Cyrena Wages @ Home: Episode 2
The second half of our first ever chat with Cyrena at her home in Memphis, Tennessee. Cyrena is Memphis born and raised and has also lived in Nashville. She has music rather than blood in her veins.
I caught up with Cyrena Wages at her home in Memphis, Tennessee, for our first sit-down interview. We spent just over an hour shooting the breeze. Welcome to part two, which covers CW's thoughts on the music business and her current 2025-26 album. We have since recorded several more episodes which will come out this fall.
I've heard about half the new 2025 album. I was under the impression that it was all a bit lighter and more fun. But then I found out this week that Find Out is a real relationship. It was not as much fun as it might have been! There's a distance, there's a gap now between your raw emotion and and the storytelling element of it is stronger. It was really when I saw the videos that I realized how much fun you were having. You know, they are pretty funny videos. I want to say hilarious!
Yeah, I needed this record, man! And I mean, it falls really naturally behind what I was saying about self-esteem from looking back at Vanity Project. I told the true honest story and it emboldened my backbone and then I went in to make this one. Which by the way you're always writing one while one's coming out.
So Vanity Project was rolling out as I was preparing this one. And now I'm starting to work on the next one, which we can get into. I needed to go into the writing room and be funny and crazy and have a good time and tell a radical story. And I also can't be fucked with in the same way that I used to could.
I've always had a hard time in love. I find love to be the most complicated thing in the whole world. And I'm not even sure I know what it means. But I was plagued by that in a way during Vanity Project that I use now a very funny weapon, not to murder with, but to self-protect with. And it's just been true stories that come into a brighter life by taking on a bit of a different character in each song. There's always a source that's from true and real literal pain.
And then there's just a whole little world built around it where I don't die at the end. I come out on top in every song and I needed that for myself. I think I still don't understand it. I feel like you understand it better than I do, but I needed to have a good time. And I felt like after going on tour last year and damn after playing that record on tour and watching it connect with people… but also I'd get off stage and I was like, I need something else, you know? Now I'm ready for a different part of this story, a different flavor here.
Which is why artists keep doing this. There's just always something ahead, you know, and like legacy acts... fans get really angry. This is why artists that are legacy artists get shit from their fans because people are like, "Play the old stuff."
But the reason they're still still able to go out and tour is because there's some untold part of the story that's propelling them to make the next record and to keep on chasing this thing and wrestling this bear to the ground.
Remembering that I've only seen half of the new album. I don't think it's Side A either. You're still finishing some of this stuff off. I've got two demos and three, I believe, finished tracks and two have been released anyway, so we're talking about those first.
In If It Ain't Broke, it's a fun song, but the video, I just thought this is the best video because it's a proper piss-take. You're messing about with this gun that you clearly don't know how to use. And this is Patsy, right? So tell me about Patsy. I believe that the character in there is a version of Patsy Cline.
I've written about and made up and character named so many different versions of the woman that I see this character to be. Sometimes I call her Gertie. My grandmother Gertie. Sometimes she's Patsy. But she's just the trad wife that's found a new way, you know? She's decided this isn't working anymore and she's taken back over. And it can also be done with playfulness. Like you can shift inside of a marriage and stay in the marriage. You can take on a whole new version of yourself and stay within a situation.
I am now relationally in a different season of my life than I was on the last record. And so the last record was about like fleeing, like get me the fuck out of here, you know? And this one's a bit more like… I might stay here, but "Sit down, sir." You know! I'm glad you love the video.
