About
“The Wages’ were run out of North Carolina for stealing horses and other boorish behavior. We settled in North Mississippi and evolved into three groups: the preachers; the drunks and the outlaws; and then kind of a mid-range group. I came from the mid-range group.”
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Memphis-born Cyrena Wages spent the better part of her 2010s in neighboring Nashville, Tennessee. She first led a buzzy country band with her brother and boyfriend at the time, until that core trio became a duo called Lost Wages. While the siblings recorded with name producers like Marshall Altman (Frankie Ballard, Natasha Bedingfield) and Mark Needham (Dolly Parton, Walk the Moon), Cyrena nannied and tended bar.
When Lost Wages reached a natural stopping point, Cyrena felt that she “hadn’t even started.” She says the “stories that had lived in my mind since I was a little girl hadn’t even come to the surface yet.” It was leaving Nashville—“leaving the system,”—and moving back to Memphis that gave her the space to discover her true voice and the clarity with which to make it heard.
“Memphis is part of the tapestry of my soul,” she says “There’s something different about this place. It’s honest, and...heavy. It’s where I can connect to the source, ya know. It provided me enough openness to find myself, my real autonomous self, outside of all the voices. That was something I’d never done before. It’s like I had been asleep since I was five years old and then woke up and said, Where have I been? What the hell happened to me?”
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As a young girl, Cyrena fell in love with music on the country backroads between Millington and Shelby Forest, two small towns just north of Memphis. Her father, the hometown judge, would drive her back and forth to school in his gold ‘67 Cadillac. When he dropped her off, he’d shout, “Kick the door down and tell ‘em Dewey sent ya!” —a famous sign-off of legendary Memphis radio host Dewey Phillips.
Phillips, the first man to air Elvis on the radio, had been a close friend of Cyrena’s grandfather Woodrow. That deep Memphis influence and the steady soundtrack of Al Green, Ann Peebles, and Hank Williams on those drives to school left an indelible mark on Cyrena’s musical taste and sensibility.
“I’ll never forget. My dad had Tracy Nelson’s Mother Earth record with the song Down So Low on it. That’s the first time I really took in the sound of a woman with an alto voice, and it just wrecked me. So weighty and emotional. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a singer. Later he’d show me Bonnie Raitt and Bobbie Gentry and it all started to make sense.”
With her father’s musical influence, the legendary country-soul tradition of Memphis in her blood, and a growing fascination for how more contemporary singer-songwriters express their own soul—artists like Amy Winehouse, Phoebe Bridgers, Lana Del Rey—Cyrena developed a deep love for how music and honest confession can overlap.
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Wages’ upcoming debut album, Vanity Project, is both an exercise in rebellion against years of conditioning, as well as a way of processing her own struggles, healing, and growth. As much as Memphis shaped her positively, there were aspects of growing up in the South that didn’t align with who she wanted to become—the stifling effects of small-town religion, the burden of “ladylike perfectionism and pleasantry,” and the pressure to marry young and marry “well.”
Combine all that with the crippling, long-term self-image issues developed while growing up competing in the Tennessee beauty pageant circuit, Cyrena had a lot to elbow through on her way to becoming an artist. Breaking free of norms, finding her own truth, and “coming to terms with herself,” as she says in album closer “Back to the City,” led Cyrena to a place where she could confidently write the songs that would make her first album such a personal, authentic statement.
“As far as the pageant stuff goes, I’ll die in therapy over it,” Cyrena says, laughing. “Walking around in a swimsuit with a number on your waist like a show horse, all while a bunch of weird old guys give you a score of 1 to 10... I subconsciously internalized that whole dynamic and it was in the driver’s seat for a lot of my life. I either bullied myself for not being ‘whatever’ enough, or I’ve been dismissed as ‘whatever’—and not the smart one, not the creative one, not the artistically capable one. My value outside of my viability is deep work that is still unfinished for me, and a lot of these songs have subtle or blatant references to that struggle.”
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Cyrena tapped producer Matt Ross-Spang (Charley Crockett, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Margo Price) to helm Vanity Project at Southern Grooves Studio in Memphis. Most of the album’s songs were penned with her primary creative collaborator, Memphis guitarist Joe Restivo, who’s played with Memphis greats like Don Bryant and William Bell, as well as the late Blues Hall of Famer Otis Clay.
Joe grew up in a transitional era of Memphis music, when the old blues masters still on Beale Street coexisted with a new generation of musicians exploring hip-hop, garage rock, and the latest evolution of Memphis soul. That formative experience, as well as a jaunt in New York City studying jazz and contemporary music, gave Joe the musical vocabulary to provide the sophisticated chord voicings and sonically evocative foundation for Cyrena’s warmly relatable, and deeply (sometimes painfully) confessional lyrics.
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“It had been a really long time coming. I was getting ready to make this record,” says Cyrena, “and I heard about a music business guy saying—before ever hearing the songs—’Yeah, but she’s kind of a vanity project, right?’”
And just like that, the album had roots and the title track was born. “I’m making peace with myself by flipping that narrative - a wink and a middle finger. But I just feel ready, when I haven’t felt ready before. Everybody comes to terms with themselves on a different timeline. It took me a minute...but now it’s my time.”