‘Ira Louvin’s Inner Child’ by Nick Flessa | New Album, ‘A Different Kind Of Energy’
Los Angeles-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nick Flessa is telling a cinematic story of landscape, place, and time on his fully instrumental new album, A Different Kind of Energy, out April 17th via Anxiety Blanket Records.
The alt-country and Americana collection communicates through its compositions and vividly detailed song titles, each unfolding like a chapter in a novella or a scene from an old Western film.
Today, Flessa is sharing the project’s third single, ‘Ira Louvin’s Inner Child,’ named after the late country singer whose harmonizing act with his brother in The Louvin Brothers became one of the most influential groups of the 1950s. Ira tragically died in a car accident in 1965 after years of battling alcoholism and tumultuous relationships. Though The Louvin Brothers were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001, Ira passed away at just 41.
Flessa has a way of taking stories like this—some that feel almost folkloric and others that are painfully real—and turning them into cinematic compositions that evoke powerful emotion without uttering a word. In just under two minutes, “Ira Louvin’s Inner Child” serves as a tribute that traces the emotional contours of Louvin’s life.
“Ira Louvin’s Inner Child is an ode to the more unhinged Louvin Brother,” he shares.
“More stripped down than some of the other tracks on this record, it consists of just pedal steel and acoustic guitar. The melody and chord progression are based on “Are You Washed in the Blood?”, a hymn from the 1800s by Elisha Hoffman, notably recorded by the Louvins.”
“Ira Louvin led a violent and painful life, but wrote and performed beautiful music. Beaten senseless as a child, prone to anger and drunken violence throughout his life, nearly shot to death by his wife, and ironically killed by someone else’s drunk driving, I think of this recording as my tribute to the light, playfulness and intelligence at the core of his work. That said, the title is sort of tongue-in-cheek. The idea of applying contemporary pop psychology to a figure like Ira is in some ways deliberately incongruous.”
‘A Different Kind of Energy’ is the end result of what began in the hanging stillness of the high desert town of Wonder Valley, California, and was eventually fleshed out back in L.A. with many of the same players who had contributed to his 2024 album, The Politics of Personal Destruction. It was in Wonder Valley that he started writing new instrumental pieces informed by that space, fitting them into the scene-crafting language that had already carried over to his songwriting from a background in filmmaking.
Headline photo: Jenna Caravello
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