I think it might be the best song I ever wrote," Kip Loui tells me. That's quite a claim from a songwriting lifer who will turn 60 this year and has been copiously tunesmithing since high school.
He's speaking about "Cold Out There," the title track from his new album, which he considers his first-ever honest-to-goodness solo record. Cold Out There has been a long time coming from a guy who has been bedrock-deep in the St. Louis music scene for decades, with all the classic local bonafides — Vintage Vinyl clerk, KDHX host, Uncle Tupelo associate, Twangfest co-founder and leader of a half-dozen great St. Louis bands.
The new album's liner notes are a who's who of St. Louis country-rock — Brian Henneman, Eric Ambel, John Horton, Mark Ortmann, David Torretta, Kevin Buckley, Mark Spencer, Jesse Irwin, Brad Sarno and others — and the album is filled with the kind of sturdy, amiable country-rock tunes that Loui has long been known for.
This time out, though, Loui ended up experimenting with a new songwriting approach: writing from the first-person perspective of fictional characters.
"I like the idea of exploring songs through the eyes of different characters like a novelist does," Loui says. "It allows me to express certain thoughts and ideas that aren't necessarily mine."
Those characters in Cold Out There include a widower, a young child, a lonely school teacher, an elderly crystal salesman, an alcoholic writer, a brothel owner and more. Loui says all of them have helped him find a new groove in storytelling. "If I'm just writing from my perspective, that is so limiting," he says. "I can imagine myself in different time periods and in the shoes of different characters, and as long as I do so thoughtfully and hopefully intelligently and with sensitivity, I think that's a completely valid artistic choice."
The songs all take inspiration from disparate sources. Take the lead track, "ADHD," a slinky rocker inspired by Loui's day job as a special education teacher. "I Don't Drink It For the Taste," with nifty guitar work from Henneman, was sparked by Nic Cage's character from Leaving Las Vegas. "Douglas County," featuring Buckley's drowsy fiddle lines, is based on a roadside peddler Loui encountered selling rocks and minerals in the Ozarks.
"I watched him interact with customers, explaining these crystals to kids," he says. "He seemed lonely to me. I made up the rest."
The aforementioned "Cold Out There" is inspired by Suzy's, a brothel that plays a minor part in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Loui describes the song as "a conversation that Suzy is having with one of the ranch hands. She's selling the idea of family and community, but it's really all just transactional." Despite the song's gentle-sounding refrain, he insists that it's a brutal song.
"I'm really hoping Bonnie Raitt covers it," he says, and indeed, it's easy to hear a singer like Raitt inhabiting the song.
As much imagination as Loui used to create these character sketches, he's also in each song somewhere. "I try to take the personal and make it universal," he says. Take the album's closing song, "More," which is "probably me having a dark night of the soul moment." And "Only Child" is told through the eyes of Loui's young son, Max, whom Loui and his wife, J.J., a musician who sings harmonies on the album, are raising in Crestwood.
Loui is far from an only child. He's the youngest of six, raised in Webster Groves by his mother, Shirley, a Washington University composition professor, and his father, Wayne, an award-winning theater director and Saint Louis University professor. Both died two years ago from COVID-19 within 10 days after an outbreak in their retirement home. "They were beautiful people," Loui says. "Just lovely, wonderful people."
Such a statement is typical of Loui, who at 59 still has a youthful, flop-haired Muppet quality. "I was obscenely good-natured," Loui says. "I had no interest in drugs or alcohol." What did interest him was his older siblings' record collections and the cheap acoustic guitars laying around the house.
By 17, he had fallen hard for the Beatles and started experimenting with writing his own songs. "I spent most of the '80s desperately wishing it was the '60s," he says. "I really wanted to go back in time and live as a mod."
His twenties were spent playing in coffee shops, earning a degree in communications from Saint Louis University and working in record stores — Streetside Records, Vintage Vinyl and Euclid Records. "I would judge everyone's souls by what kind of music they liked," he says, joking about the music-snob stereotype of record-store clerks.
By then accumulating a pile of original songs, Loui formed his first band, the Heebee Jeebies, a punky power-pop outfit that became a mainstay on the late-'80s circuit, playing the old Cicero's basement bar, Off Broadway and the Hi-Pointe.
Around this time, Loui developed an interest in country music, a genre that he is now probably best known for. "The irony and hilarious part of all of this was that I hated country music growing up," Loui says. "I had city-people prejudice against it. I thought it was just for uneducated bumpkins." He changed his mind after listening to Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
One day in the record store, he threw on a Hank Williams record. "That was an epiphany," he says. "The imagery and the songwriting and the simplicity and the archetypal-ness of it — it hit me to the core. That was the day I got over my apprehension of country music and started immersing myself in Ray Price, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, George Jones ..."
Loui started hanging out with a couple of rock-band kids from Belleville named Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, attending their gigs, showing up at rehearsals and sharing mixtapes. "Everybody knew Uncle Tupelo were going to go far," Loui says. "I would loan Jay my guitar a lot because it had a pickup in it. I would mail out demos on their behalf trying to get them a record deal." Loui's name would later show up in the liner notes for the reissue of Uncle Tupelo's No Depression album as an early manager of the band.
That put Loui at the tip of the spear of the '90s alt-country movement. He hosted The Back Country on KDHX, curated and produced a St. Louis roots-rock tribute to Chuck Berry, co-founded Twangfest and served as president of the nonprofit that ran the festival for 10 years.
But he never stopped writing and singing his own songs, playing in country-rock band Belle Starr and the Rockhouse Ramblers, a classic-country cover band that ended up recording two original albums.
"At the end of the day, that's primarily what I am," Loui says. "I'm a songwriter who sings a little bit and strums an acoustic guitar."
Loui returned to a more rocking sound in the '00s with the Transmitters, releasing two more albums, and he and Henneman formed Diesel Island, a traditional country-cover collective that is now coming up on 20 years together.
Over the last few years, while settling into the family life, Loui has released songs recorded with his wife J.J. on The Hill Recordings (2016) and Show Me State (2020), and today he remains as committed as ever to his craft and in his belief in his songs.
When asked how long he plans to keep writing songs, he answers quickly.
"Forever," he says. "It's what I do."
Subscribe to Riverfront Times newsletters. Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
