Lola Kirke and Greta Morgan Are No Saints

Lola Kirke is an actress (seen most recently in the movie Sinners), singer-songwriter, and the author of the book Wild West Village, a collection of essays about growing up in New York City; Greta Morgan is a singer-songwriter and the author of the memoir The Lost Voice, which chronicles her rediscovery of her creative voice after losing her ability to sing. To celebrate their respective releases, the two friends caught up about putting out such personal work in a new medium.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music 

Lola Kirke: What is your biggest fear about The Lost Voice coming out? 

Greta Morgan: My book is so vulnerable. When I sent the first draft to a trusted friend, I didn’t hear back for five days and I thought my skin was gonna peel off. The book is mostly about my relationship with my singing voice, but in order to tell that full story, I also tell the stories of my longest romantic relationship, share intimate details about my parents’ divorce, talk about the deaths of people I loved and share many shames and failures. I guess my biggest fear is, Am I showing all my gaping wounds?” What was your biggest fear about your book before it came out? 

Lola: Similar, I think. Also, because I write so much in Wild West Village about growing up in a specific kind of New York privilege, I feared it might be unrelatable. When I read your book, even though I haven’t lost my voice, I haven’t dealt with that kind of grief, I still totally related to your story. I was fearful people wouldn’t do that work of being able to relate to me. I’m super grateful that hasn’t been the case. 

Greta: A Jungian therapist friend recently said that once we dive deep enough into the personal, we hit the vein of archetypes and access the universal. So, yes, your upbringing was in a super specific microcosm of New York’s elite culture of artists. But there are stories of betrayal, of sisters being jealous of each other, of being valued for beauty when you want to be seen as more, of falling in love with a cowboy when you had promised your love to someone else — all of those are archetypal human experiences. 

Lola: That’s such a good way of putting it. My book has a lot of Grand Dames. The Martyr and the Saint. 

Greta: The Ingenue. The Harlot. The Cowboy Poet. 

Lola: When I gave my family my book to read, not everyone was thrilled. And I was on the phone with my agent crying. She thought it was wild that they were so upset. She said, “You know, Lola, you’re no saint in the book.” And I was like, “What? Well, no, no, no! I am obviously a saint!” 

Greta: [Laughs.] The poet Ellen Bass said that you can’t write a good poem and still be the hero of it by the end. I don’t think you can write a great memoir and be the saint of it. Unless you’re, like, Theresa of Avila. Nobody wants to read about a perfect person. 

Lola: I don’t even want to hang out with a saint. If I was at a party and a saint was there, I wouldn’t even talk to them. 

Greta: In my book, I wrote about parts of my life and psyche I’d rather shy away from. Like lying to the partner I loved to go off with this fancy rock star predator, or watching social media replays of myself singing at Madison Square Garden in bed at 3 AM after the show. Watching my own replays? It’s so vain. I could’ve written myself as some kind of stoic who doesn’t indulge in occasional ego-fluffing… But what actually happened is always more interesting. 

Lola: Your book has such a clear journey. There’s who you are in the beginning, then there’s this epic nomadic journey and this soul searching as you grapple with losing your voice, and then you arrive as a totally different version of yourself. It’s almost like seeing you reach a Nirvana state. But I wonder, have the lessons all actually stuck with you? Do those enlightenment moments stay with you? Do you ever forget the lessons you learned then? 

Greta: Oh, man, I learn and forget and relearn and forget the same lessons all the time. I wrote the book to help me avoid the same mistakes. And to remember how I climbed out of a rock bottom. 

Lola: Having known you before the book, with your full singing voice, and now, after the vocal loss, there is such a marked change in who you were before this and now after.
Greta: How would you describe the change? 

Lola: Well, do you want to tell our origin story, or should I? 

Greta: Let’s tell it together.
Lola: You were playing a song at a charity event in downtown LA in December of 2016. I had heard a lot about you and secretly was quite jealous because you were very beautiful and really good at music. 

Greta: What? Are you serious? You were jealous? I used to see you and your boyfriend around and you two were too cool to approach. You were this glamorous television star, and you two looked like you were right out of the 1960s Laurel Canyon. You were like the popular kids. 

Lola: Oh, my god, I’m so glad that that came across because that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. But yeah, I saw you and I had heard about you from our mutual friend, Erin. You had this great outfit on and great boots, so I came up and said, “I like your boots. And I like your leotard.” 

Greta: I said, “I love your haircut.” And we chatted, and then, once you walked away, my friend Nirvan said, “I think you should go ask for her phone number. I think this is how women become friends.” He said it as though he were watching a friendship mating dance in a David Attenborough documentary. 

Lola: Once we became good friends, you bought me the same pair of boots you were wearing. But they no longer fit because my feet have grown.
Greta: My feet have grown too! 

Lola: Why have your feet grown? 

Greta: I don’t know. But, alas, our feet are bigger. How else have we changed? 

Lola: When I first met you, you had blinders on. You were going to be the next Big Indie Female Singer. And you were already on track, whether it was gonna be with Vampire Weekend or your solo stuff. I came to your house once and you had a spreadsheet of all these songs to measure what was finished and what was unfinished. 

Greta: Oh, god, the spreadsheets. 

Lola: You were so organized. Anyway, I think both of us were seeking external validation. Even though The Lost Voice and Wild West Village are about wildly different subjects, and they deal with things in a very different way, both have the themes of having to overcome the desire for external validation. As young women in our industries, that’s how we were taught to be valuable in this world. But external validation is always going to elude you. Both of our books are about learning how to value yourself outside of that system. Both of our parents, in really different ways, put into our heads this thing that a lot of people in America’s parents put into their heads, which is just: you have to make something of yourself. If you don’t make something of yourself, then I don’t even know who you are. Instead of growing outwards in that way, you’ve been going inwards and going through a journey of becoming more real. I’ve loved seeing you relinquish the level of control and perfection you once had. 

Greta: Thanks. Man, that’s totally how it feels. You’ve changed so much since I met you. You were a grand actor when I met you. A true television star. I loved watching you on Mozart in the Jungle and think you’re a genius actor. Sometimes when actors become musicians, it comes off as a vanity project. But when you moved to Nashville and started writing country songs, I was like, “Oh, is this actually her first love?” It felt so natural. 

Lola: You and I both left LA in such extreme ways. 

Greta: Totally! You went to Nashville and reincarnated into a country songwriter living in Tennessee. And you’re this amazing domestic goddess now. When I visited you, I was shocked by the level of gourmet hospitality you offer as a Tennessean. All of a sudden you’re making apple pie from scratch and you’re roasting chickens like it’s nothing. There’s this gorgeous garden outside and the dog is running in the yard and there’s a view of the river. It felt like you moved into a completely different archetype and it also feels way more real. 

Lola: Yeah, and you left LA in 2020 and became The Nomad. The Wanderer. That was so epic to watch, but I will say, I’m so glad you’ve finally landed. I love how the slowness of your journey across the country is almost like from the 1800s. It’s like you were riding a wagon. 

Greta: Hilarious. You’re right. It took five years. I started in Los Angeles where I’d been living, spent a lot of time in Utah, went back to Chicago, Nashville, and now I officially settled in the Catskills in upstate New York. 

Lola: I thought we might get to keep you in Nashville. 

Greta: I missed the mountains too much. If the Smoky Mountains were directly outside Nashville, I could have stayed forever. But they’re too far. 

Lola: Yeah, I was hoping that you would, but I knew in my heart, you had to go somewhere else. 

Greta: When I first landed in Nashville, I thought Oh, Nashville, music city, even though my voice is fucked up, maybe I’ll start writing songs, I’ll pitch songs for other people. Instead, I wrote zero songs and spent every day learning how to write a book. I typed out Lucia Berlin short stories and read Paris Review interviews with my favorite writers. Jenny Lewis let me live in her house for free when she had that Nashville place. That was so generous of her. It gave me time to learn without being so stressed about money. 

Lola: Did you know that I started writing my book when I lived in Jenny’s house before you did? 

Greta: You’re fucking kidding me. 

Lola: God bless Jenny Lewis! 

Greta: God bless Jenny! 

Lola: One of the beautiful things about Nashville — and I don’t mean to sound like an asshole, but — truly, there’s something in the water. There is a creativity, whether you’re writing a song or in a different form… I can’t help but if I go walk alone in Nashville, on the Shelby Bottoms Trail, by the end of it I have, like, five song titles or a direction of something. There’s just something there that asks you to turn something unsaid into language. 

Greta: Totally. Even the grocery cashiers can sing like Patsy Cline. Everyone is walking around with music in their heads all day.

Lola: One of the other similarities between our books is how what we thought were burdens then eventually kinda became blessings. Like, I was so arrogant and being like, I’m an actress, so I can just be a musician as well. I really want to be taken seriously as a musician. How am I going to make that happen? Then, suddenly, the universe completely took away my acting career. Now, when I look at my music career, I’m like, I could never have had this if I had been an actress, if I had been working to the same degree that I had been before. And while there’s a part of me that misses acting a lot — and I think that this is another conclusion from your book that I have — I wouldn’t trade my life for the world. This is what I have gotten out of losing. What I’ve lost is profound to me. What you have gotten from what you have lost, what you have given in this book as a result of what you’ve lost… it shook me. I read The Lost Voice at a time where I was feeling a lot of lack in my life. Your book is secretly a self-help book. You don’t tell anyone else what to do, but you allow so much healing for others as you talk about the healing of yourself.  

Greta: Aw. I loved your book so much too. Your book reminded me of if Eve Babitz re-wrote The Royal Tenenbaums, but it was a country musical with your wit and sensitivity. If people could only read a couple essays from your book, what do you wish they’d read? 

Lola: “The Cowboy Problem” is an essay that I really love, which is about my experience going to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous and failing it because I was in love with someone else while I had a boyfriend. And then there’s one about a sex worker I love called “Heaven,” and another called “Blades of Grass.” What are the chapters that you wish people could read from your book if they only read a few? 

Greta: Chapter 3 is the coming-of-age one. I’m a Catholic high school singer who has just started my band, The Hush Sound, and am making my first big budget record. It was produced by Sean O’Keefe and Patrick Stump from Fall Out Boy, and it was a key moment in my relationship with my voice, because they kept telling me to sing in ways that didn’t feel natural to me. I internalized all those criticisms. I was a virgin, 17 years old, and my voice was as wispy and young as I felt then, but they kept telling me to sing like Fiona Apple. It was the first of hundreds of moments where someone tried to tell me to sing or look or act a certain way, especially men. So much of my professional life was a lesson in learning to gain my seniority back from people who I perceived to have more power, and to stop looking at myself through the eyes of men, trying to please them. 

Chapter 6 is my personal favorite chapter in the book. That’s the wilderness chapter. It has all the revelations of being in silence. Chapter 8 is where the biggest breakthroughs happen. That’s when I started writing on the page. 

Lola: How did you learn how to write? 

Greta: I’ve been a big time diarist since I was 12. Probably 500-1000 words a day, and I’m always looking for a revelation and trying to make myself laugh. I just found an entry from when I was 15 that began, “I’m having an awful day. I’m in religion class, but that’s not the only reason.” Even there, that small moment, I was making a joke with myself. In 2016, my friends Bianca Gaiever and Nirvan Mullick and I started a practice called Perfect Moments. We would each write down one emotionally resonant moment from our day in two-to-three sentences, then send it to the text chain. Keying in on resonant moments helped me identify emotional resonance in the way writers need to do.  

Many moments in my book are from the Perfect Moments journal. Passing Emmylou Harris in a hotel hallway. Singing at Madison Square Garden. Receiving my first vocal injection shot and seeing a tiny ruby of blood on my throat, and remembering that one of my first song lyrics with The Hush Sound had the lyric, “Who shot that arrow in your throat?” So many of the touring moments with Vampire Weekend and the funny moments on tour with Jenny Lewis. 

Lola: Are there ever terrible perfect moments? 

Greta: Yes! All the time! One that comes to mind was when my mom fell in the hallway and shattered her kneecap. She was howling in pain, still in shock, and she didn’t want me to call the ambulance because she still thought the pain might disappear. A few of the neighbors were doctors, so I said, “Should I call Dr. Greenberg? Dr. Sosenko?” While she was writhing in pain, she said, “Call the Ghostbusters.” I mean, cracking a joke at a time like that… That was a perfect moment. 

Lola: So much of learning how to write is learning how to notice.

Greta: How did you learn how to write? 

Lola: I’ve been fucking rattling off the same stories as at dinner parties for years. It was just a matter of time before I sat down and wrote them. And of course, I found different things in them, but people have always told me I’m a good storyteller, so I’m grateful for their encouragement.

Greta: The fact that you started your book off the basis of dinner stories reminds me of something George Saunders said. It was something like, “We should figure out how to be charming on the page in the same ways we’re charming in person.” You do that so well. 

Lola: You do too.  When people told me I was a good storyteller, I thought maybe they were just trying to get me to shut up because I talked a lot. When I first started writing, I was really afraid of doing it. 

Greta: Why? 

Lola: I was afraid of writing the same way that I was afraid of music at first. I didn’t think I was good at it. I enjoyed it so much. I mean, you know, there were books that completely changed my life, and I loved the experience of reading and the intimacy of it. But I’d always been told I was a bad student. I didn’t know grammar. The only thing that I was good at growing up was acting. And beyond memorizing lines, there’s only a craft to acting if you want there to be. You know what I mean? It’s not like playing the piano, where there are technical things you have to fucking know how to do to do it. It’s a tangible skill. Most people just have an instinct for it. Maybe I was a good actress because I was a good storyteller, or maybe I’m a good storyteller because I was an actress — or am an actress. 

Learning how to edit myself has been incredible. Where I ended up as a writer is so different from where I started. But it did feel like a risk to try something knowing I definitely wasn’t gonna be an expert. 

Greta: What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a creative practice, but they’re really scared to be bad at it? 

Lola: My advice is: Who cares? Who cares if you’re bad? 

Greta: Right. Nobody’s watching you. Nobody is keeping track of whether or not you are a genius at macramé. 

Lola: Yeah, just go for it. Don’t be a fucking pussy… and I mean that in the most loving way. Lately I’ve been thinking that life is too sad to not make jokes. I was reading an interview with this actress, Molly Gordon — she said that, and I was like, You’re so fucking right. She’s also a fellow Jewish person, and that is very much a part of the tradition of being a Jewish person as well, finding intense light in intense darkness. But also, life can be incredibly ugly, so we have to find the beauty of it. And I think to engage in a creative practice, whether you’re making macramé, or singing songs or telling stories, is to add to the beauty of this world. And that is not a fucking selfish project. Something I feel as I’m getting older is that, I always kind of resented my mom for the emphasis that she had on beauty, because I saw how that could really backfire and create a lot of ugliness. But now I realize that is such a well-intentioned thing. To want to be surrounded by beauty, and to want to bring beauty into this world, is really fucking cool and special. 

Greta: Maybe the wish would be to broaden the spectrum of what is beautiful. 

Lola: Well, it’s your mom saying “Call Ghostbusters!” 

Greta: Yeah, right. Life is too painful. You have to make a joke. 

(Photo Credit: left, Cristina Fisher; right, Sarah West)