On stage at Detroit’s Lager House on Wednesday night, Americana act Chloe Kimes told the crowd she named her new album Daredevil because being a touring independent musician can feel “like driving off a cliff every night.” But like a daredevil, Kimes pulls it off with joy and aplomb.
Born and raised on the west side of the state, Kimes spent the past decade cutting her teeth down in Nashville. She cites Michigan bluegrass superstar Billy Strings as an inspiration, and her original song “Coors Light” went viral in 2023 after she performed it on a Knoxville radio station. You can hear the influence in the track’s bluegrass-tinged sound and winking lyrics, which toast the popular beer while celebrating life on the road: “Well the best advice I ever ate was keep it forward never straight.” Viewers instantly clamored for a proper recording, so she scrambled to book a session at Nashville’s famed RCA Studio A and put out the track within weeks. It’s included on Daredevil, which she self-released earlier this month.
The Lager House was the sixth stop on her tour in support of Daredevil, and by the singer’s own account the room was filled with friends and family who traveled from Up North to Detroit for the show, as well as plenty of obvious fans of “Coors Light.”
The warm-up act was fellow Michigan act the Rupple Brothers, a self-described psychedelic folk ensemble hailing from Chesaning, outside of Saginaw. Featuring brothers Evan and Cole Rupple, the band played a set mixing a variety of rustic influences and was joined by Kimes for a cover of “Forget Me Not” by the former Americana duo the Civil Wars. For their finale, the band performed a long experimental jam in which the fiddle player tapped his instrument with his bow, creating an eerie, otherworldly percussive sound.
Kimes took the stage looking a bit devilish herself in a fire-red outfit and matching nail polish, heeled black boots, and her wild hair tamed by a pair of clips. Her backing band — a fiddle player and an upright bassist — wore matching black Dickies jumpsuits that fit the album’s auto theme.
She sings with a flair for the theatrical and a pop sensibility but also with an undeniable love of country music, which you can hear in Daredevil’s heartbreak tracks like “Triton V8” and “Sawdust.” The set also saw her and her band cover the old bluegrass standard “Lonesome Feeling,” and, for some reason, Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work.” (It is a good cover.)
Other songs bounce with exuberance, like “Barstool Lemonade,” an ode to her father framed as a retort to the disapproval of a conservative woman: “Yeah, I’m somebody’s daughter/ But have you met my father?” You also have to admire anyone who can sing a raunchier track like “He Still Listens to the Radio (Hammer & Nail Me)” with her own mother and grandmother in attendance without blushing.
And “Coors Light” seems primed to be a bar sing-along, if not a commercial jingle, with much of the crowd at the Lager House stomping, clapping, and singing along: “I like Coors Light on draft / Ain’t never seen a picker who can pick like that / Yeah we’ll do it all over in the morning.”
Kimes makes being fearless look so fun.
Follow Midbrow Detroit on social media:
Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X.
