Working at our arts & culture desk, there are lots of unsolicited emails from new music artists about their latest project. Within the messages there is a best-case, white-whale scenario: hit play and immediately realize this is something special. Which is exactly what happened when the members of Quad Cities based Lady Igraine sent me some tracks from their debut LP, Unum. It was about 20 seconds into album opener “Tempest,” when I asked myself some variation of, “What the shit is this?” That reaction continued throughout the rest of the opus of a single, of which our music reviewer said was “…over six minutes of pure guitar-rock alchemy, powering on a fuzzy and electric sonic realm somewhere between glam metal and psychedelic rock.” By the time the tune concluded, with a finishing coda cut short right before the expected sustained note, I was hooked.
Fast forward a few weeks later and I had the opportunity to chat with Lady Igraine members John Sorensen, Clay Knutson and Graham Silas over video-chat. We talked about their recording process with Luke Tweedy of Flat Back Studios (“Luke’s stone cold.”) the wide swaths of artists across the world, both musical and not, that inspire them (Masayoshi Takanaka, Mdou Moctar and Andy Warhol to name a few) and why the band feels like their current trajectory feels like a redemption arc.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
I can imagine this buildup and work for this first project (Unum officially released in early January of 2025) and it feeling like a release, especially with the catharsis of being able to perform it. How does it feel to be on the other side of that? Any takeaways from this first leg of post-album completion?
Silas: I feel like there’s at least a few perspectives to have on it. There’s one, on the level of the catharsis that you talk of. We’ve been working on that album for — almost a year and a half. We put so much into it, and there’s this sort of magic of the writing process, that creative freedom and musical conversation, where it’s very free flowing and exciting. Then you get into this, I don’t want to say robotic, but almost robotic. Like, “Here are the parts. It’s mapped out. We are going to track this. This is going to be a great product and representative of what we worked for.” There is this sense of, “Yes, it’s out now, we get to play it and here’s this polished thing.” Then there’s also this eagerness to get back to the excitement [of writing], for any creative there’s an eagerness to get back to that. But then also this feeling of, “We need to do this piece of work justice and give it the time and space for it to breathe and for us to breathe with it.” It’s a balance between those ideas. It’s amazing that it’s out, it’s a relief and it’s exciting in its own right. But I feel like we’re also geared towards, “OK, what’s next, without rushing this process?”
I can relate to that in a lot of ways. As a writer there’s lots of similarities with the whole idea of wanting new people to experience it and wanting new fans. But then there’s this time elapse that happens. It’s been a month since it came out. Now it’s a year. Maybe it’s five years from now, and somebody might be listening to the album for the first time and you got to give them that space too, right? To appreciate it?
Sorenson: I do have to make an amendment on the timeline, because we met in October of 2023, and we were in the studio in April. So that was actually only six months from meeting to being in our first studio session, which doesn’t feel like it could be that fast but it really was. So yeah, we’ve been together for a year and a half. It’s been a whirlwind, for sure, but hopefully we’re playing the songs with the same kind of energy and excitement, even if it is five years from now. That’s a nice thing, now it’s muscle memory. There’s not much thinking involved, it’s more feeling. More getting to live and breathe it on stage, as opposed to having to think so much. That’s been pretty freeing.
So you’re working on the album and in April you get with Luke Tweedy to record at Flat Back Studios in Lone Tree. I read an Instagram post where you thank Luke for getting the band through the emotional challenges of recording. What was that process like, and what were some of those emotional crossroads that he helped you through?
Knutson: Luke is a hard read. You get in there and you want to see how he feels about it and get some feedback from him, but he’s more locked down. Like, “You need to stay in your corner and figure it out and I’ll get back to you after the fact.” But recording was kind of surreal. Hearing these songs we’ve been playing in our practice area come to life. Even just being able to hear all the individual parts come together was something I’ve never really experienced. I don’t think I’ve ever really, actually recorded in a studio before quite like that.
Maybe this is a bad analogy, but is it like hearing your voice recorded back in a way?
Knutson: And having that pressure of Luke sitting there listening to me, and just me. Warts and all. Also putting the lyrics out there, not knowing what anybody’s thinking and trying to stick to your guns with what you’ve written. Not, “Did they like the way that sounded? Or do I need to change this lyric up because of their reaction to it?”
Sorenson
Luke’s stone cold. He’s really good at not getting too high or too low. He does offer words of encouragement sometimes. But also, he’s not too involved in the process, like Clay said, he lets us breathe and have fun with it and experiment a little bit. When we do have those moments where we have to run it a couple times he doesn’t show frustration. Even when we’re struggling, he doesn’t exasperate that. He is actually a very calming presence in the studio, whether it’s high or low. So that was nice.
Silas: These emotional hurdles, difficulties and trials really sprouted from it being our first experience as a band in the studio. More than anything, I think Luke recognized that the real solution to handling these emotional hurdles were within the band itself. So more than anything, he set up this safe, comfortable environment where we can handle these things internally, whatever they may be. Whether that’s just how he is — stone cold, hard to read, or if he knows that that is helpful to the process as a whole, I think it’s a multi-purpose move on his part. Very supportive in as few words as possible. It was a great experience.
I like that we have a pretty eclectic palette to pull from, which is rare. I’ve been in a lot of projects, and now being with these guys, I never really realized how important aligning what you like musically helps a lot.
John Sorensen
Who would you say are some musical influences for the album? It’s such an amalgamation of all these different genres like Prog and Math Rock. But there’s grooves in there too. What are some influences that have you saying, “We’re carrying this tradition of these people who influenced us within this music.”
Knutson: Honestly, in one song there’ll be so many different parts that I took from this person. Like in “Tempest,” we have the opening riff, and that was off the cuff a Desert, Tuareg Blues style thing. Like Mdou Moctar, who is just a guitar hero. It was wanting to pay homage to something like that. Then take a heavier section where there’s a guitar harmony that pays tribute to 70s hard rock, Black Sabbath type. Then maybe the verse sections will be a little more geared towards Southern folk rock. So in any one song, it’s playing with puzzle pieces of everything that I grew up with and enjoyed. I think anybody can listen to these songs and have a part in it, where it calls back to something for them. Not everybody’s gonna catch the same section of a song but they’ll all have a particular connection to it.
Silas: Even from the beginning of picking the cover art for our album. It was, like, “What is our style? Where are we going with this?” It was this idea of a modern take on something nostalgic. These sort-of callbacks that you’re talking about are these classic ideas that work for a reason. Music being the process of reproducing ideas. That is that stream of creativity. Of these, “classics for a reason” and us adding our own spin to it doesn’t change what already exists. It sets up this platform of, “We love this, here’s how we love it.”
Sorenson: We all have a pretty wide range of music tastes. That’s a big contributing factor. I grew up on Zeppelin and Nirvana. The basics, a lot of the classics, but I got into Motown and Turkish funk and grooves from all over the world. All of us have a little bit of that in us. In this next album, we’ve got a song that has Bossa Nova influences, some stuff that’s a little more sultry. There’s some different flavors. I like that we have a pretty eclectic palette to pull from, which is rare. I’ve been in a lot of projects, and now being with these guys, I never really realized how important aligning what you like musically helps a lot, especially if it’s pulling from all over the world.
And the follow-up: do you think there are any influences that might be more surprising for a listener? Let’s say your average listener will listen and be like, “Oh yeah, here’s some Sabbath or Zeppelin.” But here’s another thing that influenced this that I wouldn’t have thought of.
Silas: Frank Zappa. Maybe it’s more surface level. But in the writing process, there’s a way to write a song in a “square” way: Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. But we have these moments of pause where we’re like, “That actually felt like it should be three instead of four. Or did that feel like that could go with one more? Let’s play that and see how it feels.” Metric modulation too. In the last third of “Heed the Call” we’re just taking eighth notes out of the arrangement for no reason other than that would feel more accurate to where we feel this. So Frank Zappa more in an arrangement sense, less than the musicality. I don’t know why this popped up, but Andy Warhol saying, “Art is just getting away with it.” In “Barnstorm” where it’s that really recognizable Americana section, and then it goes to this other section where I have an octaver on, we’re going to a funk beat, that feels right, let’s do it and get away with it.
Knutson: I agree with the Zappa thing. It’s that non linear song writing style of, “Let’s not try to go back to the same spot and do the same thing again. If we are, let’s change it. Let’s do something different so that there’s constantly something new happening.” So I like that comparison. I think one of my modern influences, I just pointed this out the other day, because I went back and did a listen to this song by the jam band Goose called “So Ready.” For a while that was on repeat, several years ago, and then after listening to “Flame in the Wind,” I was like, “Whoa, okay. Maybe that’s where that was born?”
Another thing would be smaller folk artists from the British folk scene. I took a lot of inspiration from the musician, John Martyn. He messes around in a lot of open tunings, a lot of unusual acoustic style stuff. He would take an acoustic guitar and plug it into this tape delay machine. He’d open for Pink Floyd and he would just turn all these knobs on this tape delay machine and play the acoustic guitar and have a psychedelic experience. I was like, I’m gonna get a pickup for an acoustic guitar and come to this first jam session. A delay pedal and distortion pedal, and I’m going to run it through an acoustic guitar. We’ll see what I can do with that.
Sorenson: It sounded so gnarly. I was like, how are you getting such a gnarly sound out of a fucking acoustic guitar? [laughs] I also got to say one thing with Clay’s influences, like he was saying open tunings. I think there’s probably at least three, if not four or five different tunings on the record. I saw a comment from someone who came to our record release show, and she was like, “The guitar player had like four or five different guitars!” But I think she thought it was just because he likes guitars, which, of course he does. But that adds something that maybe you won’t pick up on consciously, but on a subconscious, frequency level. Hearing new tunings that you don’t hear every day perks the ear up and in a certain way.
Knutson: It opens me up too. Sometimes I get blocked when I’m in a standard. It’s like, I’ve been here before and nothing’s really working for me right now. So I need to take some time away from a standard tuning. And where’s somewhere I haven’t gone before? How can I unlock the fretboard in a way I’m not comfortable with.
That speaks so much to this idea of exploration. Being open to that exploration and finding creativity through the music journey. I know it’s easy to bash popular music, like yeah here are these tunings and chord progressions that you hear all the time, because that’s what gets into people’s ears. But still, it’s really refreshing to hear you say things like “We’re gonna mess around with all these weird tunings…because it’s fun. Because it challenges us.”
Knutson: I mean, I would much rather just have the one guitar to worry about. [laughs] You’re traveling with all these different guitars. Then you got to tune every one and then when you get to the song, you got to re-tune it again. It’s just all…but it’s fine, you know, I won’t have it any other way.
Silas: We’re gonna start a GoFundMe for a DigiTech pedal that can just automatically tune whatever guitar Clay’s playing. [laughs]
Taking the genre spanning nature of the album and the heavy Arthurian literary themes, what’s your take on “the concept album?” Would a Lady Igraine concept album ever be on the table?
Knutson: I actually brought this up not too long ago. I love storytelling and continuous threads that you can go down. I mean, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, stuff like that. I love movie soundtracks. Even in our individual songs I’ll try to pull from, like a 70s cop movie and try to paint that picture in a song. A concept album can be accessible to average listeners, so I definitely think it’s in the realm of possibility. We need to come up with a story that’s worth being told. Even this first album has a lot of continuous elements between songs, definitely similar themes.
Sorenson: I feel like it turned into a little bit of a concept album, just kind of organically. It did seem to have this cohesion that felt a little bigger than us, you know.
Silas: We created it really organically. This close proximity to it being a concept album is just a byproduct of the organic writing process, where we’re on this wavelength or on this level. There’s this inherent thread that ties these songs together. But if the intention were to create a pure concept album — we’re still finding what our sound is. Where do our voices intersect and then how do we optimize that product? We were talking about this process for album two, where it’s maybe a little bit all over, but that’s how we’re viewing it from the outside in. When we’re sitting down and writing we are directly inspired by each other, and again, from that wavelength. We’re in that discovery process and I’m not really rushing to leave it. I think it’s fun, you know? It’d be cool to do some 80s Japanese fusion concept album like Masayoshi Takanaka. I’d love that.
…it’s just like crash landing into something beautiful. It’s accessible from a human experience standpoint, as cringe as that term is, we’re all people. We all have the human experience. So then here’s our interpretation of what the fuck just happened.
Graham Silas
One thing I would add, I think this is all coming from a place of a redemption arc. The music that we write is really a reference point of the past and of the future, meaning that everything that’s happened up to this point is something that we welcome and embrace. We don’t wish to shut the door on the past, or things that maybe weren’t desirable, or things that were really difficult. We’re at this point where we create something and realize that nothing is ever for nothing. Even if that’s not immediately apparent, then working to get to that point. This is just a vantage point to look at everything that’s happened up to now and welcome the uncertainty. You play the hand that you’re dealt, and the way that this group all came to be — I’m not a God fearing individual, but there were definitely some god moments where you have those feelings of a hunch, of that natural gravity, and then getting to this point where it’s just like crash landing into something beautiful. It’s accessible from a human experience standpoint, as cringe as that term is, we’re all people. We all have the human experience. So then here’s our interpretation of what the fuck just happened. It’s crazy getting to this point, nobody’s drawn X’s and O’s on a whiteboard for this.
Sorenson: I think that’s eloquently put. Definitely a fated origin we have. It’s been a journey and based on the reviews, maybe that journey was reflected and hopefully people want to come along.
Knutson: It’s just getting started. There’s plenty of room around the table, people.
