REVIEW BY: Ron Hoysted

"Country Music With An Attitude"

Born in Maysville, Kentucky, Lolene is a natural born creative artist. Her mother, Allene imbued a love of music in Lolene from an early age, Allene and her sister Francis performed as The Singing Dugan Sisters.Lolene's gift of creative writing came from her father, Bill, who among his accomplishments include writing for George Burns and co-authoring a novel, The Damned Don't Cry, which was adapted to a movie starring Joan Crawford 


Lolene's school years included a sharp focus on music. She sang in the school chorus, learned to play guitar, and performed with friends. In the 7th grade Lolene and two friends won a Talent Show and subsequently appeared on Lexington, Kentucky television where they sang "Yesterday".

She became a student of music, rooted in traditional country and folk. Emmylou Harris has been a dominate influence on Lolene's music for many years. However she has been influenced by a broad range of artists such as Dolly Parton, Carly Simon, Rusty Young, Bonnie Raitt, Shania Twain, Trisha Yearwood, The Eagles and the Dixie Chicks.

By mid 90's Lolene began to turn her attention to writing. She drew upon some ideas that dated back to her school years. Her first song "Wasting Your Time" has its roots from those early days. Subsequently, Lolene wrote "With Someone", a ballad inspired by and dedicated to her mother. Lolene frequently begins the writing process with a catchy phrase that forms the nucleus of a chorus. She then creates the verses around the chorus. Examples of this can be found in "Don't Wake Me Up" and "The Deal's Gone Down". Jimmy Fortune of the Statler Brothers has supported and encouraged her to never give up and has freely given his time to offer advice and comment on her songs and singing.

In 2000, Lolene prepared demo tapes of three of her recent songs and sent them to a few publishers of country and pop music. Colonel Buster Doss responded and encouraged Lolene to pursue not only her writing interests but also her singing. In April 2002 Lolene completed the studio work for her debut CD "Lonely Dealin's" all under the artful eye and ear of the Colonel at the Bayou Studio in Nashville, Tennessee. 

"Lonely Dealin's" is a 12 song anthology about human relationships. Eleven of the songs are original materials. Since July 2001 Lolene has released six of these songs as singles to worldwide radio market, and three have received wide airplay around the world to appear on the various Top 40 charts in Europe and Australia. The airplay for the lead song on the CD was sufficient to propel "Slow Burn" to #2. World wide airplay of her 2001 releases from the CD were sufficient to propel Lolene to #73 most played artist in the world for all 2001. Airplay for her first release, "Don't Wake Me Up" was so strong that Lolene rose to #11 on the same most played artist during the last 2 weeks of July 2001.

Other tracks worth a mention are "Me Without You", "The Man I Love", "I Will" and "You Never Come" 

It is hard for me lately, to review albums as I have received so many and most are equal to and in some cases better than the Top Name Artists, (who sometimes don't have that something, so an 12 track album might only have 5 to 7 decent tracks.) Where the independents I have had the pleasure to listen to have a 100% album. And this is one of them with 12 tracks it is hard to pick an outstanding track as they are all easy to listen to, if I was pressed I would have to say The Man I Love, Me Without You and I Will are my favorites. But my advice is buy the album, place it in player, hit repeat and enjoy.