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31 Days of Women: Angaleena Presley

Angaleena Presley

Courtesy: Marushka Media

While I’ve already highlighted Ashley Monroe and the Pistol Annies as part of my 31 Days of Women feature, I figured it might be best to showcase each member of the trio individually. Angaleena Presley has remained one of my favorite interviews because of the honesty she shared in our chat nearly four years ago. I sat down with the singer in a cafe in New York City to discuss her debut solo album, American Middle Class, and throughout our lengthy chat there were tears, laughter and many life realizations.

“I got introduced to the world as Holler Annie with these two blondes beside me,” she tells me of her bandmates Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe. “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.”

Many people resonated with her critically acclaimed debut, where 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,” she details the hurdles she faced during the “most horrific, tumultuous, part of my marriage” and likens writing the song to therapy.

 

 

Meanwhile, previous single “Ain’t No Man” best describes Presley’s perseverance and perhaps her feminist leanings.

“I just think women are amazing creatures and I’m so glad that I am a woman. I just want to empower women,” she says. “We still have to fight for equality. I think we’re a group of people who have been discriminated against, probably more than any other group on the planet. I just feel like we need to stick together. We need to love our men, but we need to make sure that they don’t take advantage.”

She adds, “Ain’t no man gonna tell me to put a bikini on and wallow around on the hood of a truck. I’m going to sing songs about real things and real problems and real joy and real grief. This is the only thing I know how to do. I can’t fit into the model. I guess I broke the mold and I’m not going away.”

 

 

For more of my interview with Angaleena Presley, visit Radio.com.

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Interviews Q&A

Top 25 Interviews of 2014: No. 11 Angaleena Presley

angaleenapresley

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.

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Artist of the Week Band of the Week

Artist of the Week: Angaleena Presley

angaleenapresley

I had the pleasure of talking with country singer-songwriter Angaleena Presley, known for her role in country girl band the Pistol Annies alongside Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe, over the summer while she was in New York promoting her debut solo album, American Middle Class, which was released today. While preparing for our interview, I had her album on repeat and was struck by her honesty in every song. She sang things many of us would never openly admit and in her bio she stated that she has trouble not being honest. I had a pretty good feeling she’d be open to sharing the stories behind her songs as she’s said they are her autobiography, but I never fathomed she would completely let her guard down.

Throughout our interview, Angaleena opened up about her previous marriage, her hometown which is dealing with a serious pain medication epidemic and described the most honest songs on her record in so much depth. I was struck by her honesty and walked away wanting to re-listen to all her songs since I now knew the stories behind so many of them. Below is an excerpt from my interview with Angaleena. For the complete article, visit Radio.com.

“I got introduced to the world as Holler Annie with these two blondes beside me,” she told me. “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.”

One song that strikes a chord on American Middle Class is “Pain Pills,” which Presley says is a protest song about the struggle coal mining communities face with prescription medication, specifically Oxycontin. It’s something that hits close to home for the singer.

“I started [that song] as I was on my way home from a funeral,” she says. “A friend of mine from high school OD’d [and] at the funeral the mom was walking in going, ‘Oh they had a heart problem. It was a heart issue.’ We knew what was going on. This is when I realized, this is starting to become a problem.”

Presley gets emotional when she talks of the song and the “hush-hush culture” that surrounds prescription drug addiction in her small hometown of Beauty, K.Y., where she says the problem is worse than most other places in the country. It took her four years to finish writing “Pain Pills” and once she did she learned of a family member who was suffering with the same pills she’s singing about.

“Addiction has really changed the face of my personal life and a lot of things in my family. That song just haunts me,” she says. “If there’s anything I would get up on a soapbox for, it’s prescription medication. I just think it’s a travesty how careless doctors are with that stuff. It still happens. You don’t hand a 16-year-old a bottle of heroin and say, ‘Here you go. Just quit taking these after 12.’ Let’s start talking about it, let’s get some resources, let’s get some help.”

Watch Angaleena Presley make her debut on the Late Show with David Letterman below playing the title track of her album, “American Middle Class.”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuSMUChHSYY