STANDING UP& STICKING OUT
As country music singer Tami Neilson tours New Zealand this month, she’s riding high on global acclaim. But radio still decides a singer’s star power. Carly Gibbs reports.
WHEN YOU THINK OF Tami Neilson, think of her not as a regular country music gal, but as a “cowgirl-drag queen meets Disney princess”.
“What I wear is just another creative expression,” she says, of a career spent both “standing up and sticking out”, while rocking a curtain fringe and beehive hairdo.
Although for her new album Kingmaker, released last month, she’s swapped that beehive — once teased with hairspray, then swapped for hair extensions and, for promotional purposes, a wig, to bold crowns and headpieces that she’s handmade or bought.
“If I don’t have something on my head
I’m losing my mojo,” the Canadian ex-pat laughs.
That mojo has made her an appealing singer and songwriter in an imperfect, oldfashioned genre. Only 13 per cent of country music radio across the US is made up of women, and in New Zealand, where she’s lived since 2007, we have no country music stations.
Neilson’s yet to win over radio’s commercial powerhouses, and without their support, no country singer can be considered a “mainstream” success.
This is despite the fact she’s an award-winning artist and shares a single with American country music legend Willie Nelson on Kingmaker, an album that ranks in the top five on the New Zealand music charts, and is charting at 25 in the US top 50.
She’s in the midst of a New Zealand tour, before heading to Europe and then Nashville, performing at Tauranga’s Baycourt Community and Arts Centre tonight , with Chamber Music New Zealand.
C
ountry legend Harlan Howard famously described a country song as “three chords and the truth” and Neilson,
45, is a vocal advocate for things like gender equality in the industry. Something that’s seen as a “drawback” when it comes to success, but she’s pragmatic.
There’s never been a better time for independent artists, such as herself, to connect directly with their fans and say what they want to say.
Her voice challenges the “kingmakers” or gatekeepers of the music industry to hold her back, something she was inspired to write about while simultaneously writing the live show The F Word - Songs of Feminism in Country Music, with Dr Jada Watson, professor of musicology at the University of Ottawa.
“It’s telling the stories of Dolly Parton to Loretta Lynn, to today; their obstacles and how the industry is stacked up against women. It’s sobering and can feel daunting, but it also lit a fire in me,” Neilson says, adding that she doesn’t worry what others think.
“I’m not just going to sing about pickup trucks and tight blue jeans and shaking your arse on a Friday night. I have something to say, and most definitely country music is one of the most conservative genres, that’s stuck in the past. In a world where this genre was built on excluding women, excluding people of colour, it has pretty established, deeplyrooted, rotten foundations.”
In her track King of Country Music, she asks “could the king of country music be the daughter, not the son?”
Green Peaches’ lyrics are about young women being exploited by music industry sharks. Ain’t My Job features every bothersome man that ever crossed her path, and Careless Woman just sums her up.
“When people listen to my music and they feel empowered, stronger, encouraged and uplifted, they’re seeing what’s in themselves, but when you listen to my music and you feel challenged or defensive, you’re just holding up a mirror. It actually has very little to do with me. My hope is that it makes people think, and any change only ever starts with making people feel a bit uncomfortable with the way things are,” Neilson says.
“It’s not what you do if you want to be ragingly successful,” she acknowledges, but it’s not her number one priority.
“I feel like I was put on this earth for more of a purpose than that.”
I’m not just going to sing about pickup trucks and tight blue jeans and shaking
your arse on a Friday night.
TAMI NEILSON
K ingmaker was written during
lockdowns, which informed her songwriting.
“We’ve all gone through trauma in the past two years, and as a musician, that was a big reckoning to not be able to work and tour, but also as a woman in a pandemic who has small children, there have been articles calling it a “she-cession”, with a massive disappearance of women in the workplace, it’s setting back the progress of [the fight against] inequality. Those things inform the album because I was writing in the midst of that.”
Neilson recorded it at Roundhead Studios, owned by Neil Finn of Crowded House. Willie Nelson famously features in the track Beyond the Stars, a song about love and loss.
While Nelson recorded remotely — the two connected through his wife Annie online — she got to meet him at his Texas Luck Ranch this year, where she performed with him on stage at Luck Reunion.
“I am going to be that grandmother that tells this story a million times.”
After the death of her father, Neilson wrote their duet to express the grief she was feeling. Meanwhile, Nelson — at the time of her visit — had just lost his sister Bobbi Nelson.
“Bobbi was his right arm. She was his piano player for 40 years and played on all his albums.”
Arriving at Luck Ranch, just days after Bobbi’s death, she was cautious their meeting might not go ahead — but it did, and was better than she could have hoped for, despite her feeling incredibly nervous.
“He was so lovely; so generous. Everything you think Willie Nelson would be like, that is him. He’s just authentically a down-to-earth Texas boy. You kind of forget he’s a massive global superstar because he doesn’t act that way.
“I remember walking into his house and he was sitting on his kitchen bench. [He has] this big, open, beautiful log cabin. He got down from the bench and he walked over and I was like ‘Oh’. He was quite small. I thought he was going to be this towering figure, right? He was in his T-shirt and jog pants like a grandad, you know? He had his long braids.”
The pair immediately connected and Neilson gifted him a custom-made cowboy hat from Hills Hats in Wellington. Black, with starry fabric lining, and a dark blue leather band — a nod to their Beyond the Stars track.
“I thought he’s probably got a million cowboy hats, but he doesn’t have a custom one from New Zealand. I handed it to him and he just went ‘woah, that’s a beautiful hat’.”
Sitting in Nelson’s lounge, his compliments didn’t end there. As they rehearsed, he would momentarily stop and praise Neilson: ”’That’s a good line right there’. Even now, it just feels so surreal. Did I dream that?” she says.
N eilson is sweet and modest, given she’s
been in the performing world since she was a child.
As a baby, she was held by Roy Orbison, while her father Ron played a supporting act on stage. She sang with Nashville star Kitty Wells at age 10 and opened for Loretta Lynn. Later, her family band The Neilsons, made up of her parents and brothers Todd and Jay, toured Canada, the US and the Caribbean, opening for acts like Johnny Cash, before she moved to New Zealand for love, and established her own solo career.
She has five albums to her name; and has provided the soundtrack for the New Zealand TV show The Brokenwood Mysteries for all eight series. Next month she makes a cameo appearance on the show.
“Everywhere I go, all over the world, people come up to me after shows and go ‘I discovered you on The Brokenwood Mysteries. I’ve always said to them ‘I want a cameo.’ I’m not an actress, but I want to be a dead person or a waitress. So, writer Tim Balme said: ‘we can do you one better and you can be yourself. The whole episode is going to be about your new album’.”
She recently returned from a Canadian tour promoting Kingmaker, where she
says travelling internationally now is “insanity”, not to mention musicians aren’t “match fit” like they were pre-covid.
Travelling to Canada was her first international tour in three years. During that time, every one of her flights was delayed and the airline lost her guitar.
“It didn’t turn up until two days before I left,” Neilson says.
“I flew home with [a] lovely new guitar to start my New Zealand tour, and they lost my guitar again.
“It arrived, thank goodness, the day before I did my first show.”
This time she’s left “Gibby”, the vintage Gibson guitar her dad gifted her when she was 18, at home and is using the “Barbie drag queen” guitar she purchased in Canada, which she’s named Minty.
“It looks like a guitar Dolly Parton would have. It’s mint green with crazy, gaudy gold trim. It’s this little parlour guitar and as soon as I saw it, I fell in love.”
Neilson brings vintage glamour to the stage in an array of 1950s rockabilly outfits, fringed dresses and suits.
To have one of the best-selling and moststreamed albums in New Zealand is proof that New Zealanders love country, she says.
Radio New Zealand and a few independent stations play her tracks, but commercial stations choose not to platform it, unlike North America, where country is one of the most successful genres in Canada and the US, and is considered mainstream.
“It’s disappointing and it can be really frustrating,” Neilson says from her home in Waimauku, West Auckland, that she shares with her husband Grant, and their two sons, Charlie, 10, and Sam, 8.
“Having your song played on mainstream radio is like having an ad play, and I think it’s wonderful that local acts like L.A.B. and Six60 can sell out stadiums, but that’s because of that important support. It’s for album sales and festival headline slots, and it grows your audience. Radio is still a really important tool for that. But you know, you just gotta keep plugging away.”
Overseas reaction to her album has been “beyond what I could have dreamed and expected”, she says as she works to crack the international scene.
Rolling Stone magazine hailed her as “a fire-breathing R&B belter on her own terms”.
“Every morning at the moment, I wake up and there’s a review from somewhere overseas and it feels like Christmas. There are all these firsts for me — being reviewed by The Guardian and Mojo Magazine, everywhere from Germany to France, Australia . . . Just these incredible reviews. It’s just wonderful to see that people are getting the album, it’s connecting, and that feels so rewarding.”
Asked if she’ll need to move from New Zealand to grow her artistry further, she says she’s unsure.
“I still have homesickness for my family, and Canada is part of my identity, but I think where you choose to put down roots, and where you grow your family, it has a different depth of relationship.
“New Zealand is my heart,” Neilson says. ■ Tami Neilson performs at Baycourt tonight, 7.30pm. For tickets, visit ticketek.co.nz. Her cameo appearance in The Brokenwood Mysteries, airs on September 4, on TVNZ1.