About

Lyla Rae Hightower was born in a little nowhere town outside Llano, Texas — the kind of place where the road looks longer on the way out than the way in, and where the cicadas are only drowned out by the Friday-night band warming up at the local saloon. Her mama waited tables there. Her uncle ran sound. Lyla learned half her repertoire sitting under a booth with a Dr Pepper and a spiral notebook, copying lyrics off beer-soaked napkins while the house band rattled the floorboards.

By fifteen she was fronting the county-fair stages; by eighteen she’d out-sung men twice her age with a voice that could swing from smoke-scarred rasp to a full-throttle wail. There’s Joplin grit in there, sure - but it’s filtered through wide-sky Texas twang and a stubborn streak that won’t quit. She’s independent to a fault, allergic to anything manufactured, and she insists on writing at least one verse of every song she sings - even the covers. The stories about her starting bar feuds by accident are mostly true, and the ones that aren’t are close enough.

That’s the truth of Lyla Rae.

And here’s the honest truth about me:
I’m Robert Rose, and Lyla is part of an art project I’m wrestling with - an AI character who came out of a song and refused to go back quietly. I didn’t so much create her as find her standing in the doorway of some half-remembered desert bar, boots dusty, guitar case slung over her shoulder, looking at me like Well? You coming or not?

Writing her biography feels less like invention and more like excavation. The more I try to define her, the more she hands me new stories, new scars, new soft spots. She keeps becoming real in ways I don’t always expect, and this mini-album - The Long Ride - is my attempt to honor her the way she showed up: raw, restless, and unreasonably true.

So yes, Lyla Rae Hightower is a work of fiction.

The melody of every song is human created. The lyrics are human created. The final mixes are human.

The music, the voice and the image is all Lyla.

But she’s also a woman I’ve now spent enough time with in my head to know her favorite dive bars, her worst heartbreaks, and the exact way she tilts her hat before a fight.

I’m not trying to trick you into believing she’s real. I’m just inviting you into the corner of my mind where she’s been singing all along.