How Laci Kaye Booth survived Nashville to make a killer country album

LOS ANGELES — Laci Kaye Booth clearly recalls the career path she'd envisioned in her head.

After finishing in fourth place on "American Idol" in 2019, the smoky-voiced country singer from small-town Texas promptly moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a record deal — then landed one just months later when she signed with Big Machine, the label known for having introduced music's biggest star to the world.

"I was hoping I'd get a song on the radio," she says of her ambitions at the time, "and I'd become the next Taylor Swift."

That's not the way it worked out.

Booth's arrangement with Big Machine, she says today, turned out to be "one of those nightmare record deals where they just choose everything for you." The label, according to Booth, told her what to sing and how to dress; she made a somewhat generic eight-track mini-album in 2021 that "didn't even feel like me," she says. Though it featured input by proven Nashville hitmakers including Dann Huff, Nathan Chapman and Lady A's Charles Kelley, the self-titled record sank without much of a trace, and the next year Booth was dropped by Big Machine.

"My manager at the time called me and told me she was coming over, and I knew before she even walked in," the singer says. "I just had that intuition."

Now Booth, 28, is having a second go with "The Loneliest Girl in the World," a striking LP released last week by Geffen Records on which she takes up a darker, deeper sound and a more personal storytelling approach. Positioned somewhere between Megan Moroney and Lana Del Rey, the music finally captures "my true self," Booth says, "and what I really want to say and do creatively." It's also primed for discovery at a moment when country music is more open to new fans — and new voices — than it's been in years.

The album opens (after a spooky instrumental intro) with the sly but haunting "Cigarettes," which digs into a pair of formative episodes in Booth's life: leaving home as a teenager to be with a guy against her mom's wishes — "I was all of 17, going bad-boy crazy," she sings over a gently throbbing guitar riff — and encountering the harsh realities of the music business after her stint on "American Idol."

"Had to watch my dream fall through/ I gave myself a day or two," she sings, "The same Champagne that they bought me/ I popped it when they dropped me."

That really happened, Booth notes with a laugh during a visit to Los Angeles ahead of last month's Stagecoach Festival. Big Machine gave her a bottle of bubbly when she signed her deal, which she held off on opening "because I wanted to wait until a moment to celebrate," she says. And getting dropped seemed to qualify? "I felt like a failure, yeah, but it was kind of a celebration of a new chapter — like, I don't have to be this person anymore." She smiles.

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