Who is Lera Lynn, the singer from True Detective Season 2?
For someone who sings “My Least Favorite Life,” Lera Lynn’s life is actually going pretty well these days! Leading up to the premiere of the second season of True Detective, we knew the 31-year-old folk singer (and the singer from True Detective Season 2) was behind the show’s theme song. Now we know she also has a role in the actual show as a gloomy artist at the world’s most depressing bar.
“I am definitely not playing myself! I would like that to be widely known,” she told Vulture this weekend. “You can’t see it, but they did give me track marks for every shoot. Makeup, dark circles, yellow teeth, cracked lips. They put oil in my hair. The whole nine yards.”
Another difference? In real life, Lera Lynn is much more successful than her bar-playing character. She currently has three records to her name — 2012’s Have You Met Lera Lynn? and 2014’s Lying in the Sun and The Avenues.
She worked on the last album with T Bone Burnett, the man behind the music on True Detective‘s first season, as well as The Big Lebowski, Crazy Heart, and much more. For it, Lera Lynn said she dug a bit deeper into her own “difficult family life” with the songs “Letters” and “Leave It Up To Me.”
She again collaborated with T Bone — as well as Rosanne Cash — for True Detective. That process involved them getting unusual prompts from Nic Pizzolatto.
“For instance, ‘My Least Favorite Life,’ the cue was that Nic wanted a song about a lover who dies and comes back as a crow,” she told Music Times of the song featured in the first episode, which was co-written by Rosanne and T Bone. “I think Nic’s so creative and he has such an interesting perspective. Anything that you can write to his cues I think is going to be interesting, but Roseanne just was able to capture such a sad, sad tone. Beautiful. Really beautiful.”
Although we don’t know whether Lera Lynn’s character will pop up again on the show, the real-life singer has a busy summer ahead, with a nationwide tour kicking off this Friday. For more about her and information on where to see her live, visit her website.
