Elle King

If you're craving some homespun wisdom in these complicated, hi-tech times, you need to look no further than old episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, ...

I was miserable in Hollywood, and I had no idea that you could actually enjoy this as a career, I had no idea that people listened to you, or that my ideas were valid and I needed to stick to them. But it was worth it, she adds — her stepdad had the keyboard-pounding Lewis on heavy rotation around the house when she was a kid, and she had to pay her respects to the late legend. “It was very brief, and it was my first time at the CMA’s,” she recalls. In the group she was with, she made a joke that everybody else was making, she adds, which apparently displeased a male member of the entourage, who addressed King’s significant other instead of her. You can go to hell,” she snarled defiantly in the track’s verses, and shrugged her way through the singalong chorus of “What do you want from me?/ I’m not America’s sweetheart.” Tooker apparently can keep up, and the couple shares a love of critters, so their retreats in Rhode Island and now Nashville boasts a menagerie of goats, donkeys, and other assorted farm animals. “Come Get Your Wife” with the banjo-based childhood reminiscence, “Ohio”; co-penned by the King/Hamrick/Langley/McKinney team; it finds the artist whimsically reflecting on Jackson, Ohio, which “may not be like Hollywood/ But we got nice hills and hey roll real good..All I need on a Friday night/ Is some Coors in the cooler and a few fireflies/ And a good ole-fashioned mountain dancing song.” It’s all about reclamation, even when the vintage Thomas Mann axion posits that You can never go home again. Prior to lockdown, King had begun dating Dan Tooker, an East Coast tattoo artist, and in that last “In isolation” chat, she was proud for having maintained a long-distance relationship for two long years and then nurturing it through the coronavirus era. It takes a bit more for a beau to keep with King, and she’s been upfront about her faux-pas frailties from the start, as listed in the arena-chiming anthem “America’s Sweetheart”: “I think I’m pretty with these old boots on/ I think it’s funny when I drink too much/ Hey, you try to change me? In fact, King is equally thrilled by the recent HBO Bee-Gees documentary as she is by the news that, thanks to the unexpected placement of their four-decade-old chest “The Goo Goo Muck” in Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff Wednesday, the voodoo rockabilly cult combo The Cramps is suddenly on the Google-search radar again. And now that song alone has taught me to get out of the way, let things have their own life, let things have their own time, and that’s been a massive teaching tool for me. King grew up cursing like a sailor and living in just as many exotic ports of call, from her birthplace in Los Angeles — to model London King and “Saturday Night Live”-renowned Adam Sandler alum Rob Schneider — to New York, Copenhagen, and Philadelphia, where she attended its University of the Arts. But for her most formative teen years, she resided with her mom and music-loving stepdad on a farm in rural Ohio, affectionately known to locals as being part of the Tri-State Area, with Indiana and Kentucky (full disclosure: This writer was a part of it, too, hailing from Indianapolis).