GO BIG OR GO HOME? TAMI NEILSON, DRAMA QUEEN, DOES BOTH part two

Who are you calling dramatic? Photo by Alexa King Stone

THE HARD-CUT FRINGE and the glossy clothes, the rockabilly skank and the truth-telling lyrics, the country belter and the Kiwi address with a Canuck accent. It’s true, Tami Neilson will tell you, you can be two things – or more – at once. But here’s a confession for her today as we’re linked across the Tasman by the interwebs and a camera: I like her chugging country songs, really like the messaging and soul infecting it too, can get energised just putting on one of her albums, but I love, like really love, the dramatic – hell, let’s say it, the full-bodied, ballads.

Full-bodied ballads? Yep, the ones on her new album, Neon Cowgirl, showing the influence of Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley and k.d. lang; the kind that are quite rare these days, given the full flourish of strings and orchestral drums, rising to snow peaks of love and pain from the very depths of despair, all strong emotions worn on the chest not just the sleeve.

“From the way I sing, the way I write, the way I dress, it’s like go big or go home,” Neilson says, owning the description. “I feel like a lot of music today, and I mean our culture [misses it] because when you watch shows or movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s there is this nobody is being cool thing; everybody is, as my kids would call it, cringe. Because you are wearing your heart on your sleeve, you are putting yourself out there very vulnerably.

“I can remember speaking to Victoria Kelly, who did the string arrangements on this album as well as the last, and she is a very tasteful arranger. I said to her, I want you to leave all your taste at the door. Roy Orbison went whole hog. He left nothing out: it was full country opera basically. And so over the top, and all the endings turn into this huge crescendo, and it’s like oh my God, take it down a notch Roy. But I’m not interested in taking it down any notches; I want all of it. I want full cheese: I want brie, I want camembert, I want mozzarella. I want all the cheese.”

So this album is the musical equivalent of a four cheese pizza?

“And who doesn’t like cheese?”

Well, yes, though I must lodge an objection here. I know what she is saying, but I would clarify that the effect is anything like cheesiness bordering on sickly, with taste left at the door. When Neilson lets it go, it’s dramatic, it’s unabashed, it’s further than most people go, but it feels right, it suits the songs. And it’s fun.

“Yes, I would say it’s not no taste but no restraint. It’s not cool to really give it all and be full flags flying; it’s cooler to be mysterious and keep things close to the chest and all that kind of thing. But that’s just not the kind of artist I am, or the kind of writer or performer I am.

“So I may as well just be,” she says, with a throaty chuckle, “unapologetically too much.”

When she has in the past gone big with a hearty rockabilly sound and full-throated singing at the front, that seems perfectly fine and no one says anything about cheesy. So why should she hold back in the ballads? And go little bit further this time.

“I think it all comes back to serving the song. If the song is a big bold, dramatic song, then yeah. But then there’s a song like Loneliness Of Love, which is very restrained. Even though I could sing it bigger, that doesn’t serve the story. Knowing when to paint really boldly, with big strokes, and then to be intimate and restrained.”

It’s not just the sound that goes hard. This is an album that takes on the idea of dreaming something beyond the plainly obvious, of remembering what it was like to aspire before “reality” supposedly nullified that. So if you are going to write songs about finding your dream and making it real – say, for example, getting Willie Nelson to sing on a song a few years ago, then becoming his friend and touring buddy –you have to allow the full range to show.

“Absolutely. I think in the context of how this album was written, the lowest of the lows experienced before and during, and then the highs that were experienced …,” her voice trails off, then Neilson refocuses. “I think that life in general, you’d like to think you can have a time that is just experiencing joy without pain, but almost always we experience both simultaneously. And the joy is that much sweeter for the pain that we have gone through to experience it, and the pain is that much more bearable because of the joy that we get to experience.

“They are always intertwined and that is what was processed through the making of this album.”

And this is not just some writerly/interview cliché for her on an album full of songs examining resilience and survival, with not just her own issues but the fact her regular collaborator in songwriting and on stage, her brother Jay, was in a coma while she recorded Neon Cowgirl.

“People look at the journey of this last year and go, ‘oh my God you are killing it: you are playing with Willie, you played the Opry, you did all these things, man I’m so happy for the journey you are on’, not knowing that at the same time this year has been the hardest I have worked through with my brother’s health, and before that my health.”

For Neilson, things started going wrong a couple months before the planned big, back-to-my-roots, family road trip across Canada she talked about in part one of this interview. She ended up in ICU with sepsis and a collapsed lung, thinking “Is this it now? Will I ever be able to sing the way I used to sing?” That subsequent road trip, intended not just to show the kids her roots but to really put in some solid work on building her profile in North America, became instead “this journey of healing” as she built her lung capacity up again and slowly returned to the dynamic performances that had made her reputation.

Then when she returned home to write with Jay, a relatively straightforward operation for him turned complicated and almost fatal as he suffered multiple seizures and a stroke.

“He had to have half of his skull removed because of the swelling of his brain, so for the past 10 months he’s had his skull out, his right hand has been paralysed, he can’t read or write – he has aphasia – and it’s only been in the last six weeks that he had his skull replaced,” she explains.

“Within 48 hours [of this skull replacement] his hand had mobility again, he is starting to read and write again. So it’s been a pretty hopeless past year, but then to have this injection of hope and all these positive gains in his recovery, has been incredible.”

And remember, all of this was happening at the same time as the album coming together, this tour she is on right now with Nelson and Bob Dylan being planned, and people’s responses to the new songs being so effusive. If you put even a quarter of that into a country song, people would mock you for being over the top. Probably call you dramatic.

“It’s so crazy," she laughs. "It has to be true."

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Mad Facts Too: Tami Neilson Road Worrier – part one of this interview 

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Tamil Neilson’s Neon Cowgirl is out on July 11