The accusatory caricatures of backwoods, blue-collar people that have circulated with a vengeance since Donald Trump’s election meet their match in Angaleena Presley. On the day of the Women’s March, the Kentucky-bred singer-songwriter trudged through the streets of downtown Nashville. A week later, when Trump signed his anti-Muslim travel ban, Presley penned a countrified lament called “Ain’t Enough Freedom,” conjuring images of a young girl in a war-torn nation who’s suddenly barred from seeking refuge in the U.S. The chorus is a deliberate, down-home tug on the heartstrings: “She could be settling down in some red light town instead of thinking there ain’t enough freedom to go around.” “I’m not against anyone,” Presley says of the unreleased song’s inspiration. “I’m for peace and human kindness and taking care of babies. And when there’s someone in office who isn’t for that—and who’s setting policies perpetuating that—I need to give that little girl a voice.”
The daughter of an East Kentucky coal miner, Presley grew up identifying with the songs of Loretta Lynn, the Coal Miner’s Daughter, particularly the full-strength frankness within Lynn’s depictions of domestic strife. But Presley was also an angsty child of the ’90s, pilfering her dad’s flannel shirts during her grunge phase. After taking courses in psychology and women’s studies at Eastern Kentucky University, Presley was the first in her family to move away. In Nashville, she saw some starving songwriter years, hoping to sell her compositions to hit-makers, then gave up on waiting for other artists to be the outlets for her songs. She taught herself the basics of home recording, tinkering with the percussive possibilities of lighter flicks and frying pan clangs and developing a rootsy, collagist aesthetic along the way.
Then Presley was catapulted into the mainstream country spotlight half a dozen years ago when she, Miranda Lambert, and Ashley Monroe formed Pistol Annies, a spunky trio in the tradition of the Dixie Chicks, and enjoyed immediate attention thanks to Lambert’s involvement. Presley shined as the trio’s smart-assed voice of experience, but it didn't exactly set her up for mainstream solo success. Since the Annies’ hiatus in 2013, she's camped out somewhere between the commercial country fringes and the Americana songwriter scene, where the dominant attitude toward pop-country is one of condescension.
The class-driven political conversation surrounding rural America hadn't yet become an object of intense fascination when Presley released her debut American Middle Class in 2014, but in hindsight, it’s a little like she saw the election coming. With a potent mix of sarcasm, indignation, and affection, she captured the pride involved with keeping up appearances of modest prosperity, and the despair engendered by working for an economy that uses up the body before discarding it. Her treatment of the subject matter was anything but superficial, and hard to dismiss.
On her new album Wrangled—which she co-produced with Oran Thornton—Presley shifts her focus to systemic sexism. Its playful songs speak up for those who, like Presley, strive within a country-music format whose business strategy has involved minimizing women's voices, as well as those generally facing gender-role expectations to be angelic, sexually appealing nurturers. “There are women out there whose mothers are like, ‘When am I gonna have some grandbabies? You’re 30. You’re 35. Your eggs are gonna rot,’” Presley says. “Just because you have a vagina doesn’t mean that you automatically have this dream for a baby to pop out of it. I wanted to give a voice to women who maybe don’t want babies because there should be no guilt or shame attached to that. And the more we talk about things, the less powerful they are.”
Both Presley's narratives and delivery have sly bite. She casts gender norms as teenage tragedy in the girl-group pop number “High School,” brings steely impatience to the loop-driven country blues of “Mama I Tried,” and turns a battered preacher's wife exacting biblical revenge into a Southern Gothic tale with “Only Blood.” There’s no more withering appraisal of country’s uber-masculine party jams recycling generically bucolic imagery in list-style lyrics than “Country,” in which rapper Yelawolf guests (with praise for Sturgill Simpson, no less) and Presley spends one verse repeating the word “jeans” nine times in a needling, exaggerated drawl. It's audacious, knowing stuff.
At a cafe serving cold-pressed juice and gluten-free confections less than a mile from her East Nashville home, Presley considered her outlier status by the standards of small-town Kentucky, Nashville's various music scenes, and country-averse observers alike.
Pitchfork: In this political environment, people tend to reduce those they see as their ideological opposites to simplistic caricatures. What’s it like voicing your affection for your redneck roots while simultaneously speaking your mind about gender inequality?
Angaleena Presley: Uh, honestly, it’s scary. It is polarized, and where I’m from, there’s a lot of conservatism, and they want change. There hasn’t been a lot of development as far as employment, and they’re scared and desperate. They just want to work and they want to live the American dream, but it’s almost like it doesn’t exist for them anymore. I get that. I would never judge them for that or think that they’re less than me. I support them and I love them—I just wish they could support me and love me. [chuckles ruefully]
When I do speak out and I go against what are sometimes considered those rural, small-town values, it’s scary because I want to feel like I have a place to go back to. But I also believe we have to move forward and we have to evolve. So it’s a real conundrum for me. I’m all about tolerance, respecting others’ equal rights, and love. And it’s hard for people to be about love when they’re scared and need change.
On your first album, you articulated blue-collar attitudes in a way that was intelligible to multiple audiences, including liberal, cosmopolitan ones. With Wrangled, were you looking to build on that?
I think so. I come from an underdog culture. It makes you a survivor—strong and wicked smart. But also you feel like you can’t catch a break and you live paycheck to paycheck. The experience that I’ve had in the music business is such a parallel to that. I write about what’s going on with me, and usually I tend to go to the dark side.
Or the smart-ass side.
Or the smart-ass side. [laughing] And what’s been going on with me is this sort of rebirth—finding myself as an artist and realizing that the scales aren’t balanced. There is discrimination against women and there are laws in our country that are supposed to protect us from that, but in the music industry, those laws don’t seem to apply. If you look at statistics and charts over the last 12 years, country radio’s breaking the law, in my opinion. Somebody needs to talk about it. Hell, I’m 40. I’ve got nothing to lose. It’s like, “If I have to throw myself to the wolves to make way for some other girl from some underdog town, so be it.”
I’m coming off Pistol Annies. I had this unique experience where I did everything backwards almost. I did the “move to Nashville with nothing but the guitar on your back in a beat-up car” part correctly. And then I got the “hurry up and wait around for five or six years” part right. But then all of a sudden here comes Miranda Lambert and Ashley [Monroe], and it was this windstorm of, “Come and jump on my bus.” And two years later I found myself complaining about the cold beer not being there fast enough. So when the Pistol Annies started to wind down and I started doing my own thing, I was paying those road dues. There were times when I would be in a parking lot in 32-degree weather, trying to put makeup on in my van’s rear-view mirror, changing clothes crying and cold. It sucked. I realized that even though I’m in this band with a platinum-selling album and a “Good Morning America” appearance, Angaleena Presley [the solo artist] hasn’t done all that stuff.
Miranda and Ashley sing with you on “Dreams Don’t Come True.” What did having them in solidarity with you do for the spirit of the song?
They really got it, because every young hopeful thinks you come to town and there’s this guy in a suit who rolls up and gives you a [recording] contract. A week later, “Here’s your new car.”
You also feature Yelawolf on a song that feels like an absurd burlesque of bro country. You took the repetitiveness of list-style lyrics so far that some lines reminded me of Dr. Seuss.
I wrote it at the height of the bro country movement. I had just done a demo session, and there were some great songs on there. I had a meeting with my publisher, and I was like, “So are you pitching songs? What’s the reaction?” And his response was, “We love what you do. Love it. We don’t want you to do anything different. But with this bro country thing, it’s just not the right time.” Basically he was saying he wouldn’t even play the songs for people—he wouldn’t even try.So I went home and wrote “Country,” and I sent it to him the next day asking, “Here, will this work? Will you try to pitch this one?”
And what did that get you?
A scathing email to my manager. Didn’t get me very far. But guess what? That song’s on a record now that will be sold to the public.
Was it your idea or Yelawolf’s to reference Sturgill Simpson during the rap?
Oh, that was all him. We sent Yelawolf the track. He came over with his whole entourage to play us a bunch of stuff he was working on, and then we played him some of the other stuff from the record. It was almost like this dick-measuring contest. It turned out good considering he was like, “Yeah, I’ll write you a rhyme.”
So there’s that reference to Simpson, and you also co-wrote a song with Chris Stapleton for the album. The rise of both renewed debates about where to draw the boundaries between country music for people with taste and country music for the masses. Simpson is the sort of country outsider who vocally distances himself from the mainstream. But you give a very different account of your experience in “Outlaw.”
The gist of “Outlaw” is that I don’t set out to be this rebel outlaw person. I just write what I write honestly, and it makes people uncomfortable sometimes. That doesn’t mean I want to be dubbed this outlaw person. If that were what country radio wanted to play, I would do a dancing jig. But it isn’t. I just don’t fit in that part. That doesn’t mean that I don’t wanna be the “it” girl and make millions of dollars and wear sparkles, because I sure would. [laughs] It’s not even that I’m not willing—it’s that I don’t know how to be fake.
If you’re left of center, you can double-down on the righteousness of your position by criticizing commercial trends, but you’re not supposed to admit that you’d like to be in on mainstream success.
But I would! It’s great, man. [laughing] They bring ice to your bus, cold beer, massages.
Kacey [Musgraves], who I love and who’s a good friend, has that song [with the hook], “I don’t wanna be a member of the good ol’ boys club.” Yeah, she does. They just won’t let her in, you know? Country radio won’t play her. And why not? She’s amazing. I really just don’t get it. She does all the work and she shakes all the hands.Somebody just has to start talking about this. There’s such a taboo and such a fear. Country radio is almost like this god-like entity that we fear and bow to. Dictators sometimes need to be brought down. We need to rise up.
Country artists with a foothold in the mainstream have been reluctant to come off as political even as politics have been a national obsession. What do you make of that?
I can see why people won’t talk about it. Let’s face it: It is a lot of old-fashioned values, especially in country radio. When you look at what some people [in the country radio industry] have said in interviews, specifically concerning women, it is scary. I’m not by any means this braveheart who thinks she can push the needle. But I also can’t sit and be quiet when people are suffering and there’s the potential for a lot more suffering.