I walked away from my interview with Angaleena Presley speechless. By far the most honest interview I’ve ever had, Angaleena opened up to me so much about her life, her past and what many of the stories behind her songs on her debut solo album American Middle Class dealt with. I’m always grateful when an artist opens up so freely because talking about some of these songs is like giving me her diary to read. Like music, sometimes and interview can be therapy, and I can only hope I helped her get some of these thoughts off her chest and out into the world. Read some of our chat below.
“I got introduced to the world as Holler Annie with these two blondes beside me,” Angaleena told me of her bandmates Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe of the Pistol Annies. “I feel like I had to get in a band, make history and kick down a door so I could walk through it as a solo artist…I’m an older artist and I could sit there and be like, ‘Oh this should have happened.’ No. If it didn’t happen like this, you wouldn’t have had this story to write or this song that so many people connect with. I feel like everything happened the way it was supposed to happen for me.”
Angaleena has no trouble speaking her mind and American Middle Class makes that clear. On each of the 12 tracks, she gives an honest portrayal of her life covering the moments that others may want to forget. On “Drunk,” which Presley wrote with Sarah Siskind (who has written for Alison Krauss), she details the hurdles she faced during the “most horrific, tumultuous, part of my marriage,”
“I had gotten pregnant three months after knowing my ex-husband,” she recalls. “We were both wild, living the artist lifestyle and I got pregnant and I grew up and he really struggled with it. He just couldn’t do it. I went to write that day and I just started venting to [Siskind] because a lot of times writing appointments that’s like our therapy. We can’t really afford therapy at that stage in our career so we are literally each others’ therapists.”
While it felt good to get these things off her chest, Presley admits that she’s worried to play the song for her seven-year-old son being that it’s a “laundry list of how my marriage ended.”
“It’s so scary to think about the day that he puts two and two together and he’s like, ‘Oh, daddy did that?’” she says. “I’ve always tried to be really honest with him.”
While sitting with Presley at a French bakery in the heart of Midtown, she even tells a “TMI” story about how she had to explain menstruation to her son after he found a tampon in her car. “He’s like, ‘What is this?’ and I explained to him a woman’s cycle,” she says. “So I feel like that’s how I’m going to handle it. ‘Mommy and Daddy were young and wild and you were in Mommy’s tummy and Daddy didn’t have a baby in his tummy and it took him longer to be a grownup.’ I think I just figured it out in this interview. That sounded pretty good to me.”
Read our complete chat on Radio.com.