The cover of Cyrena Wages’ second album could be straight out of a grainy Brian De Palma B-movie from the ’70s: She stands before us in lacy nightclothes, arms uplifted as if drawn to some mesmerizing force, compelled to move inexorably toward it. Even the title, Miss Melancholia!, could be lifted straight from B-movie hell. It’s a perfect distillation of the album’s mood, ranging from foreboding, cinematic ballads, and anthems at the top to her earthier, Americana-tinged material by the end, like her classic, golden-age country ballad, “FAFO.” All are united by Wages’ clear-eyed look at people’s compulsions, blind spots, and obsessions as they blunder through the world.
At the same time, it may well be that the various characters in Wages’ latest batch of songs are all different facets of herself. Indeed, she says, “Miss Melancholia!, I think, reflects an acceptance of not being what people bargained for. I think the truest thing I’ve figured out about myself is that I’m full of contradictions. In my first record, I was trying to resolve that, and in my second record I have realized I’m no longer interested in resolving that, and that contradiction is just my human experience.”
Or, as she sings on the opening track “Wildflower,” “They’ll call me crazy, unhinged, fucking wild, but they keep calling me/When you’re finally alone with yourself, you’ll miss the chaos of my company.” And, she hints, with that chaos comes unpredictability: “You laid me down in a bed of roses/You’re waking up with a wildflower.”
The song continues Wages’ knack for portraying relationships and solitary soul-searching alike in deft lyrical strokes, but this time around she has a newfound confidence. It’s now been over two years since she debuted with Vanity Project, the mood of which was dominated by Wages confronting her teen years spent competing on the Tennessee beauty pageant circuit, as she said at the time, “Walking around in a swimsuit with a number on your waist like a show horse, all while a bunch of weird old guys give you a score of one to 10.”
If her debut summed up Wages’ rejection of that world, it also captured her rediscovery of the back roads around Millington, where she grew up, as the pageant world’s perfect foil. The new album finds her relaxing into the self-empowerment of that homecoming epiphany and casting a wiser eye on both herself and those around her, in an intriguing voice somewhere between Lana Del Rey, Marianne Faithfull, and Patsy Cline.
“I wrote this [album] as sort of my own armor,” she says. “And I also think in its most cynical moments, it kind of tells on itself. Like, maybe that’s where I’m also the most tender, you know? And both of those things are true for me.”
Part of finding her more vulnerable-yet-savvy voice involved experimenting with some new songwriting partners. “I didn’t necessarily think, ‘Okay, it’s time to make another record.’ I just think of it as, ‘I’ve got to keep writing.’
“So, when I lived in Nashville, I bartended for a long time with one of the girls in the band Boys Club for Girls, Amie Miriello, and after they opened for us one night, she was like, ‘I really want to write some stuff with you. I know this guy who I think would really get your sonic space. Why don’t you come meet him?’ That was Johnny Black. And, not even really knowing anything about Johnny, the first song we wrote, we all just had this moment of like, ‘Oh shit, this is something special.’”
Moving quickly, Wages, Miriello, and Black began crafting demos, which ended up becoming the album’s master tracks. As Wages puts it, “We chased it down. Johnny was creating these insane tracks while we were writing, and then I was cutting the vocals that day, assuming I would go back later and redo them. And then he convinced me to just let them be raw, in the tone of where I was the day we wrote the song. And then the record just kind of made itself that way.”
Cyrena Wages and band (Pat Fusco, Landon Moore, Joe Restivo, Jeremy Stanfill, and Shawn Zorn) celebrate her new album with a show at Hernando’s Hide-A-Way on Saturday, November 14th at 8 p.m.
