Lou Turner & Kate Teague

For the past three years, poet and musician Lou Turner has been steadily road dogging it across the country and world, as a member of Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band, on a MJ Lenderman tour, and in her own trio of Nashville indie chooglers, the Styrofoam Winos—but for her masterful new album Strangels, Turner went back home. Feeling the need for solitary exploration while buoyed by the confidence she gained playing stages from Newport to Austin City Limits, she decided to record in her home studio, self-produce, and play almost all the instruments herself. What emerged was Turner at her freest and most relaxed—her lyrics, succinct and direct, playful and deep; her playing—of guitars, electric bass, upright bass, drums, flute, marimba, synthesizer, organ, and percussion—joyful and adventurous, spanning influences from Judee Sill to Alice Coltrane to Neil Young. On this third release for SPINSTER, Turner, Noah-like, builds her own weird ark of the animal kingdom’s “strangels” (a portmanteau of strange angels): horses and “bad boy” snakes, fireflies and vultures (“though demonized in our culture”), as she ventures into the flood waters of thematic dualities: the strange and the angelic, the folky and the pokey, the earth-bound and the heavenly, and all the spirited interspecies and interdimensional encounters between. Strangels is not just an ode to the wonder of God’s creation, but the wonder, too, of self-creation, as she constructs in a sense, an Ark of the self, gathering the parts of her that are the road dog rocker, the cat lady poet, the pastor’s kid, the deft singer-songwriter, the jazz percussionist, the seeker, and the knower. What is the noun of assemblage for those many selves? It just might be a “strangel.”