life. But at the same time, it was also more about, sounds corny, but falling in love with myself and learning how to actually take care of myself in a way — hence the very intense title of the record.”

The catchy cowpunk tune “Sex and Money,” for example, is more “empowering,” she says, something Loveless wanted to reflect on the record as whole, with its tales of a burned-out singer-songwriter shamelessly chasing a lavish life of luxury and spoiling herself.

“That’s the word I was searching for in my early-morning brain: empowering,” she says. “I was going through a breakup, but there’s some love songs, some crush songs, some fuck-you-I’m-done songs. It’s a lot of different things.

“Here I was, and I found myself driving back and forth from Ohio and North Carolina with all my stuff in a van and writing songs in the car, on my friend’s couch and at the Old Bag of Nails Pub [an Ohio-based restaurant chain]. It’s a lot of things thrown together,” she adds.

The brutality and uncertainty of the breakup is now just history, only to be recalled in song, but she seems to look back on that time fondly, if not a little indifferently, now. “In that situation where I could, if I wanted, pull over and go anywhere else, it ended up being more inspiring, because I could just think. And I was very sad, so I was able to not be on my phone, because I had nothing to be on my phone for,” she explains. “I didn’t have anyone I needed to talk to, so it was a lot more freeing. I was able to get a little more inspired.”

She admits that when she was younger, she’d simply “wait for inspiration to hit.

“But now I don’t have that luxury, financially or career-wise, at all," Loveless notes, "so I definitely push myself a lot more." Her work as an engineer and producer at Secret Studio in Columbus helps, too.

As the interview ends, she’s still waiting for breakfast, but her bus is getting ready to leave.

“When I was young, I felt like I’d have all the time in the world,” Loveless concludes. “Now I’m going to be 35 in a blink. My real estate is going down.”

But her career is going up.

Lydia Loveless, 7 p.m. Saturday, February 3, Globe Hall, 4483 Logan Street. Tickets are $25.