Nashville, being a music industry city, draws a lot of talent, even from Memphis. Yet there often comes a moment of reckoning for that talent, when everything that makes an artist unique collides with all the factors that make the industry an industry — the assembly line, if you will. That, at least, was the trajectory of Memphis-born Cyrena Wages, a singer/songwriter equipped with such a rich, soulful alto that Nashville called out to her for most of the 2010s. There, her duo with her brother Houston, the Lost Wages, was courted by producers who’d worked with the likes of Frankie Ballard and Dolly Parton, leading to some of her first recording sessions. And that, in turn, was where it all went wrong.
Whatever was created in those sessions just didn’t feel like her. Somehow, she felt she “hadn’t even started,” she says. “The stories that had lived in my mind since I was a little girl hadn’t even come to the surface yet.” Part of the problem, she realized, was personal: She needed to confront the young girl she had been to find her true, mature voice. “For whatever reason, some kids, often young women, absorb so many external narratives that our own essence and truth just gets totally washed away. That was me, and I lived in that checked-out space from age 9 until about 26.”
For Wages, the key to not being checked-out was coming home to “the country backroads between Millington and Shelby Forest” where she grew up. Here, she could have the space to develop her vision. And now this Friday, years after she returned to those backroads, that vision is coming into fruition with the release of her debut album, Vanity Project.
Produced and mixed by Matt Ross-Spang at his Southern Grooves studio, the album has some of the rootsy, vintage elements of his previous acclaimed work with Margo Price or St. Paul & the Broken Bones, yet with more of the contemporary pop instincts once championed by one of Wages’ heroes, Amy Winehouse. Most of all, the sounds jump out of the speakers with the grit of a real band.
That includes not only Ross-Spang himself but guitarist and songwriting collaborator Joe Restivo, whose experience with groups like the City Champs and the Bo-Keys brings a subtly cosmopolitan touch to the arrangements. Other A-list players from Memphis, including keyboardist Pat Fusco, bassist Landon Moore, and drummers Danny Banks, Ken Coomer, and Shawn Zorn, bring some heavy vibes and grooves. It’s abundantly clear this was not created “in the box” of a computer screen. This album has soul.
Yet the real soul arises out of Wages’ liquid vocals and the very personal lyrics she has penned. There’s no small irony in the album’s title, as these songs confront her struggles with her own self-image and the double-edged sword of physical beauty. Having grown up competing on the Tennessee beauty pageant circuit, she was immersed in the mix of acclaim, cruelty, and infantilization that such a world cultivates.
“I’ll die in therapy over it,” Wages says of those years, laughing. “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. … I subconsciously internalized that whole dynamic and it was in the driver’s seat for a lot of my life. I either bullied myself for not being ‘whatever’ enough, or I’ve been dismissed as ‘whatever’ — and not the smart one, not the creative one, not the artistically capable one.”
Living through all of that, and staring it in the face, lends the album its hard-won wisdom. “Am I a mess or a work of art?” she sings on “Back to the City.”
“In my darkness I ruminate/I wonder if a lover will ever stay with my heavy heart/But the morning sun whispered, ‘You’re the most beautiful girl in the world when you fall apart’/My soul has lines on her face, I am much older than my time/But I’m comin’ up from the reverie and out of the corners of my mind/And I’m going back to the city/I’m going back to the old me/I got a new pair of dancing shoes and damn I feel pretty.”
Such insights into her own life, Wages suggests, couldn’t have come if she was still chasing the brass ring of music industry approval. That could only come from the back roads. “Memphis is part of the tapestry of my soul,” she says. “There’s something different about this place. It’s honest and … heavy. It’s where I can connect to the source, you know? It provided me enough openness to find myself, my real autonomous self, outside of all the voices. That was something I’d never done before. It’s like I had been asleep since I was five years old and then woke up and said, ‘Where have I been? What the hell happened to me?’”
Cyrena Wages and band will celebrate the release of Vanity Project at Bar Ware on Thursday, May 30th.
