Hot New Joint: "My Least Favorite Life" by Lera Lynn

I really want to hang out in the sad bar that Vince Vaughn and Colin Ferrell conduct all their tenuous, secretive meetings in on “True Detective” season two. It’s dark and it never seems like anyone is around; the food is probably good and greasy, and I bet the booze is cheap.

And, above all else, you’ve got Lera Lynn alone on stage, strumming a heavily tremoloed guitar, singing sad songs that set the mood all too well.

So who is this lucky woman, plucked from singer/songwriter obscurity and paired with T-Bone Burnett to produce such somber, haunting, spectral songs for the soundtrack to “True Detective”?

Lynn has three albums to her name thus far, beginning with 2011’s Have You Met Lera Lynn, and her most recent being last year’s The Avenues. The soundtrack to “True Detective” season two arrives in August, presumably after the season has concluded, and selections from the album have been slowly released each week in the iTunes store—four of which have been contributions from Lynn, including the strongest of her material for the show, and what is a very serious contender for my favorite song of the year—“My Least Favorite Life.”

Debuting in the first episode of the season, “My Least Favorite Life” is a little over three minutes of sheer melancholic perfection. Lynn’s voice—husky, wounded, and desperate sounding—shows command over the evocative, literate lyrics: “This is my least favorite life, the one where you fly and I don’t.”

Even as ominous and pensive of a song as it is, it’s still follows a pop song structure, so it stays with you—both in the “I have this song stuck in my head” kind of way, as well as the “This song is haunting me” kind of way. And as much as I could probably listen to this song on a loop all day, a little bit of Lynn goes a long way.

While her albums boast an alt-country backing band and sound, her “True Detective” output is all Lynn, all the time, and from what has been released so far, it kind of sounds a little samey after awhile, which leaves me wondering if an entire album of this tone is sustainable.

However, even with each song’s similar sound and style, Lynn’s music casts a gloomy, well suited shadow over the plot of this season’s “True Detective”; with “My Least Favorite Life” casting the longest and darkest of those shadows. We may no longer have the nihilistic existential pontifications of Matthew McConaughey, but we’ve got this dramatic, ethereal ballad sound tracking the slow downfall of the four protagonists.

The soundtrack to "True Detective" season two arrives on August 14th. This song is available now to download from iTunes.