Beyond the Stars reaction ‘beyond my wildest dreams’

SINGER Tami Neilson might have pulled off one of the biggest coups in Kiwi country music – a duet with Willie Nelson on her new single Beyond the Stars, but there’s a truly tear-jerking back story to the whole event.

Neilson and ubiquitous producer-performer Delaney Davidson wrote the song as a tribute to their late fathers but couldn’t have believed at the time that they’d manage to get Nelson to share the mic for the song when it came to polishing it ready for Neilson’s July release of new album Kingmaker.

Even more incredibly, the video for the song was shot at Nelson’s Luck Reunion festival in the Texas hill country near Austen when the man who wrote Crazy for Patsy Cline joined Neilson on stage for the surprise duet – stunning the packed crowd and leading to a heap of headlines in the United States.

‘‘This song was written about the loss of my Dad, but with the loss of Willie’s beloved Sister Bobbie the week before Luck Reunion, it took on even more meaning to perform it with Willie, and I really wanted to honour her as well,’’ Neilson says.

‘‘Having Willie be the voice of my father in this duet is jsut something beyond my wildest dreams. I cried for three days after it was recorded, listening to it and thinking about how absolutely overwhelmed and proud my Dad, a musician and a huge Willie Nelson fan, would have been.’’

As well as the huge positive reaction Stateside to the duet, Neilson has been inundated with messages from fans who have been deeply touched by the song.

‘‘I’ve had people telling me they’ve had to pull over in traffic as they cried hearing it on the radio... I’ve listened to it a million times over the past six months and it still makes me cry,’’ she says.