The Canadian-born country singer songwriter, possessor of a belter of a voice, Tami Neilson is talking to me from her kitchen in rural Auckland, wearing a bright yellow glittery lacy gown and a fearsomely over-the-top bronze and gold headdress with spikes. She looks beautiful and also ever so slightly scary. You wouldn’t be keen to take her on. She might run you through with one of those spikes. She looks like Boudica, perhaps, had the Queen of War been a country singer with huge hair and false eye-lashes. She is leading a dappled grey horse around her kitchen.
No, of course she’s not. That would be silly. I’m fairly certain she won’t mind my flight of fancy. She is playful; she invites play. She is good at sculpting, from the material that is Tami Neilson, fantasy figures that can lead you to imagine fantasy scenarios.
My particular one has been pinched, except for the horse in the kitchen, from her Facebook page in which she is indeed wearing the costume described and is posing with a dappled grey horse. The images are taken from the video made to accompany her 2022 album Kingmaker, where she reimagines a music industry which “makes kings” of its male artists and in which women run the show and hold the power. It won her Best Country Artist (her sixth), Best Solo Artist and Best Producer awards at that year’s Aotearoa Music Awards.
“For the Kingmaker album, I was really kind of feeling that, you know, that I was stepping into my power … I think when you hit your 40s as a woman, you kind of shed all those opinions of other people and judgments, or begin to shed. It’s pretty hard to shed 40 years of conditioning, but you begin to shed all of those things you held on to so tightly. Yeah, put on your crown and do your dishes.”
Which gives rise to another delightful image: Tami in her kitchen, with the horse, wearing rubber gloves, sky-high hair and that spiky crown, doing the dishes. She is such fun.
She has said about women songwriters, “It’s great that people are starting to be more aware of the way that they’re writing [instead of, say,] when you read an interview and it immediately opens with what the woman is wearing or her lipstick colour.”
What is she wearing? “Ha, ha, ha. Right now? Yeah, I am just about to jump on the treadmill, and so I’m in very glamorous bicycle shorts and tank top with no make-up and my hair in a messy bun. I’m giving you the ultimate glamour right now.”
She is very disappointing. “Sorry,” she said, sounding not a bit contrite.
Serious intent
You can have serious fun. The show The F Word, which she wrote with her virtual friend (they met online during a Covid lockdown) Jada Watson, a musicologist at the University of Ottawa, will be performed by the pair at the Auckland Arts Festival on March 8. It will be fun. There will be singing and big hair and cuckoo costumes, but the intent, and content, of the show is serious: women, are treated, still, like crap by the music industry.
Watson is one of her heroines. Her research touched on what Neilson calls her lived experience. There exists, she says, “in-the-shadows inequality” in the country music industry. “It’s this unspoken rule: you don’t play women back to back on the radio. We can only have one woman signed to each record label on a roster of, you know, 30 men.”
It is hard, she says, to fight an invisible enemy. Watson took “actual hard data” and charted numbers on spreadsheets, and guess what the conclusion was – yep, that women are still treated like crap by the music industry.
It’s this unspoken rule: you don’t play women back to back on the radio.
She says, by the way, and emphatically, “Men can absolutely be feminists. I’m married to one, and I’m raising two of them. You know, a feminist, by definition, is someone who believes that women should be treated equally. So I think most people with their heads on straight are feminists. I think feminism is kind of like the baseline. It’s like saying you’re human. If you’re not, if you don’t believe women should be equal to men, then you’re a misogynist.”
She says feminism “isn’t really the dirty word. My husband was raised by a single mother who had two children. She was a school teacher, was then divorced, and when my husband was very young, about 4 or 5 years old, she proceeded to put herself through law school as a single mother of two. She [became] a highly respected lawyer. So, when you’re raised by a woman like that, I don’t think you would have a choice other than to view her as a strong, powerful, equal woman – equal to any man that you meet.”
There’s a story she tells that, if it doesn’t make you feel both murderous and like weeping, means you deserve to be run in with one of her headdress spikes and that you’re a misogynist. When, aged about 19, she entered a Canadian singing contest, one of the judges told her she was “20 pounds [9kg] away from being a star”. What a thing to say to someone! And it’s not even true. I’ve gained 20 pounds since then and I’m still not a star!” She was then about 55kg “soaking wet. I was a twig!” She jokes (I think) that now she tries to put on 55kg every year so eventually she will be a Really Big Star. See what fun she is?
Battling the industry
Her relationship with the music business and country music business in particular is complicated. “I kind of go between fury and sadness and discouragement and feeling defeated. You know, I think most female artists in country music do.”
When furious and sad and discouraged, get mad. Get your witches’ brooms out, ladies. If she is wary of the music business, it is fair to say that the music business is wary of her. “Most definitely.”
She is 47. She and her singing mates, Anika Moa, Anna Coddington, Julia Deans, Hollie Smith – “all of these women, we’re now in our 40s, and these are women who have been through the music industry. And, you know, we’re all very experienced, very savvy, when it comes to the music industry.”
They call themselves “the coven”. So very savvy and also very scary? “Well, the undesirables, I guess you could say.”
Here are some things people have said about her: “Cleopatra on crack.” “A feral Peggy Lee.” She loves that. Is she a bit feral? “I aspire to be as feral as possible. You know, to be feral is to walk outside the lines of society and wave your tail at civilisation.”
She says she does have a successful music career. And that is “thanks to the fans”, who are mostly women. She makes a decent living. “I’m successful despite the music industry, right?”
I aspire to be as feral as possible. To be feral is to walk outside the lines of society and wave your tail at civilisation.
She has had interview requests from commercial radio stations “and they want to interview me because, ‘Oh, you did a duet with Willie Nelson, so we want to interview you.’ But they won’t play my music.”
She is at least a bit famous; she thinks she’d be terrible at being properly famous. She says she is, “kind of one of those introverted extroverts”, which is true, actually, of many performers. She can be a bit shy, and that, she says, surprises some people.
You can see why. Those costumes, that hair, that larger than life stage persona. It’s a good disguise. “I’m not this big, like, look at me swagger. When I do that big hair and I put on those fake eyelashes and I put on these sequins, I step into that woman that is deep inside me. I kind of get to set her free for the night.”
Which is in itself a form of freedom. “Absolutely, yeah.” What does it say about her? “I think for me, being a woman in her 40s, who is plus size, who hasn’t had any plastic surgery yet.” Yet! What does she mean? “Who knows what will happen? You know, when I’m Dolly Parton’s age, I might be, like, ‘I’m 80. I need to pick something up off the floor.’ Who knows?
“Dressing the way that I do, just remaining in the music industry is an act of subversion, and it is an act of rebellion to take up space. And so the way I dress is unapologetic, and it is really kind of staking my claim.” She quotes Parton: ‘I’d rather stand out and be different than be pretty.’”
One with willie
You do have to be a bit interested in Willie Nelson because she went to his 200ha ranch in Texas and he did a very drawn-out card trick for her. He is known for having a liking for dirty limericks but he didn’t share one with her. “I don’t know if he thinks I’m a laidee. Ha.”
What I really wanted to know was, did she share a spliff with him? He is what you might call an aficionado of weed. She did not, she says, because “I’m a total square”. She loved him. “He was exactly how you wish he was. He is the most anti-celebrity that I’ve ever met. When you spend time in his presence … you have that initial brain freeze where you’re like, ‘Oh. My. God.’ You’re in this god-like presence, like the Wizard of Oz, this larger than life thing and, boom, he steps out from behind the curtain and you’re, like, ‘Oh, he’s just a man. He’s just a lovely, real, down-to-earth man.’”
She lives, fittingly, in the country, on 41/2ha at Waimauku, near Auckland’s Muriwai Beach, with her police inspector husband, Grant Tetzlaff, and their two sons, Charlie, who is about to turn 13, and Sam, 10.
She came to New Zealand after meeting Tetzlaff on a 2001 visit here from Canada. She grew up touring in a rickety RV which was prone to exploding. Her parents, her two brothers and her made up an itinerant country and gospel music band, The Neilsons. It was a weird sort of upbringing, although, she says, as a kid, it’s just what you know. She did, though, “sometimes daydream” about what it would be like to grow up in the same house, on the same street, every day of your childhood and “have, you know, the same friends and go through high school and graduate together. That, to me, was something that was exotic.”
This is what passes for exotic in her daily life now. There are cows. The cows are not named because they sell them off every three years. There are sheep, who do have names, but she doesn’t know them. The kids name them, and she doesn’t want to get involved, although the sheep will live out their lives in the paddocks.
“They’re just pets that graze. We had six, and then they turned into 15 this past summer. And we’re, like, how is this happening? Because they’re all girls, but the neighbours’ sheep … I think they’re getting frisky at the fence line.”
I don’t care what she claims, I am determined to picture her in the yellow frock, done up to the nines, with towering hair and false eyelashes, playing her guitar on a dappled grey horse. She is serenading the cows and giving the finger to that dickhead singing contest judge. She is waving her tail at the world.
Tami Neilson, The F Word, Auckland Arts Festival, Saturday, March 8, 7.30pm.
