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| Lindi Ortega (Source: facebook.com/lindiortegafans) |
Lindi Ortega's new, 10-song album "Faded Gloryville" landed her on the pages of the Nashville Scene this week. With the Scene describing Ortega's "warbling throwback vocals" as being supported by "some of the hottest producers in roots music," the talent and the art are clearly alive. Interestingly, the article points out that the title track is a funeral march, which makes sense in the context of a career that the Scene calls, "DIY country noir."
Ortega, who is half-Mexican by way of her father, has brought the somber topic of death to her music partly through her fascination with the holiday Día de los Muertos. From her official web site:
Through the works of Frida Kahlo, Lindi found an appreciation for Dia De Los Muertos, the Mexican Celebration of the dead. As a graduate in Philosophy from the University of Toronto, Lindi has always been fascinated with the idea of death and found irony in the Mexican depiction of Skeletons dressed up and almost cartoon-like during a day where the dead were celebrated. Suddenly death did not seem so morbid... It began to take on a certain whimsy. Lindi believes that both life and death could stand to be a little more whimsical.In an interview with American Songwriter, Ortega sees this mix of the morbid and the celebratory even in classic country music:
Maybe that’s the reason I like Johnny Cash songs so much. “Folsom Prison Blues” has one of the most crushing lyrics of all time – “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” – but it’s set to this jovial, happy, clip-cloppy beat. If you took away the lyrics and just listened to the music, you’d think it was a different kind of song. So it’s the light and the dark, the ups and the downs, that I’m most attracted to.”Ortega is a native of Toronto and currently lives in Nashville.
