Louise Kyme: Americana woman

Louise Kyme has been busy in lockdown.

With her three solo singles out since June, under the nom de musique Lou Kyme, she’s just released her first album, What's the Worst Thing that Can Happen. ‘Covid 19 has given me time to just do it,’ she says. ‘Lockdown has made me not worry so much about the outside world.’

Americana is her musical genre – alternative country to the uninitiated like me. ‘Extreme emotion’ underpins her lyrics and the melodies she creates to convey them.

Those in design know Louise better through her award-winning creative work for charities like the British Heart Foundation, but music is in her blood. Growing up on a council estate in Southampton, in her teens she played accordion in her family’s band. Her father earned his living playing country blues in pub gigs and set up a small recording studio with an eight-track reel-to-reel tape recorder. ‘He was super creative, very unusual and really ambitious to push it,’ she says.

As teenagers Louise and her three siblings joined his band, Okeh Wranglers. Her sisters played violin and steel guitar and her brother the drums. Their mother played bass.

For six years from her late teens Louise gigged across Europe with Okeh Wranglers, even playing the revered Continental Club in Austin, Texas, and in Nashville, Tennessee.

‘We went down a storm,’ she says. ‘We had our own sound.’

Back home they singned with London indie rockabilly label Fury Records – ‘the closest we came to taking it to the next level’.

But in her mid twenties, Louise opted out of the band to go to college and get a ‘proper’ job. ‘I was always interested in painting and line drawing,’ she says, so she studied illustration at Southampton.

Back to school

After college she got a job as an administrator with a charity, then, by chance, became an artworker at BHF. Her career developed and she ended up managing design for the charity. Collaborations with the likes of Hat-trick and The Partners helped kick-start a few creatively-driven consultancies, winning a cache of top design trophies in the process.

'No one teaches you how to be a client,’ Louise says. ‘Some awesome agencies helped me along the way. I just applied the mentality we had in the band, to be world-class and not settle for less.’

But, after years of hard work for little pay, in 2016 Louise ‘hit major burnout’. ‘I could no longer find anything in London that made me excited,’ she says. She left her job and headed back to Texas and Austin’s South by Southwest cultural festival.

Recalling Okeh Wranglers’ Texas gig, she says, ‘It was a big experience for me. Austin is such a colourful city. There was a feeling there that struck a chord. I wanted to reconnect and feel my heart beat again.’

‘It was tough at first, being on my own, but I made a few connections by going to gigs.’

One of those connections, with Chuck Prophet and the Mission Express, marked another turning point. ‘I had a massive grin the whole time I was there. I thought, “This is it”.’ Now friends, Prophet and band members Vicente Rodriguez, James DePrato and Adam Rossi feature on her recordings.

Buoyed by ‘extreme inspiration’, on her return from Texas Louise started writing her own material. ‘I’d always known I could be a writer,’ she says. ‘I just couldn’t stop writing.’

‘When you’re surrounded by music, it forms into your own sounds. You don’t know if it’s average, bad or what. Vincente told me the role of a musician is just to put it out there.’

Shifting forward

Louise is back in London and back in design, working as strategy director with Stuart Youngs at Studio Texture. Their clients, mainly in the not-for-profit sector, include Diabetes UK, Parkinson’s UK and the Royal Society of Arts.

‘In the last few years at BHF, I loved what strategists did,’ she says. ‘So when I got back from the US that’s what I tried to do.’ Stints as an independent with groups like Circus, The Team and Studio Texture confirmed her strategic abilities.

Louise’s life is balanced now between design and music. Both centre on creativity, but she draws a distinction. ‘Design is a commercial art. Music is being yourself,’ she says. ‘I’m doing music because I have no choice. I just want to be doing good music and perfecting my self-expression.’

ENDS