Nashville songwriter Luke Dick's 'Lockeland' celebrates love of life, marriage and music

Award-winning singer, songwriter and filmmaker Luke Dick is a country music songwriter most gifted at nimbly dancing in the space where No. 1 hits, like metaphorical trains, scrape against the right and wrong side of the tracks.

His latest album, "Lockeland" — released on March 15 — was inspired, as most work does for the vaunted Nashville-based creator, by a humility that honors with equally high regard his skills as a deep thinker and multi-instrumentalist.

The highlight of "Lockeland" is Dick discovering the overlap in the "lyrical, spiritual and stylistic Venn diagram" of his art, which allows for how much the 44-year-old enjoys expressing himself creatively to arrive as concepts and feelings uniquely inspired by impressionistic art in word form romantic poems, or expressive personal narratives.

Most notably, the album includes the plaintive love-and-companionship ballad "True Companion," which was initially written by Dick, Miranda Lambert and Natalie Hemby during sessions for Lambert's 2022 "Palomino" album.

Via a press statement, Dick notes that the trio connect and "come together through song and music in a special (way)."

Conception versus creation

Dick has a wild shock of hair, a thoughtful demeanor, a philosophy degree and time spent as an adjunct philosophy professor. Plus, he's sitting on a broad couch in his quaint northeast Nashville home studio overlooking the Cumberland River's woodland banks.

Though these notions would make you think otherwise, don't get it twisted. Luke Dick — one of the creative pens behind a decade of iconoclastic Music City favorites like Eric Church's "Kill a Word," Lambert's "Bluebird" and Kacey Musgraves' "Velvet Elvis" — isn't a country music Walt Whitman.

Dick is very aware that the art of conception is a philosophy-driven one involving the formation of a definite and permanent idea.

However, he's much more successful in songwriting as a creator skilled at the action or process of bringing something into existence.

For Dick, the nuanced difference between the two involves the latter troubling itself with evolving the form while still "working inside the keyhole" of unlocking commercial success.

Unpacking intriguing Oklahoma roots

Dig deeper into his biography; the story gets more stunningly confusing.

For the first five years of his life, the Cogar, Oklahoma, native and son of an exotic dancer lived in the Red Dog Saloon, a five-decade-old Oklahoma City strip club.

At the Red Dog during the height of the Oklahoma oil bust in the early 1980s, table dances cost $5, the stage featured no poles, and a diverse population of blue-collar employees and patrons passed the time.

Between 1982 and 1989, Oklahoma's per capita income fell to 80% of the national average.

However, the Red Dog's Tex-Mex hamburgers were always considered excellent throughout the era.

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His bittersweet childhood's impact on his life is revealing itself differently to Dick of late.

In 2019, that legacy yielded "Red Dog," a well-respected documentary that debuted at South by Southwest and was an official selection of the Nashville Film Festival.

"I've currently got some therapeutic songs in the works for Hey Steve, my indie rock side project," he reveals.

He notes that they are not of hyper-intellectual inspiration.

"Simple consonants and vowels that fit melodies make the song feel like a better version of a completed (whole thing)."

'Salve for the hearts that need it'

"Half of my record is about love — my relationship to love as a concept, my relationship to my wife, Alison — that's a new concept," says Dick about "Lockeland."

Four decades after learning how to save drug dealers from epileptic seizures in exotic dancing emporiums down the street from Baptist Bible colleges, Dick worries himself with less fearsome exploits.

"Daily, I'm distracted by this panoramic view (of the Cumberland River)," he says.

"My ability to love is primary, on many levels, to the creation of my legacy."

Tracks like "Carrot" and "The Feather" exist at the edge of where the fate of the output of his creative freedom is measured not by commercial validation but by allowing people who desire an earnest connection to music to feel validated by his craft.

"This is a salve for the hearts that need it — or music for people to vacuum their homes to."

'Unmoved' by trends

Dick offers that he graduated from Garth Brooks' alma mater, Yukon High School, but that he's never met the ultimate icon of the area from which his hardscrabble roots were born.

Twin ships passing in the night have arrived at different pinnacles of Music City's standards of success.

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"It's comforting not to feel like I'm beating my head against a wall while trying to fit into (Nashville's mainstream country industry)," he adds, "but I still wake up and try to figure out when my songs aren't going to fit (in Nashville) anymore."

Though perpetually intrigued by why he — though acclaimed by critics and industry executives — still feels like an outsider, he's also "unmoved" by the trendy sounds and tropes that define so much of the mainstream country industry's concert-, festival- and radio-driven bellwethers of success.

He sits squarely between being a proudly confident Nashville creator and a resilient trickster living to fight another day.

"I'm not trying to make music that doesn't fit within the genre," he says. "However, the conceptual way I view catchy and (hook-driven) hits always digs into places where the radio (isn't looking for hits)."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville singer-songwriter Luke Dick releases album 'Lockeland'