I caught up with Cyrena Wages at her home in Memphis, Tennessee, for our first sit-down interview. We spent just over an hour shooting the breeze. Welcome to part two, which covers CW's thoughts on the music business and her current 2025-26 album. We have since recorded several more episodes which will come out this fall.
I've heard about half the new 2025 album. I was under the impression that it was all a bit lighter and more fun. But then I found out this week that Find Out is a real relationship. It was not as much fun as it might have been! There's a distance, there's a gap now between your raw emotion and and the storytelling element of it is stronger. It was really when I saw the videos that I realized how much fun you were having. You know, they are pretty funny videos. I want to say hilarious!
Yeah, I needed this record, man! And I mean, it falls really naturally behind what I was saying about self-esteem from looking back at Vanity Project. I told the true honest story and it emboldened my backbone and then I went in to make this one. Which by the way you're always writing one while one's coming out.
So Vanity Project was rolling out as I was preparing this one. And now I'm starting to work on the next one, which we can get into. I needed to go into the writing room and be funny and crazy and have a good time and tell a radical story. And I also can't be fucked with in the same way that I used to could.
I've always had a hard time in love. I find love to be the most complicated thing in the whole world. And I'm not even sure I know what it means. But I was plagued by that in a way during Vanity Project that I use now a very funny weapon, not to murder with, but to self-protect with. And it's just been true stories that come into a brighter life by taking on a bit of a different character in each song. There's always a source that's from true and real literal pain.
And then there's just a whole little world built around it where I don't die at the end. I come out on top in every song and I needed that for myself. I think I still don't understand it. I feel like you understand it better than I do, but I needed to have a good time. And I felt like after going on tour last year and damn after playing that record on tour and watching it connect with people… but also I'd get off stage and I was like, I need something else, you know? Now I'm ready for a different part of this story, a different flavor here.
Which is why artists keep doing this. There's just always something ahead, you know, and like legacy acts... fans get really angry. This is why artists that are legacy artists get shit from their fans because people are like, "Play the old stuff."
But the reason they're still still able to go out and tour is because there's some untold part of the story that's propelling them to make the next record and to keep on chasing this thing and wrestling this bear to the ground.
Remembering that I've only seen half of the new album. I don't think it's Side A either. You're still finishing some of this stuff off. I've got two demos and three, I believe, finished tracks and two have been released anyway, so we're talking about those first.
In If It Ain't Broke, it's a fun song, but the video, I just thought this is the best video because it's a proper piss-take. You're messing about with this gun that you clearly don't know how to use. And this is Patsy, right? So tell me about Patsy. I believe that the character in there is a version of Patsy Cline.
I've written about and made up and character named so many different versions of the woman that I see this character to be. Sometimes I call her Gertie. My grandmother Gertie. Sometimes she's Patsy. But she's just the trad wife that's found a new way, you know? She's decided this isn't working anymore and she's taken back over. And it can also be done with playfulness. Like you can shift inside of a marriage and stay in the marriage. You can take on a whole new version of yourself and stay within a situation.
I am now relationally in a different season of my life than I was on the last record. And so the last record was about like fleeing, like get me the fuck out of here, you know? And this one's a bit more like… I might stay here, but "Sit down, sir." You know! I'm glad you love the video.
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I actually have another new version or two more of this video that are going to come out. They've just been sitting in a folder. I love making content. I didn't know that. But I love like higher concept video making and it helps me explain why I wrote the song in the first place when I can put something aesthetic with it.
I think the video that you're referring to is one that I made with my friend Kevin Brooks here in Memphis. We shot it at one of my godmother's houses near Millington on the front porch and it's the one where I wrap the man up with the rope and haul him off to the woods. That the one? In this really light record! Had a blast doing that.
I don't know how fixed you are on the titles, but you've got one called Wildflower, which is the newest one I've heard. A wildflower is quite a common symbol in country music. You know, that image of a person who's so many things, maybe a bit wild, maybe a bit fragile?
I wrote this with Amie Miriello and Johnny Black, who I wrote the entire second record with, or what we have of it so far. But when we wrote it, my biggest qualm initially was: it's too on the nose. You know, am I selling out? Am I over-intellectualizing things that are good, is in my DNA. It can't just be nope, this is good and easy and simple. I have to bring in some kind of paralysis of analysis, you know?
But my co-writers were really good at just reeling me back in and being like, "Do you like it? Do you feel it? Do you want to play it in front of 100,000 people? Do you think it's a fuckin' banger?" Yes! So, let yourself live – which was a metaphor for the state of my life at this time and the time we were writing it is like – are you allowed to be happy? Are things allowed to be okay? You know, can it be good? Yeah, I love that song.
Best Behavior sounds like a finished track and I saw you rehearsing this for your show recently. Is Best Behavior the next one to come out?
It was going to be the first one and at the very last minute I changed it. Two reasons. One, I thought to intro this new sound of mine that super upbeat and fun like If It Ain't Broke might be the best way to come out swinging.
But also because the opinion of the loose focus groups that I've created is that Best Behavior is the most slam dunk of the tracks. And I don't believe anyone anymore. Like I don't think that anybody knows what we're doing. I don't know what I'm doing. We're all just like shooting in the dark and hoping it lands somewhere.
I still knew that if they're all right and if that's the song, it's not time yet. I'm tidying some things up over here on my end. And trying to make sure that I'm ready for a really big full send, so to speak. And so I wanted to use these first tracks to dangle the new energy out there and then to work after they're released to try to blow them up.
I've released them independently, right? There's no machine behind it. They're not going to have some gigantic leap in streaming. That doesn't really happen anymore. But I'm going to work on the back end to try to blow them up. And during that, I'll just be using those tracks to find this new audience and get that foundation laid. So when the next ones come out, especially Best Behavior, I've already found the people, you know?
My grandfather Woodrow, the Robin Hood character? I always knew he was a wild dresser and larger than life. I never met him, but he was full of very bizarre witticisms and stories and career seasons that he went through and just funny as fuck that he did. And he looked like some kind of rock star. And my dad does, too. My dad is a trial attorney, but he looks like he's the bass player in some super hip like hippie rock band. And he says things that are just – I'm like how do we document all this before his time on earth is gone?
I heard something about my grandfather that he said show up and be the best dressed person in the room and just listen. And maybe there's some truth in that. Maybe there's some other colors I could add into that, you know, but I found that to be really interesting, like claiming your power with quiet rather than puffing...
I can definitely relate to that. In the working classes of England there's a phrase that somebody used which is not "dressing poor". So you might be kind of poor but you dress like somebody who isn't. And immediately that gives you a presence, doesn't it? It's like a uniform. It changes your mind, right? If you dress well or you dress up, especially as a woman, right?
And I mean, it's not even so that you can fool other people into thinking that you have money if you don't, but more so that you make a statement with the clothes on your body. Whether it's, you know, dressing well in a way that's fine materials or it's dressing well in a way that is bold and unique and a conversation starter, you know, which was my grandfather's particular flavor of it and my dad's and mine sometimes as well. Just like a bit of a fearlessness.
There's a lot of bravery in showing up in something that's going to turn heads. And there is a confidence there and an okayness with being perceived and being seen. It's loud in dress but quiet in voice, sort of letting that speak for you a bit. I haven't unpacked it, but I like that. It's great!
I'm just imagining you now in those massive red angel wings for Find Out that you are dragging them out of a lockup or whatever it was. That's an outfit!
I worked with a dear friend here named Chris who has a really cool shop out of her Midtown home that she calls Vintage Modern Memphis and fashion pop-up bar and she's just got like so many cool things. So I always pull great things from her little treasure trove and combine it with the other weird shit in my closet. We try to bring these characters to life. It's so fun!
You can catch up with Cyrena's latest on Instagram. Her TikTok is brilliantly hilarious and she has her own website where you can buy Vanity Project as an actual physical IRL thing like a CD or a record!
