Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
LoRae Blackmore is a TikTok creator, river person, and poet from rural British Columbia. I’ve loved all of her online content for a couple of years now, and – in light of Congress’s proposed TikTok ban – thought Path Finders was about due for a thoroughly Gen-Z edition.
Enjoy our conversation about transience, sobriety, and dressing like a princess, below. And enjoy these t-shirts based on LoRae’s TikTok monologues, right here:
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Can you just start with a bio? What’s your hometown like, and where are you now? And then there’s a ton of country imagery in your online persona – your book is called Poems of a Podunk Princess and your TikTok handle is @lanadelredneck – and I wonder if you can talk a little about where that comes from, too.
LoRae Blackmore: I’m from a small town called Creston in BC, Canada. Population 5,000, full of loggers, hockey players, and just good old Canadian hicks. My online persona comes from my very backwoods redneck upbringing. No electric heat, we’d chop and haul wood in the winter for the wood stove. My dad was a trucker and mom worked odd jobs too while raising nine kids. My childhood was running around barefoot through the woods, gardening, canning, changing diapers, going on long hauls with my dad, and going to the river if we were lucky. My online persona comes from that country upbringing combined with my transient deviant Lana-esque adulthood. I moved to Vegas at 18 and fully rejected my backwoods roots for a life of solo travel, reckless behavior and sugar daddies (would not recommend). Over six years I lived in Nevada, California, Idaho, and Washington. Around age 24 I came full circle, feeling an itch for rural living, old trucking songs, and the familiar peaceful simplicity of my childhood. Now I live in Washington with my sister and niece. I go to the river almost daily and spend my time writing and hanging out with family.
DY: I think my first exposure to your content was your Spotify playlist LanaDelRedneck, which has more than 4,000 saves. How would you describe that music niche? Where do Lana Del Rey, Noah Cyrus, and Hank Williams Jr. overlap? Were you surprised when it found such an eager audience?
LB: I coined the phrase Lana Del Redneck in 2022 in a video on my old account (@allaroundgreatgal) for “the depressed artsy indie girls that grew up in tiny redneck towns.” At the time there wasn’t too much mainstream representation of more alternative country culture, and I’d still like there to be more. Country doesn’t have to be a political stance, and I love curating playlists and content that aren’t the typical stereotype of country. To me Lana Del Rey has always been a little country. From her older persona Lizzy Grant, to her highway anthems, she demonstrates how genres can be bent in expression of truth. I think people love that playlist because that’s what it’s doing, combining and bending cultures because for so many people like me, they’re already melded.
DY: So much of your content is about your near-daily trips to the river – where’d that ritual come from?
LB: I grew up going to the river but I started going more in my adult life when I first got sober. Cold therapy and just being in the water has been a huge aid in staying sober and has also helped with anxiety. Not only that, just spending time alone in nature is like a meditation, it’s nostalgic and makes me feel like a kid again, just splashing around with nowhere to be and no one to be. So getting sober was a blessing because it reminded me how much I love the water.
DY: Your TikTok is such a joy to watch in part because of your campy, hyperfemme aesthetic. How do you think about getting dressed when the plan for the day is to run by Dutch Bros. and then go for a swim?
LB: My entire wardrobe is dresses and skirts. I stopped wearing pants 2 years ago because I realized I hate them. I love feeling like a princess and I’d wear prom dresses every day if I could. On river days I’ll wear a short dress and take a towel for the car seat, I don’t love swimsuits. I also never get my face wet so I’ll wear lashes, eyeliner, and a bow or bandana in my hair. I just like feeling pretty and glamorous no matter where I am, and there’s probably something deeper and darker to that sociologically but running around all dolled up just makes me happy and adds flavor to my life.
DY: Do you feel any tension in being a certified river rat and nature girl and then making a living on the internet? I am personally so thankful that your monologues are in my feed, but I wonder if one of those existences ever starts to impede on the other.
LB: I feel so lucky to be able to pay my (very minimal) bills from TikTok while sharing my writing and adventures every day. I do get freaked out sometimes when I realize how many people out in the world are aware of my existence and perceiving me every day, but at the same time it feels like I’m on the right path. I’m an introvert and a hermit. I feel like a private simple person but I’m also a very public eccentric person on the internet. So I guess we’ll see where it goes.
DY: It seems like a lot of your adult life has been pretty transient. How do you know when it’s time to leave a place? How do you know where to go next?
LB: In the past it was all very chaotic and not at all calculated, I’d just go from state to state on a whim. I’m a little more mature now, but I do get the itch. I’ve been in Washington for like a year. I think my next place will be somewhere warm. Maybe I’ll get a van.
DY: What are you listening to these days?
LB: From my “recently played” tab on Spotify: Loretta Lynn, John Anderson, Tyler Childers, Noah Kahan, Maggie Antone, Colter Wall, and BANKS. I just remembered how much I love BANKS, her music is magic. But yes, most of the time I’m listening to old grandpa music these days. Country is my comfort genre. I have 25 public playlists on Spotify that encapsulate every vibe I’ve been on for like two years. Check ‘em out to see what I’m obsessed with at any given moment.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Who Is Lana Del Redneck? appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
