Sometimes episodes of The String lean toward that new, new thing my guests have just put out into the world. Sometimes though, the journey story is so fascinating and special that it takes up most of our time. This week’s pairing of artists from my coverage of Americanafest fell out that way. Whatever I thought I knew about Indigo Girl Amy Ray and extravagant torch country singer Tami Neilson kept giving way to new insights and questions. That said, each artist does have a new solo album and both are looking like finalists for those imminent year-end lists of great Americana recordings.
Tami Neilson has two origin stories. On one hand, she got a powerful head start in the touring music business growing up in a full-time family band in her native Canada. Then she fell in love with a fellow from New Zealand, so she moved there and launched her solo career from scratch in a place with very little country music culture. So the story is one of ingenuity, determination and style. Because the only thing about Tami that’s almost as memorable as her voice is her retro-glam look, her big hair and her epic eyelashes. “I had someone joke once that the reason I sing loud is to be heard over my outfits,” she says with a big laugh.
I find family bands particularly interesting, because as audacious as it is to set out on a music career for yourself, it’s even more so on behalf of and with your kids. Neilson’s clan sang gospel first on a more localized basis around Toronto. Then as she got in her teens and her brother wanted some escape from a school he found unwelcoming, the family went full-time and hit the road playing more and more country music. It was wild, rewarding and precarious.
“It's not a natural, normal way to grow up, you know?” she says. “You're in this cocoon, and you're sheltered. I had my parents there and my brother. But you're also getting a front seat to the music industry, which can be quite dark. And there can be a lot of stuff that you're exposed to at a really young age, you know, people who take advantage or rip you off. So it's a very strange dynamic.”
It was an ideal training ground for becoming a solo singer, except for the unexpected twist of moving to New Zealand to live and raise a family just about twenty years ago. Country music, especially her passion for vintage twang and countrypolitan, was regarded she says as “your grandparents' music,” so she had to adjust her approach. “This is the choice I've made,” she recounts. “I'm going to make my life here. I need to flip it into a positive. And so if there's no country music here, I have less competition. I will make my mark faster. I will stand out. I'll be unique and different. And so I kind of just started to carve my own path.” That included opening for Emmylou Harris and other opportunities she’s sure wouldn’t have fallen her way had she been in Nashville.
Kingmaker is Neilson’s fifth album, a distilled cocktail of all that’s endeared her to audiences down under and in Europe and the US - swooning grandeur, punchy grooves and songs of feminine power. Her voice starts soaring a few seconds into track one and never stops surprising us.
Amy Ray’s rise to fame has been better documented, but one day after she and her lifelong friend Emily Saliers were given the "Spirit of Americana" Free Speech Award for activism in music, we went deep into how and why the Indigo Girls put their shoulder to the wheel on behalf of others. It was part of their world from the beginning playing bars around Five Points in Atlanta in the 1980s, Ray said. She’d grown up in a conservative Christian environment where service and tithing were ingrained. Saliers’ family was politically progressive and activist, making for a fascinating dynamic. They lent their music to causes right away, particularly in response to the AIDS epidemic.
I asked Amy if younger artists today might think they needed to hold off on playing benefits and leaning into activism until they got their artistic and financial footing, and she said no, because artists can do well by doing good. “It’s synergistic,” she tells me. “And the activism within your community is sort of like nurturing the ecosystem that you live in. And it's richer for it. So you gain the camaraderie of the other musicians. You automatically have a network of people then, and then you share gigs. It's not why you should do benefits. But I'll tell you that the result of all the activism work we did early on, gave us more opportunity than if we hadn't done any of it, for sure.”
The other main part of our conversation had to do with Amy’s solo career, which got going just after 2000, supported by Daemon Records, which she launched in 1990 as a home for iconoclastic indie artists. Her first direction rocked pretty hard with material that was punkier than anything the Indigo Girls might record, as open-minded as they were. Then later country songs began coming out, and she formed a band around those sounds that’s stayed almost entirely intact for ten years, through three albums and numerous solo tours.
The newest, If It All Goes South, investigates living with joy and purpose and leaving the world better than we find it. Guests abound here including Allison Russell, Sarah Jarosz, Natalie Hemby and old friend and protege Brandi Carlile. The music is relaxed but vivid, all building to a gospel crescendo.
