Laci Kaye Booth Explores Every Facet of Love on New Album ‘Love Ain’t for The Faint of Heart’

As Ella Langley continues her historic Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping streak with “Choosin’ Texas,” Stella Lefty earns her first Country Airplay chart-topper with “Boston” and Megan Moroney earlier this year earned her own Billboard 200 chart-topping project, one of Langley’s current opening acts is primed to etch her own singular mark on the country genre.

“Everything Ella’s doing, the way she shows love for everybody around her, is just so inspiring. It really is. I think she’s setting such a great example,” says Texas native Laci Kaye Booth, who is opening arena shows on Langley’s Dandelion Tour. Booth just released her newest album Love Ain’t For The Faint of Heart , on Friday (Sept. 18) on Lost Highway Records.

The dozen-song set, produced by Ben West (Langley, Stephen Wilson Jr.) finds Booth further expanding on her brand of “dreamy country,” while the song’s lyrics center on reckoning with various facets of relationships. The unraveling of a previous romantic relationship and the beginnings of her current love story with boyfriend and fellow country music artist Morgan Evans, inform her latest album.

The project also follows her previous viral hits including “George F****** Strait” and “Daddy’s Mugshot,” the latter of which draws from her relationship with and lessons learned from her father Jody Booth, a musician who was often on the road for long stretches when she was a child.

Booth wraps her velvety, dusky voice around a range of sounds, from hazy country ballads to churning rock-inspired numbers that gather inspiration from Stevie Nicks and Lana Del Rey. Booth teams with Lukas Nelson on “The Illusion of Love” and serves up a languid, haunting rendition of an older song from her writing catalog, “Ethereal Redneck Shit,” filled with vivid imagery such as “I wanna levitate, dance on your Escalade.”

“I thought this was such a representation of who I am to my core,” Booth says. “I love a dive bar. On my last album, I wrote the song ‘Damn Good in a Dive Bar,’ and I thought this is such a good representation of who I am at my core,” Booth says. “I thought, ‘I can’t write another song like that, but I can at least explain that song in another way. I got in the room with Luke Laird and Ben West. I had two ideas on my phone, one was ‘Ethereal Redneck Shit,’ and the other was a verse about, ‘I’ve been cooking and cleaning all up in my feelings.’ And I really was in that moment, trying to juggle music and life.”

Booth spoke with Billboard about the inspirations behind the new album, as well as what she’s learned on the road touring with artists like Langley.

There are many different textures on this record. What was that process like melding them into one album?

When I went into this record, I thought I was making a completely different record. I stopped halfway through, took a break from it because I needed to get my mind right, and then I started making it again or finishing it. And I think that’s why you see so many different eras of my musicality. As much as I love a cohesive record that all sounds the same, I think there’s something to this record that you never know what you’re going to get. You put it on shuffle and you’re like, “Whoa.”

There are definitely songs that feel like they are their own world, like “Ride or Die.” What inspired that?

I was listening to Lana Del Rey’s Honeymoon record a lot. That’s one of my favorite records of hers. And I’m always inspired by her, but what I’m most inspired by is [that] she just does what she wants, the freedom to do anything you want in music. That’s what I was feeling with “Ride or Die.” I was living in an apartment complex by myself at this time and there’s a biker bar right beside it. And I would always, I never did it, but I would always fantasize about just going to the biker bar and maybe riding away on a bike with a random person. It was just this story in my head and there’s so many different endings to that, but I thought that was a really cool perspective to write about.

What made you feel like you needed to regroup on the album a bit?

Sometimes, I create something and then I post it immediately. And then, like with “Daddy’s Mugshot” and “George F****** Strait,” if it goes viral, then we’re just kind of chasing that for a minute. And so I think that’s where things kind of got a little crazy, a little chaotic. wasn’t making a record for TikTok. I wasn’t just making a record for people to listen to an upbeat tune at concerts. I know these crowds that I’m playing for sometimes don’t know my music yet and they just want something that feels good. That can get in your head as an opener for sure. So I needed to take a beat and think about the record I wanted to make.

As you got back into the headspace of your vision for the album, what was the first song that came out of that period and sparked that new vision?

“Different.” I think that was also a game changer and I felt I had this really big craving to just write by myself or just to start songs by myself at least. When I made my previous record [2024’s Loneliest Girl in the World ], it was a record of pure loneliness. I was in survival mode. Then this record came about when I was falling in love and I knew from the beginning the record would be about love in all its forms. I think for a while, I was trying to name it What The F**k Do I Know About Love? That fell through and I landed on Love Ain’t for the Faint of Heart and I think it’s a beautiful dichotomy of both. I’m big about creating worlds, getting lost and escaping reality, but also falling into a love that’s so healing and it grounds me and anchors me.

What sparked the idea for “Different”?

It’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever been, writing a song and releasing it by myself, and maybe that’s why I love it so much, because it’s so scary. It’s so exciting, like being on a rollercoaster ride. I was going through the emotions of falling in love with someone who was pretty broken and I think that’s such a relatable thing in the world of dating. It came so easily and it was exactly what I was feeling. What I appreciate about it, is every time I listen to it, I can be teleported right back to that moment of feeling those emotions.

What did Morgan think the first time you played it for him?

I was really scared to play it for him. We hadn’t collaborated as much on music at that time, so I was like, “He’s definitely going to think this is such a weird song.” But more than that, what it says. I had shared it with my team, my team was freaking out about it. I was about to go in the studio and record it. So I was like, “I just got to rip this Band-Aid off and show him this work tape.” And his reaction was the coolest thing that I have witnessed musically. It was just like a jaw drop moment and it’s his favorite song on the record.

Obviously, the album is inspired by love. How do the two of you balance everything with two busy careers?

He just knows it so well and he’s been doing it for forever, so when I have a problem on the road, he understands it instantly and he’s so supportive. It’s nice having him as a collaborator, too. Some songs I start myself, maybe sometimes a song doesn’t get finished, but living with someone as talented as him, he’s just a machine when he writes.

It’s been so beautiful watching that unfold in storytelling, too. I think our writing styles are different — he comes from a country-pop space, and I’m over here writing the most gloomy, weird lyrics and melodies and putting those two together has been a beautiful outcome that you see in “Daddy’s Mugshot” and a couple of other songs on the record [“The World Keeps Spinning,” “Ride or Die”].

Songs like “Ethereal Redneck Shit” have this pensive, exploratory feel to them. How has that evolved over your career and especially with this album?

The very first thing I said when I moved to town was I want to be dreamy country. That was my name for a while. And not a lot of people understood it back in 2019 when I first came to town. They were just kind of like, “You want to take a nap? What?” And I think it’s evolved because I know what it is now.

I love crystals, and I’ve always been such a fan of Stevie Nicks, because she just totally dives into that aesthetic. I don’t know her personally, but that was the artist that took me out of country music for the first time and opened me up to a world of this whole other genre of music that I could get lost in. What I love most about it is seeing people recognize something ethereal and say, “Oh my gosh, that reminds me of you,” or, “That’s Laci.” I feel like the brand is evolving and it’s a good feeling.

You have been on the road with artists including Ella Langley and Parker McCollum. What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve taken from those tours?

Just reading the crowd is one of the biggest lessons, trying to know what the crowd wants in that moment. With each one of those artists, the audience is so different and I enjoy each one so much. I think there’s also so much professionalism on the road. I go into these tours not knowing what I’m going to get from the artist, and every single one has just been so determined to just be a great musician. And when it comes to expectations of how much I’m going to see these artists, they spend a lot of time with their openers, and I think that’s really, really cool.

Beyond your new album, you also teamed up with Carter Faith and Baby Nova for “Pearl Handled Pistol” recently. How did you team with them for this song?

I’ve always been a fan of Carter’s, and we got into the writing room with Jessie Jo Dillon, who we’re both friends with. They had the idea for the song and I feel like we couldn’t have picked a better song title for us to write. It was like this whole movie we got to make. I think I told her the day we shot the video, I wish we could start a band and this could be the way we worked because it was so much fun getting to work with people you relate to on so many levels. And Baby Nova is so cool. I hadn’t met her before then, but she’s doing her own thing and I love that so much.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/country/laci-kaye-booth-new-album-love-aint-for-the-faint-of-heart-1236344798/)._