Lady Of The Canyon

With Mozart in the Jungle behind her, Lola Kirke makes her own kind of music—a long, sweet toke of ’70s folk-rock

- Zach Schonfeld

WHEN LOLA KIRKE WAS 16, SHE STUMBLED upon a record at a flea market. She didn’t own a turntbale, but the cover struck her. “It was a photograph of this beautiful woman lying down in a field,” says Kirke, who bought the album anyway, as a decorative artifact. Much later, when she finally got a record player, it “was the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever heard.”

Affair!, by a country-pop singer with the unforgettable name of Bonnie Guitar, was a 1969 concept album about a woman cheating on her husband. The singer, it turned out, was still performing; Kirke found her on YouTube and “tracked her down through the good, old internet.” The two talked on the phone for hours: “She shared all about being a woman in the music industry, being a mother, love— everything!” (The 95-year-old Guitar continues to gig once a week in Soap Lake, Washington.)

You won’t find Affair! on Spotify; it never made the leap to CD, much less streaming. But Kirke’s contagious enthusiasm inspires thoughts of scouring garage sales and the dusty stacks of used record stores, in the hopes of finding another copy. You can hear her reverence for ’60s and ’70s folk-rock in her twanged-out debut, Heart Head West, with nods to the Laurel Canyon scene of Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and particularly Gram Parsons—an obsession that led to “a really bad tattoo that I recently covered up,” says Kirke.