Photo: Ashley Osborn

Cosmic Americana singer-songwriter Cassandra Lewis’s storytelling acumen is evident in our Zoom interview, as–ice clinking in her coffee with a glass straw–she weaves tales of growing up watching television as an antidote for loneliness. She then jumps to the story of her “last shot,” during the early lockdown stages of the pandemic, when she landed an impromptu meeting and demo with Elektra/Low Country Sound president Gregg Nadel and performed for him in Elektra’s Los Angeles parking garage.

“I had to sing outside because it was the pandemic still and we talked for a bit and he said ‘I suppose you’re gonna sing for me,’ and I said ‘Actually yes, but can I take you to the parking garage? The acoustics are better.’” A few weeks later, Lewis got word that the label wanted to fly her to Nashville to sing for 9x Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb (Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton), and she was signed on the spot. On July 12, Elektra/Low Country released Lewis’s sophomore album and major label debut Lost in a Dream, an album of ballads in which Lewis draws on cinematic Wizard of Oz imagery to portray the insight that only comes after one exits the slow boil of toxic love. 

“When you’re in a toxic relationship, it’s hard to see through the whole thing,” Lewis said in our interview.  “So that’s why the album’s called Lost in a Dream because it’s the suspended reality that was happening and I wasn’t sure if I had been knocked out by the storm of this person.” 

While a toxic relationship with a lover that wouldn’t even claim her as a partner may have been the impetus for the album, Lost in a Dream as a title could also refer to the dream-like quality of Lewis’s life as an army brat during childhood, or the continuation of that nomadic lifestyle as an adult, now having lived in 31 different cities. Or, Lost in a Dream could refer to the years-in-the-making “overnight success” of scoring a last-shot deal with Elektra/Low Country, and subsequently working with songwriters Natalie Hemby, Anderson East, Angaleena Presley, and Anderson West on her sophomore album. Working with part of the team that brought us Lady Gaga’s “Always Remember Us This Way” (produced by Cobb, and co-written by Hemby), it could be said that through all that traveling, hustling, and heartaching, Lewis has at last arrived.  

Described by Lewis as a “hero’s journey” of overcoming a troubled and troubling relationship, Lost in a Dream opens with the track “Too Much,” which listeners will immediately recognize as an unrequited love song. As Cobb backs Lewis on acoustic guitar, she sings, “I would give my love to you even if you could not do the same for me/ Road’s been too rough to walk alone.” But by the end of the first song, we’re not just talking about unrequited love–it quickly becomes clear it’s toxic as well: “It ain’t true love from you after all the shit you put me through/Could you break it to me gentle as can be/Set me loose like bottled letters to the sea.” It’s clear by the end of this song that we’re on a journey of heartbreak, one we’ve been on with other country queens who have been put through it, like Natalie Maines on the Gaslighter album or Kelsea Ballerini on Rollin Up the Welcome Mat (For Good) or Kacey Musgraves on star-crossed or even Tammy Wynette on ‘Til I Can Make It on My Own.

On the fourth track of the album, co-written by Trevor Bahnson, who also plays acoustic guitar and provides vocal backup on the track, Lewis pays tribute to her roots with “More Like Mama.” Though she told me on our Zoom call that she left her mother’s home at age 15 to break family cycles and set out on her own (“And even when I’ve gone a million miles from home/I’ll be carrying this beauty like a stone”), in this song Lewis recognizes the ways in which she’s so much like both of her parents:

Just like my daddy used to party

Just like my papa used to preach

Just like my daddy, he would wander

And he’d empty out his pockets for his dreams

Turns out we ain’t so different, him and me

The title track was co-written by Natalie Hemby and opens with that lyrical, waking from a dream, Oz-like quality immediately: “I fell asleep in a field of red poppies/Under a kyanite sky/You came to me like a wave of sweet nothings/I inhaled your ethereal high,” with Lewis’s sweeping vocals sounding like a combination of Patsy Cline, Amy Winehouse, and even Marty Robbins in her pacing. Though the opening lyrics are reminiscent of a fairy tale, by the end of the song, it’s more like the original Grimm’s Brothers fairy tales where things go nightmarishly sideways rather than into an escapist fantasy world: “But my smile disappeared/When I reached for your hand/Just to find I imagined you mine.” And that’s all a warm up, both musically and lyrically, for “So Bad,” the first track released as a single from this album.

In “So Bad”, Lewis lets loose with the vocals. The spare nature of Cobb’s production quality makes room for her big voice and even bigger heartache. In our interview, I asked the musical influences question, and Lewis responded, “I’m a time traveler. My influences range from 90s grunge to early Pink Floyd. If Pink Floyd and Patsy Cline did peyote in the desert with Whitney Houston and Celine Dion, it’d be an interesting party, I’ll just say that, those are my influences.”

Lewis’s Lost in a Dream album is emotive, raw, vulnerable, and despairing at times–but it’s also a party in a way, an assembly of some of the best songwriting and musical talent an artist could ask for. It’s also a party in the sense that it’s a celebration of triumph over a challenging childhood and an adulthood that included everything from construction work, to weed-farming in California and “selling joints out of the back of a Subaru” (and then losing that farm to a wildfire), to a toxic relationship with a person who was meant to lead and mentor her. It’s a party I want to attend. This fall, there will be plenty of opportunities to do so, including Lewis’s August 23 show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium or her debut at the Pilgrimage Music and Cultural Festival in Franklin, TN in September.