Laci Kaye Booth

www.lacikayebooth.com/

Singer/songwriter Laci Kaye Booth has a gift for mining beauty from moments of deep sadness. As a little girl growing up in a trailer park in East Texas, she first began penning her own soul-baring songs after taking up guitar at age nine, then set off on a self-driven career that included both immense triumphs and tremendous setbacks. Newly signed to Geffen Records, the Nashville-based artist now steps into a bold new chapter with The Loneliest Girl in the World—an album that finds her taking complete creative control for the very first time, arriving at a body of work that strikes a rare balance of raw emotional realism and bittersweet romanticism.

“For a long time I was afraid of how many sad-girl songs I was writing,” says Booth, who names Stevie Nicks and Merle Haggard among her main inspirations. “But then I thought about the artists I love most and all the sad songs they’ve written, and how much those songs have helped me process my own emotions. There’s a lot of lonesome on my new album, but I think it tells the truth about what it’s like to be a girl in her 20s, trying to figure life out.”

Raised in the small town of Livingston, Booth was born into a long line of country musicians that dates all the way back to her great-great-grandfather, who played in a Texas swing band called the Polk County Ramblers. But while she learned to play guitar from her father (also a country singer), Booth considers her mother an essential influence on her path as an artist. “My parents were 15 and 17 when they had me, and I always had a really strong relationship with my mom—she bought me my first guitar and always encouraged me to sing, even though I was so shy about it,” she reveals. After performing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” onstage at a family jubilee when she was eight, Booth began to shake off the shyness and picked up the guitar. “My dad showed me three chords and I started teaching myself after that, and pretty soon I was writing little songs on my bedroom floor,” she says. “They were so silly, but they were definitely sad-girl songs even back then.”

In her school years Booth sang in a regional choir, taught guitar lessons, and played gigs wherever she could find them (including, at one point, a Christmas party at a tanning salon). While studying biology at Sam Houston State University, she played restaurants and bars every weekend to earn the gas money for her commute between campus and home, then received a life-changing opportunity her senior year. “I was 30 hours away from my degree when American Idol reached out and asked me to audition,” recalls Booth, who eventually dropped out of school and made it to the top five on the show’s 17th season. Although Idol led to her signing to Big Machine Label Group, the company dropped Booth in 2022—a turn of events she now sees as a blessing in disguise. “Right after I got dropped I called [songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist] Ben West and asked if he wanted to make a record with me,” says Booth, who first met West upon moving to Nashville in 2019. “We started working together, and it was so powerful to make something that felt authentic instead of trying to be what I’m not. I remember thinking, ‘This is who I wanted to be all along.’”

Produced by West (who’s also worked with the likes of Stephen Wilson Jr, Patrick Droney, Lori McKenna, and Parker McCollum), The Loneliest Girl in the World unfolds in an earthy yet ethereal sound that Booth originally conceived as “dreamy country”—a fitting backdrop to her lived-in reflections on lost love and shattered hopes and the thrill of following your heart, even when it leads you astray. On lead single “Cigarettes,” she presents a gritty and gorgeously detailed account of her life story, adorning that confession with gauzy textures and soaring strings (from the opening lines: “I was all of 17/Going bad-boy crazy/Podunk county beauty queen/And not your auburn-headed baby/You kicked me out, I packed my bags/Hair dyed dollar-store jet-black/You played ‘Jesus, Take The Wheel’/Every day till I came back”). “True Love” brings a spellbinding melody and tender acoustic-guitar work to Booth’s finespun tale of longing for an ex, while the cathartic “I Let Him Love Me” captures the glory in moving on from a toxic situationship. And on the album’s title track, Booth builds a brilliant tension between her painfully candid lyrics and the song’s radiant sound (including bright hand percussion, effervescent gang vocals, and a majestic guitar solo). “I’d just gotten out of a five-year relationship when I came up with ‘The Loneliest Girl in the World,’ and I wanted to write about how it’s okay to drink a whole bottle of sauv blanc and take up a king-size bed to yourself and fall asleep with the TV on,” she says. “It’s okay to feel lonely sometimes.”

To access the unbridled truth of her songwriting, Booth tends to start songs on her own, often late at night on her balcony with her guitar and a notebook full of poems. “Making this album  taught me that as long as I have that raw honesty in my writing, I’m going to come up with something I love,” she says. “It always blows my mind when I share a song that feels almost too honest and then I get comments like, ‘How’d you get inside my brain?’ I just want to keep being myself no matter what, so that hopefully my music can bring people into a world where they feel safe and less alone.”