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“To have a home for artists who are left of center is necessary,” says Kacey Musgraves, the revived label’s first signee.
The year was 2000. Y2K had come and gone without a hitch. Cell phones were still a novelty and not yet an appendage. And a decidedly analog album was taking the country by storm.
The arrival of O Brother, Where Art Thou in December of that year, a soundtrack that went on to sell over eight million copies and win two Grammys (including album of the year at the 2002 awards), put a little-known label called Lost Highway on the map. Its sound — a blend of Americana, bluegrass and Appalachian standards — hit a chord. The company’s roster, which included Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello and eventually a 23-year-old newcomer named Kacey Musgraves, proved its vitality upon launch.
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In many ways, Lost Highway was ahead of its time. It identified career artists that could thrive outside of the Nashville system and gave them the freedom to explore their own musical paths. It was as artist-friendly as a major-label imprint could be, thanks in large part to its founder, respected music executive Luke Lewis, who’d cut his teeth working multi-platinum smashes like Shania Twain’s The Woman in Me, and also signed the likes of Chris Stapleton.
“Lost Highway is a brand and a label that I had so much respect for, being an indie and seeing how they were doing things differently,” says John Janick, chairman of Interscope Capitol Labels Group. “It was very entrepreneurial and [went] against the grain of what had normally been done. As a fan, I’d bought records from Lost Highway and loved the story of it.”
But like so many music industry tales, the label burned hot and fast. A decade in, it faced a new music ecosystem with the 2012 arrival of Spotify to the U.S. That same year, Universal Music Group absorbed EMI creating an industry giant with a bottom line. Lewis left and Musgraves moved to Mercury Nashville, leaving Lost Highway dormant — until this year, when it was revived under the Interscope banner.
“It tickled me to hear it,” says Lewis of the Lost Highway revival. “And particularly that Kacey was interested — we stayed in touch, and I’ve always been proud of that one.”
And with good reason. Musgraves was the last artist signed to Lost Highway before its roster was absorbed by Mercury Nashville in 2013 and went on to become a bonafide country star — with an Americana bent — winning eight Grammy Awards and selling out arenas all over the world. At the same time, she’s moved around the Universal system, joint-releasing her last two albums through MCA Nashville and Interscope (label home to Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga).
Staying under the Interscope banner proved key for Musgraves as she now returns to Lost Highway as its first signing.
“In this world where there are so many varying degrees of genre, to have a home for artists who are left of center is necessary,” Musgraves told THR in an exclusive digital cover story announcing her Lost Highway signing.
Of Musgraves, says Janick: “She’s exactly the type of artist that we would look for. We want to be the best at doing kind of the traditional things at record labels but always think outside the box. Everything I’ve ever worked on is finding great artists and support them in every way possible. It’s not about shortcuts; it’s about supporting their artistry. [It shouldn’t be] ‘something has to happen right away for them.’ You want people that are going to move and shape culture versus follow it. And she’s one of those artists.”
Musgraves’ longtime manager Jason Owen, who worked at the original Lost Highway and has remained close with Lewis, brought the idea to Janick and, while he doesn’t hold an official role at the label, his passion has helped guide it to fruition. Janick appointed Robert Knotts and Jake Gear to co-head the label together. Knotts worked with other alt-country acts like Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson while working at Thirty Tigers, and Gear comes from UMG Nashville, where he worked with artists including Tucker Wetmore.
Lost Highway’s revival comes at a time where there are many options when it comes to releasing country music, even just internally at UMG. Last month, the world’s largest music company announced a major shift for its Nashville division as it has now rebranded as the Music Corporation of America, taking on UMG’s former namesake. All that’s to say nothing of smaller UMG-affiliated entities like Big Loud, home to Morgan Wallen, whose music is distributed by Republic. A source familiar with the matter tells THR that competition was high within the UMG system for the storied label, with the Republic collective interested in Lost Highway as well.
“It was natural,” says Lewis of aligning with Interscope. “Not to cast any dispersions on anybody, but Republic is structured differently. And Interscope has a staff that’s adept and equipped to deal with the kinds of artists where it’s not about having a promotion staff to get them on the radio. So I feel like Lost Highway ended up in the right place.”
“Everybody wants to sign great artists,” says Janick. “What we try to do in every genre of music is be respectful of the genre, but also not limit artists and tell them that’s where they should be. I think if you look at what we’ve done in the Latin space in particular, we hired great executives in Miami and built a full team that has the expertise, but plug it back into what we do at Interscope and give an artist every resource that they could possibly want. It’s very important to understand where an artist comes from.”
Authenticity is certainly on the mind of many Nashville music-makers. Riding on the stratospheric success of Wallen, a proven and perennial hitmaker, and the unorthodox approach of live phenomenon Zach Bryan, in addition to crossover successes like Post Malone (whose “I Had Some Help” featuring Wallen was one of the biggest songs of 2024), the coasts are coming for country in all its forms.
Lewis has heard this record before but he never imagined seeing terms so favorable to artists, and certainly not at Universal. “When I was quitting, I didn’t feel like Universal was game to meet the terms that [companies] like Thirty Tigers were offering, or inclined to make the kind of artist-friendly deals that I thought needed to happen,” he says. “I never dreamed that within Universal we could flip the script and do an 80-20 deal in the artists’ favor.”
In fact, one of the last things Lewis did before retiring to a quieter life in South Carolina with his wife Lauren, a former music publicity executive, was “let a bunch of artists out of their deals,” he shares. “I felt like I was setting people free, rather than leaving them tangled up. Some got masters back and I tried to be as righteous as I could about it because I felt that I was bailing on them.”
A decade on, Lewis still grapples with his exit. “You got the mainstream country thing, which is MAGA, and it was all dictated by country radio, which is sort of an evil stepbrother to the MAGA thing; that was one of the main reasons why I quit,” he reveals. “I couldn’t do that shit anymore. I didn’t understand the audience. And I didn’t want to. Shame on me? Maybe, but I was having a hard time promoting things I didn’t appreciate.”
In the decade since, UMG has seen a succession of label heads in Nashville. Mike Dungan ran the division from 2012 until his retirement in 2023, and his replacement Cindy Mabe left UMG back in February, with Mike Harris taking the helm instead. Before Mabe’s February exit, she actually had soft-launched the idea of a Lost Highway revival back in January, with T Bone Burnett involved with her. The label released Ringo Starr’s country album Looking Up.
Burnett will be working with the Interscope-fronted Lost Highway on several projects, including an anniversary edition of the O Brother soundtrack.
“We started Lost Highway Records with the O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack in 2000,” Burnett said in a statement. “As we were only able to release a fraction of what we had recorded at the time, I’m looking forward to working with the Lost Highway Team — Robert Knotts and Jake Gear, and of course John Janick and Steve Berman, to complete the work we started 25 years ago, and to get behind some of the extraordinary artists that emerged, and are still emerging, in this century in the deep world of American Music.”
Indeed, Burnett’s return, along with Musgraves, really would bring Lost Highway full circle. Now if only they can get a vinyl edition of O Brother to the plant in time to coincide with its 25th anniversary in December. “It makes me me feel old,” says Lewis, remembering the elaborate packaging designed for the CD and how business affairs balked at the spend. “I thought it was going to be one of those records for people who maybe bought one CD a year, like a coffee table kind of a CD. They said we overspent by like $350,000. I was thinking, I’m pretty sure we’re going to break even. The soundtrack grossed more than the film! It did like $60 to $70 million in CD sales … We had to track down songwriters to pay them royalties — these were people living in the mountains who never dreamed of such a thing.”
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