Lindsay Lou

She was born Lindsay Rachel Petroff and grew up near Iron Mountain, close to the Wisconsin border, in a family where relatives played and sang together. Her mother was one of twelve children, and at the big family gatherings she listened to her cousins, aunts and uncles jamming, learned their songs and taught herself to sing harmony with them. She studied at Michigan State University in East Lansing, graduating with degrees in human biology and Spanish.

In East Lansing a worker at a music shop heard her singing and sent her to the open mic at Dagwood’s Tavern, where she met the Flatbellys, a bluegrass band that the college friends Joshua Rilko and Spencer Cain had formed in 2008 with Joshua Brand and Jesse Myers. They asked her to sing harmonies, and Rilko gave her the Bear Family boxes of Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe, which she listened to on her bike rides to work and class. Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys added Keith Billik on banjo and then, in 2010, the Dobro player Mark Lavengood. Their first album, Release Your Shrouds (Hearth Music, June 2012), reached No. 12 on the Folk DJ chart.

In December 2013 she and Rilko released a duo album, Time & Luck, and that month the bassist P. J. George replaced Billik and Cain. The new quartet of Lindsay Lou, Rilko, Lavengood and George cut a four-song EP, Here Between, at The Record Company in Boston in January 2014, with a version of May Erlewine’s “The River Jordan.” Their next album, Ionia, was recorded live in four days in the dining room of the house in Ionia, Michigan, that gave it its name, with Sue Bibeau and Jeff Oehler of Beehive Productions bringing their field-recording gear from upstate New York; it was released in February 2015, just after she and Rilko had moved to Nashville. The band played many of the large roots festivals around the country.

Alongside the band she sang with two Michigan songwriters, May Erlewine and Rachael Davis, as the Sweet Water Warblers. The three had sung on one another’s songs for years when a festival promoter in northern Michigan invited them to play a main-stage set as a trio in 2014. They released an EP, With You, in 2017 and a full album, The Dream That Holds This Child, in 2020, recorded live at the Sound Emporium in Nashville with Dan Knobler producing and Maya de Vitry singing and writing on several tracks.

After Lavengood left in the fall of 2017 the band dropped the Flatbellys name, and its next album, Southland (April 2018), came out as by Lindsay Lou, with Rilko on guitar, George on bass, Lavengood on all but one track and Erlewine and Davis singing as guests. In 2022 she sang harmony behind Billy Strings, a friend since their early days on the Michigan scene, on his single “Freedom.” Her second solo album, Queen of Time (Kill Rock Stars Nashville, 29 September 2023), was produced by Dave O’Donnell at the Sound Emporium’s Studio B; Jerry Douglas plays Dobro on “Nothing Else Matters,” and Strings plays electric and acoustic guitar and sings on “Nothing’s Working,” which he wrote with her. Short excerpts of her grandmother’s voice, from conversations Lindsay Lou had recorded, tie the album together. On Tony Trischka’s Earl Jam (Down the Road, 2024) she sang harmony with Phoebe Hunt on two tracks led by Sierra Ferrell and Michael Daves.

From Nashville she has also led the Queen of Time Band and an acoustic Honey Moon Trio. On 31 July 2026 she made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry, singing Ola Belle Reed’s “I’ve Endured” with Emma Rose, Wila Frank and Rhonda Vincent. The song is on Bluegrass Women (14 August 2026), which she co-produced with the engineer Shani Gandhi. Its ten songs are all by women, among them Dorothy Skaggs’s “All I Ever Loved Was You,” the first single, with Tatiana Hargreaves and Laurie Lewis on fiddles, Hasee Ciaccio on bass, Maddie Witler on mandolin and Alison Brown on banjo, Kate Wolf’s “Like a River,” Ma Rainey’s “CC Rider” and Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train.” Aoife O’Donovan, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes and Phoebe Hunt are among the other guests, and the sessions, played in a circle as if at a jam, were filmed for a four-part series on her YouTube channel.