Music

Photographs by Kaylin Idora

It's almost like watching a movie, the mental image of Southern-transplant Olga tearing down American back roads with her kindred spirit, Jessie Mae Hemphill, in the passenger seat.

They would be in a red convertible, their guitars in the back seat and hair flying freely in the wind on their trek to New York from Hemphill's hometown of Senatobia.

Fast forward a decade or so and the image changes dramatically. Olga is now in Black Wings Studio in Water Valley with Mississippi's Cody Dickinson, laying down tracks to a new release, their hair flying in the reverberations of the 80s riffs pumping through the speakers.

And in reality, both stories exist (although the red convertible is imagined), a testament to the ethereal and fluid Olga (she goes by the sole name), who got her musical start studying with great bands like Los Lobos and legends like Hemphill and who's deep, soulful voice takes command of the blues, then twists into an 80s-infused upbeat musical dynamic – all during the same day.

“Music is cyclical,” says Olga, a San Francisco native, who now makes her home in New Orleans and is enjoying the merits of her new release 'Whatever You Want.' “Everything is cyclical. I hear even shoulder pads are coming back.”

For those who didn't grow up in the 80s, the decade passed with relatively no significance. To those who did, pop still reigns, reminiscent of an escape to a bouncy, upbeat, happier and more carefree time.

“Both of us grew up in that time,” she says of co-collaborator Dickinson. “Cody is a big pop guy, and I've always known that about him. In fact, earlier Allstars records experimented with pop. It was a great time to discover music, riding down the road and hearing the Thompson Twins or Simple Minds, I'd crank up the radio.”

Dickinson, drummer for the North Mississippi Allstars, which recently earned a Grammy nomination, and whose alternate project is the electric yet boldly raw Hill Country Revue, at press time was in Russia on tour with his brother, Luther Dickinson, and Robert Plant.

“Whatever You Want,” aside from being a trip down Memory Lane, was a catalyst for something larger – a lesson learned for Olga, that there are no holds barred in the recording studio.

“This was a whole new territory of exploration and discovery,” she said. “I didn't realize I could write guitar hooks, but I'd play something and say, 'We need an extra note in there,' and Cody would agree. He'd say, 'Absolutely. Dead on.' It was great to discover that part of myself, that ability that I had in me.”