Lola Kirke doesn’t feel British (she was born in London) or completely American (her family moved to New York when she and her siblings were still kids). Although she got her artistic career started as an actor, she doesn’t fully view herself as one, either. She’s a musician, too, but sometimes feels like she’s isn’t really one.

Kirke, who starred in Amazon classical-music-centered series “Mozart in the Jungle” and 2015 indie film “Mistress America” with Greta Gerwig and appeared in other popular films like “Gone Girl” and “American Made” with Tom Cruise, certainly has art in her blood, though. She’s the daughter of Bad Company and Free drummer Simon Kirke. Sister Jemima Kirke, a painter, was Jessa Johansson on HBO’s “Girls.” Sister Domino is a singer (and celebrity doula!). Brother Greg is a photographer. Their mother, Lorraine Kirke, owns New York boutique Geminola, which dressed the stars of “Sex and the City.”

Lola, the youngest of her siblings, started making music in her late teens, played in a band and eventually fell in love with country.

“I think because I’m really earnest; that’s how I came into country,” Kirke said following a soundcheck at the Regency Ballroom, where she performed in late March. “There’s something incredibly feminine about country, or I love the way women … have been able to be really empowered, like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Their personal stories may conflict with this idea, but the way they seemed, there was a strength. Even if they were singing about being submissive—it’s like, men in country are always crying; women are always, ‘I’m leaving’ or whatever.”

She released head-turning debut LP Heart Head West in 2018, but after numerous rejections by labels to release new album Lady for Sale (out April 29 on Third Man Records), she sometimes doubts her place.

“Maybe it’s the actress in me that seeks out different roles to play, and sometimes I wonder if this is a fucking role,” she said, matter-of-factly.

The question sometimes scares her—who is she if this music thing is just a phase or a role?—but she doesn’t view that in a negative light.

“Maybe that’s how I’m going to live this life, is just by inhabiting different roles at different times, whether they’re on screen or in my actual life,” she said.

Lady for Sale is an entirely pleasing listen composed of songs that swing from traditional-ish country to twangy pop. “Broken Families,” which opens the album, is a duet with Courtney Marie Andrews and is purposefully the most country-sounding song on the album.

Kirke listened to Andrews’ album May Your Kindness Remain while living in L.A. and DM’d her to show her appreciation. Later that year, they played at the same show in Brooklyn and started getting to know each other. By the time the pandemic began, they were good friends.

The mid-tempo tune, which prominently features pedal steel guitar, came from the two wanting to write a song for country radio. For Kirke, the desire came after falling in love with the romanticized version of Nashville on the TV show of the same name. She’d decided she wanted to become a songwriter for other artists.

“I thought that would be really fun if I started writing hits for other people. … That would be a good role to play in life,” she said. They’d hoped to sell the song to someone else. But that proved to be a bigger challenge than they’d anticipated. “It was a little too oddball for anyone else to sing it. And apparently it’s a lot harder to write a No. 1 for somebody else.”

So instead, they shifted gears to see what they could get away with by listening to hot country radio and searching for the least desirable melody they could find—call it “hate-listening,” a la hatewatching—and turning it into something that excited them.

Texas producer Austin Jenkins (Leon Bridges), who has cowriting credits throughout the album, gave Kirke the idea, she said.

“That was me and Courtney’s version of a country Hot 100 hit,” she said.

For the last two years, Lola Kirke has been splitting time in Nashville. Courtney Marie Andrews lives close by. She pays tribute to her new home in both the videos for “Broken Families” (filmed on iconic Lower Broadway) and the retro, laidback “Pink Sky” (in and around her new home with her Maltese Shih Tzu pup, Santino).

Lyrically, most of the songs on Lady for Sale are about falling in love at the wrong time, and as Kirke describes it, about longing and wanting more. Poppy synth-laden bop “Better Than Any Drug” plays like a tribute to ‘80s Madonna, or as a cross of Shania Twain and Devo. Kirke said she was challenged to write a pop song like what she’d want to hear as an 11-year-old. Album closer “By Your Side” is the kind of ballad that could play at the closing credits of a John Hughes film. Good time anthem “Stay Drunk” is tailormade for honky-tonks on Broadway.

The title track isn’t outwardly related to the theme of love, neither wanted nor unwanted. After finishing her album, Kirke pitched her album to numerous indie labels—”As much as I love country music, I was very saddened to learn that the kind of music I make is nowhere near the kind of music that commercial country would put out,” she said—and was getting rejected left and right.

At the same time, her acting career looked like it had dried up. Kirke has said that she thought others looked at her weight as a problem, which humiliated her. She felt like she was trying to sell herself, and no one was buying.

“Lady for Sale” wasn’t originally planned for the album, she said. It was a thematic outlier. And it’s the only song on Lady for Sale that Kirke wrote completely by herself.

“It felt like an extension of where I was in my life at that point,” she said. “The song, and the record itself, is very much a kind of journey. Even though it’s not chronological on the record, it’s about exploding your life and finding a new life and then settling into the reality of that new life and being like, ‘Wow, it’s still life.’  … Even when you get what you want, you’re still going to be disappointed by a million things.”

In a way, she said, she’s still longing for something on the title track, even if that something, in this case, is not romantic in nature. The song is about how everyone wants something, regardless of how much they already have. Kirke said she thought about how she knows extremely successful people who still check to see how many likes their selfies get on Instagram because of their insecurity.

“The song talks about a woman who’s playing for nobody at a bar … and maybe she’s happier,” she said. “There’s all these other wants. I’m a fucking brat. But I’m good at not getting what I want, too.”

She didn’t try to approach country labels, but the indies in Nashville were confused by her music, too. She wanted to be outside the mold, but grappled with wanting others to appreciate what she had to offer.

“I think that I’m not really making anything that’s right down the line of simple indie/folk/Americana, and I understand why people sometimes don’t really know what to do with me,” she said.

Every career rejection has helped Kirke better understand her goals, she said. Eventually, she found a home at Jack White’s Third Man Records, whose creative director lives next door to her and bought into her vision.

As she was in the study recording Lady for Sale, Kirke’s other career got a jolt when she was offered the part of Jerry West’s wife on HBO show “Winning Time,” about the L.A. Lakers’ “Showtime” dynasty.

She wasn’t a basketball fan and didn’t know anything about the Lakers or Jerry West, but dove into research, reading West’s biography and the book on which the show is based. It was her first TV show since “Mozart in the Jungle” and a completely different experience, playing a real person, alongside an already established cast, and shooting on film rather than digitally, which she said is a rarity in TV.

“That came out of nowhere,” she said. I [thought], ‘Well, maybe if I never act again, this record will do something for me.’ And then I got a call.”

With that show airing, she’s now filming Showtime series “Three Women,” an adaptation of the 2019 nonfiction book by Lisa Taddeo. That’s not to be confused with an early in development Broadway production of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” to which she’s also attached.

“I grew up doing theater but never professionally. It’s fun getting to be on stage in this capacity,” she said.

So for the time being, at least, it seems like Lola Kirke has options of the roles she wants to play.

“It’s kind of a copout, doing two things, because it’s like having a wife and a girlfriend; you can always go to the other one,” she said, laughing.

Acting is the wife, and music the girlfriend.

“I’m not, like, poly- at all; it’s going to be really hard for me to figure this out,” she said.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter. Follow photographer Nathan McKinley at Instagram.com/memories.by.mckinley.