Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell sat across from each other in a dimly-lit booth at a bar while a strung-out singer serenaded the two A-listers with the song "My Least Favorite Life" — and thus the brooding tone for True Detective Season 2 was officially set. But who was the singer in the bar on True Detective ? Well, her voice should have sounded familiar to any True Detective devotees since her song "The Only Thing Worth Fighting For" was used in the teaser trailer for Season 2. The singer-songwriter Lera Lynn was the woman playing guitar and singing in the bar and viewers will probably hear her voice again, since she's responsible for a lot of the music on this season of True Detective.
The Season 2 premiere episode "The Western Book of the Dead" established the relationship between Vaughn's character, crime boss Frank Semyon, and Farrell's character, police detective Ray Velcoro. Years earlier, they had met when Ray went to Frank to get information about the man who had raped Ray's wife. Now in the present-day, the men have maintained their convenient friendship — Ray provides help to Frank by being a corrupt police officer, Frank hooks up Ray with a good lawyer for his custody battle. As Farrell sat in the dingy booth, smoking a cigarette, his eyes went to the woman onstage performing. Then Vaughn was shown to be "enjoying" (it's far too strong of a word since their faces were so stoic) the same music, as it was revealed the two were actually meeting each other over a drink.
As the entire episode had been dark and depressing up to this point, Lynn couldn't have been singing a more perfect song than "My Least Favorite Life" at this moment.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lynn said her manager had hooked her up with T Bone Burnett and he asked Lynn to write some songs for Season 2 of the HBO show with him. Her manager, Sheri Sands, had worked with Burnett on the award-winning Raising Sand album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and thought that Lynn and Burnett would get along creatively. Turns out, her manager was right and after sending some sample music to Burnett, the two met and started working on original music for True Detective.
Along with Burnett and Roseanne Cash, Lynn wrote "My Least Favorite Life" (Cash wrote the lyrics). And Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog reported that Lynn will also be appearing in the second episode of Season 2, "Night Finds You." She'll perform a song entitled "Church in Ruins" in that same bar. She wrote the lyrics for that song with Burnett, but told the WSJthat she doesn't know how her music fits in with the plot of the series. Still, it's not surprising to know that True Detective writer and creator Nic Pizzolatto approved of all the music being used on his show.
True Detective has already exposed Lynn to a larger audience and since her "My Least Favorite Life" not only underscored Vaughn and Farrell's dialogue, but was also used in Taylor Kitsch's terrifying motorcycle scene, she may just become the go-to singer-songwriter for covering seriously morose territory.
