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Pam Tillis - Looking for a Feeling |
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Pam Tillis’ eleventh album Looking
for a Feeling, reminds you of being a child, back in the day and
standing in the candy store with a quarter or fifty cents and looking at
all the penny candy, so many yummy treasures to choose from. Fortunately
with this album, Grammy Award and Country Music Award winning singer,
songwriter and musician Pam Tillis lets us have all of these delicious
songs on one album. Just like the candy store when all of the treats
came in different colors and each with its own unique taste,
Looking for a Feeling offers
the same diversity of colors, shades, moods and vibes.
Pam Tillis joined us recently at
Riveting Riffs Magazine to talk about her new album.
“Looking for a Feeling,
is as personal as anything that I have done, maybe ever. I am in a lot
of ways a really private person, which kind of runs counter to what an
artist is supposed to be. You know cut a vein and bleed on the page. I
am very private and so it takes a lot for me to do that. I think in some
ways I am understated with my feelings. In a lot of songs I am just
trying to process the craziness that is life and the craziness that is
our world and I am trying to put it into context. I (want) to understand
it. There is an underpinning and in some ways it is a little bit
philosophical. If you listen long enough you will hear it in there,”
says Pam Tillis.
As for why she co-wrote the title song with Waylon Payne she says,
“Because it said write me (she
laughs lightly). You don’t always get a choice. Some days you pick
up the guitar and you get out your laptop or your yellow legal pad and
you might as well be digging a ditch. Some days you pick up the guitar
and it talks and the words are just coming through you. That’s what
happened that day. It was kind of a moody gray day.
I had never written with my friend Waylon Payne, but I am a big fan of
his and he is an incredible artist. There was something that happened to
me and I was naming all of these things that I was seeing and they just
started flowing into a song. All of these people in the song you can
relate to them. They are kind of spiritually adrift and they are
struggling. They are trying to find their (way) and some kind of
satisfaction. It is like a Rolling Stones song and by the way they did a
Country record. I used to say the Rolling Stones were my favorite
Country band. You can put that in the list of influences too for this
record. This song was just about the human condition and not being
judgmental of your fellow (man or woman). We are travelers through the
world.”
Some might question at this stage of her career why Pam Tillis would put
in the hard work to record another album, even though her voice remains
strong and people continue to buy her music. With this album especially,
as it was being written and original songs and those written by others
were recorded, it came during a period of time when Pam Tillis lost both
of her parents.
“I hear some artists say I am not going to do another album. There are
people who go I’m done. I think (for me) it is a feeling that I haven’t
done all that I can do. We are all just telling our story and I just
didn’t think I had told it all and I still don’t.
When I met with Joe Pisapia my producer, I told him I don’t want to look
at this record as just a destination. It is a bridge between my last
project RhineStoned (April 2017) and where I am going next. I am trying to
wake everything back up. I wanted to get that to some of the energy that
I felt from the music of my teens, when music is everything to you.
There was a blend of Country with Soul like The Staples and Gladys
Knight and also with Rock bands like Neil Young and The Allman Brothers.
There were even some of the folkier leanings. There is a crazy place
where all of those (types of music) meet and I wanted to express that in
my own way.
We recorded a bunch of tracks and it was right before daddy (Mel Tillis)
got sick for the last time. Everything that I assembled around that
batch of songs (her voice trails off, as she pauses momentarily)…by the time I
picked the thread up to continue the album, my whole world had changed,
so I just started fresh. That (first) batch of songs, some of which
didn’t make the album, we recorded in analog with a bunch of Country
Rock veterans who brought a lot to the record.
It was just a different time. I had to straddle two moments in time.
Right before I cut the second batch of songs, my mother got really sick
and I lost her in August (2019). There was a lot of upheaval and I had
moments where I went why? Why finish? There has never been a time when I
have not finished something. I also felt like it is what they would have
done,” says Pam Tillis.
In the opinion of Riveting Riffs Magazine the best song on the album
Looking for a Feeling is the
song “Karma,” a song that starts off with gloomy lines such as,
“Everything that could go wrong / Has gone wrong from the start,” but
quickly moves to an up-tempo beat and an airy lilt in Pam Tillis’
vocals. Her voice is emotive, as he contemplates why the lessons that
should have been learned in the past she is still living. The song
written by Pam Tillis and Jenn Schott may not have been written with
this intent, but this is a song that is very easy to envision women
concertgoers singing the chorus back to Pam Tillis, as she performs, “You’re
my karma / Aren’t ya’ / I used to be the heartbreaker / Now I’m the
breakie / What goes around / Comes around / Nobody’s free from karma.
“
“It is definitely a little more Poppy. It harkens back to a different
time than the present. It talks about the philosophical underpinnings of
the record. This girl is going hey I’ve got myself in this place where I
am at. Things can come back on you if you make a bad decision and she is
saying well this is it, I have made my bed and I have to lay in it. This
song isn’t all sunshine and daisies and I think sometimes and especially
in this social media driven world that everybody is trying to paint this
picture of their best life. For some of us we feel like honesty should
never go out of style. I have my ups and downs like everybody else. I
have my moods and I have my worries and things like that. I think there
is a little bit of darkness to this record and that’s okay. In the end I
am always resilient, but I have the same struggles as everybody else
does. I reserve the right to feel my feelings. I think we get into
trouble when we don’t own our feelings. I will hear people say oh is
that stupid? No it’s not stupid, because that is how you feel. Be with
that, acknowledge that and then go on. I have gotten into that trap when
I ignore my feelings or I ignore what is in my heart. I am hopefully,
evolving past that (she laughs
lightly).
Jenn and I wrote it together and that one just unfolded really
naturally. I think with some of my best songs I get out of the way and
they just flow out or they get channeled through me instead of forcing
something to happen. You don’t hear those songs. (Pam
bursts into laughter and says) Those songs that got forced are not
on the album. You have to write those types of songs to get to these
songs,” she says.
Speaking of songwriting, being the daughter of music legend Mel Tillis
she says, as a child, “I thought everybody wrote songs. I never knew to
be afraid of it, because everybody in my world and in my dad’s world
that is what they were doing.
I used to make up melodies. I would walk along in the backyard and I
would drag a stick along the chain-link fence, as I sang little
melodies. I would just make them up. I don’t know how I knew to do that,
but I did. The first song I remember (writing) was when I was eight
years old. Mom had inherited some money from an aunt who had passed away
and she bought me an old upright piano. I wrote a song on it and it was
called “Don’t That Road Seem Rough and Rocky.” (We
share some laughter about how tough that road must have seemed to an
eight year old). It was a Gospel song about the trials and
tribulations of an eight year old. I was a moody little thing I was.”
The Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings song “Dark Turn of Mind,” takes us
back to another time and it is Country Classic featuring some stellar
musicianship from Grammy Award winning fiddler Kenny Sears,
multi-instrumentalist Jim Hoke on steel guitar and Joe Pisapia’s guitar.
Pam Tillis turns in a spectacular vocal performance and if you close
your eyes you can imagine a 45 rpm record spinning on your record
player. This song once again evidences the many moods of the album
Looking for a Feeling with the lines, “You
know that some girls are bright as the morning / And some girls have a
dark turn of mind.” Talking about “Dark Turn of Mind,” Pam Tillis says, “We just took that song and did every kind of crazy thing that we could do to it. There was no plan. It arranged itself organically. The song was in a different metre when Gillian recorded it and I changed the time signature and I had made it a shuffle. That was a little bit of a leap of faith that it would do that. When I think shuffles I think of my dad. I tried to put a signature lick and a fiddle lick, like some of the great shuffles of my dad’s era. Then it took a strange turn and I just let it be what it wanted to be. Joe played some atmospheric guitar on it.”
As for the emotional vibe of the song she says, “I just love that she
owns her moodiness. I am an oldest child and oldest children by nature,
if you believe in that first order thing, are more serious. I can be a
room full of women and everybody will be giggling and cackling and I can
feel myself (dying). Obviously I can laugh and I can laugh at myself and
I can have a good time, but sometimes I don’t feel like being all
chirpy. We all have a shadow side and I just love that this lyric
appealed to me. She is saying I have this shadow side and I am okay with
it. It is who I am. It is what makes me creative. It makes me sensitive.
It is alright.
If you remember the old (television) show
Twin Peaks, this is what
happens when Twin Peaks meets
a Mel Tillis shuffle with a Gillian Welch lyric.
(She then laughs while
saying) I hope all of the above parties will forgive me. In the past
I feel like I have been adventurous, but then sometimes I have bumped up
against creative restraints. I try to silence my inner critic, but I
don’t always get her out of the way entirely. On this record I felt a
nice sense of freedom. I was willing to take it a little bit further and
push the envelope so to speak,” she says.
The Bob Regan tune “Dolly 1969,” is the fourth song to appear on the
album and Pam Tillis had to live in the moment of the person depicted in
the song as observing a young Dolly Parton on her way up.
She explains, “Some of it is a little bit bittersweet. I am actually not
me in that song, I am singing through the eyes of a younger artist. I am
imagining me just starting out in my career again. I work with a lot of
women in my career. The two ladies in my band are super young and the
road is stretching out ahead of them. It is all new to them. This song
is about a young woman who is looking at Dolly and she sees all of the
determination, the fire and the grit that it is going to take to get her
out of the hollers (the valleys
between the mountains of East Tennessee). The girl singing the song
is thinking whatever that is I want that. If I could just ride shotgun a
little bit with Dolly I could learn something. It is a sassy song, but
it really has a lot of meat to it. Dolly has really worked hard and
struggled and sacrificed to where she is at that moment in that picture.
She is still a wannabee (at that moment in the song), but she already
feels a bit of world weariness, while she is paying her dues. I tend to
like songs that pack a lot into them.”
When this writer suggests that he is not at all surprised that she likes
songs that pack a lot into them, we both enjoy some laughter.
As this warm, heartfelt conversation winds down with a very gracious Pam
Tillis, she shares some final thoughts, “Even though this album has a
slight retro feel to it, I am still creating. It is a funny thing, I
listen to a lot of new Indie artists and I hear so many things that
influenced me turning up in the music of a lot of young people. It makes
me go back to that well. It is really interesting how these young
artists inspire me and they make me appreciate my roots more. I am
inspired by the past, but I am not mired in the past.
The album Looking for a Feeling took a couple of years to record and to
see the light of day. Those were difficult years for Pam Tillis with
losing her father first and then her mother and we wondered if she found
some healing in creating the best Country Music album you are going to
purchase this year.
She told us, “Yes and I proved to myself that when you think that you
can’t, you really can.”
Please visit the
Pam Tillis website. You can also follow Pam on her
official Facebook page.
#PamTillisMusic #StellarCatRecords #PamTillisNewAlbum #PamTillisDiscography #RivetingRiffs #RivetingRiffsMagazine #GillianWelch #JenSchott
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