Pistol Annies Take Aim
Posted on September 7, 2011 by Cindy Watts
Two years ago, Angaleena Presley sat on the couch in her Nashville home looking at the walls and wondering which baby pictures to save before she set her house on fire.
Presley was a struggling singer/songwriter who had just separated from her husband, also a musician. The bank was about to foreclose. And Presley, scrambling for a way to give her 2-year-old son Jed a better life, wanted insurance money to start over.
“I thought about it for a while and then it was like, ‘OK, you’re not crazy. You’re not going to burn your house down,’” says Presley, now 34. “Then I went to pick up my guitar.”
That story unfolds in “Housewife’s Prayer,” a cut on Pistol Annies’ traditional, gutsy debut album Hell on Heels, which was released digitally Aug. 23. Pistol Annies, a trio consisting of country superstar Miranda Lambert, singer/songwriter Ashley Monroe, and Presley, sold more than 44,000 of those digital albums and debuted in the top spot on Billboard’s Country Albums chart. Because of the strong sales numbers, the album will soon be available in retail stores — something that was never part of the plan.
The trio will happily take the success, but money was never the driving force behind the Annies. Lambert, 27, and Monroe, 24, are longtime friends and co-writers who had amassed a bundle of songs that were too old-school for either of their country careers. The women weren’t sure what to do with the material, but Monroe says they broached the idea of doing a project that was a mix of their styles to accommodate the new work. Then one night, she says she and Lambert were up late writing songs on Lambert’s couch at her Oklahoma home and “Ang just popped in my head.”
“I was like, ‘Miranda, do you know Angaleena Presley?’” Monroe says. “And she was like, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘Mute the TV.’”
Monroe found Lambert’s laptop and pulled up Presley’s MySpace page to play Lambert some of Presley’s songs.
“I got her to focus for a second, and Ran was like, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ ” Monroe recalls. “Ran was like, ‘This is the missing piece. This is our band.’ And I was like, ‘I know.’”
Since the friends could only hear snippets of Presley’s songs on the web, Monroe called Presley in the middle of the night to ask her to email them more music.
“I was like, ‘Who is this?’” Presley laughs. “Ashley? And Miranda who?”
Monroe explained it was Miranda as in Lambert, and Presley says, “I was like, ‘Oh, God. OK. OK. I’m up.’”
She started emailing her songs to Monroe and Lambert, and Monroe says they were glued to her inbox like 5-year-olds to the tree on Christmas morning.
“It was like here’s another one!” Monroe recalls.
“(I) just loved it … fell in love with it,” Lambert says of Presley’s music. “And so we asked Ang, ‘You want to be in a girl band?’ I mean, literally, it just went from the couch to this.”
Music to empower women
The trio got together for the first time at the CMA Awards that year. They met on Lambert’s bus and Monroe says they started “hanging out and writing instantly.”
“There was really no option,” she says.
The women started spending more and more time together after that. Monroe and Presley, who both live in Nashville, would join Lambert for brief songwriting stints while she was on tour. It was on one of these trips that Presley shared the first line of “Housewife’s Prayer”: “I’ve been thinking about setting my house on fire.”
Many of the 10 songs on Hell on Heels are in a similar vein, no-holds-barred female hardship touching on issues ranging from debt and unplanned pregnancy to unhappy marriage. But there’s also plenty of confidence, humor and optimism as exhibited in the title track “Hell on Heels,” a harmony-rich up-tempo about a trio of women making a deal with the devil so they could take advantage of “a million” men.
“We wanted to make music about the things people talk about but no one wants to admit,” Lambert says. “We make music to empower women.”
Presley says she thinks anyone can relate to the songs on the album, or at least that’s her hope.
“I try to paint a picture and hopefully transport people somewhere,” she says. “When I was going through my divorce, Lori McKenna had a song on her record and I would just play it over and over and over and over. It’s like it was medicine to me. Music has always been like my teddy bear in life, so I hope that I can make music people can cuddle with and lean on.” Some of the songs are from personal experience. Some of them are funny. Some of them will make you cry. Some of them will make you think. I hope people like it.”
Relationships blossom
Lambert, Presley or Monroe (or some combination of the three) wrote every song on the album with the exception of the last track, “Family Feud,” which includes Lambert’s husband and fellow country star Blake Shelton.
“He said he felt like we had a gang and he wasn’t in it,” Lambert says. “We were all out at the house in Oklahoma and we were writing ‘Family Feud’ and couldn’t figure out the last line. Blake was in the kitchen doing dishes playing the good host, you know, and we were talking through it and he said from the kitchen ‘Cause the good Lord giveth and the family taketh away.’ And that was it, and he got in there. But, we wanted him in there.”
The women officially debuted their group this spring during the Academy of Country Music’s Girls Night Out concert event in Las Vegas the day after the ACM Awards. That’s when Monroe said she realized their trio was more than friends just hanging out singing together.
“My brain knew it, but my heart knew it when we stepped out on stage and we’re looking down at Reba and Martina and Carrie and The Judds for gosh sakes, and they were smiling clapping along to ‘Hell on Heels,’” Monroe says. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute.’ We hadn’t even played with a band before. We were just sitting around with guitars writing until that day of the rehearsal when we practiced with a band for the first time.”
And that was just the beginning.As the music continued to take shape and their friendships blossomed, Monroe and Presley started joining Lambert on stage some nights for a Pistol Annies portion of her tour. Sometimes Presley’s son, Jed, now 4, is even along for the trip. The girls call him their mascot and stand him on a table before every show and let him sing Roger Miller songs.
“He can do ‘Chug-A-Lug’ and ‘Dang Me’ and ‘Do Wacka Do,’ so every night before we go on … he does his little performances and he nails it every time,” Presley says. “Finally, I was like, ‘Miranda, I’m going to start charging for these performances, it will be $10 from here on out.’ And she said, ‘It will be well worth it.’”
These days Presley’s life looks a lot different than it did the day she was contemplating arson and trying to figure out how to outsmart the insurance company out of some money. She left that house for an apartment, and she doesn’t even know what happened to the house now. After she met Lambert and started going on tour with her, she fell in love with Lambert’s tour manager, Jordan Powell. The two are now engaged and recently bought what Presley calls “her dream home.”
“My life has changed so much so fast,” she says. “Everything that I was praying for and hoping for when I was sitting on the couch that day is coming to fruition. It’s like I don’t want to blink, because I’m afraid it will all go away. It’s so crazy when dreams come true. You don’t want to believe it.”
And the band is full steam ahead.Lambert is adamant that even though her career is at its peak, Pistol Annies is anything but a side project. She says it’s another equally important creative outlet that she hopes will introduce country fans to her friends. She also says having Jed on the road has taught her a thing or two, as well.
“He climbs in his little bunk and we put the bed rails up and he just watches his movies and goes to sleep,” she says. “It’s just showed me that you can have a family and be on the road.”
Monroe jokes that having Pistol Annies as a creative outlet is so huge it’s kept her out of a padded room.
“I want to do more than just write songs, and this has given me the opportunity to do it,” she says. “We draw from each other, and it’s like therapy being out there on the road together. We all truly care for each other, so it’s more than just sharing music, it’s sharing our life, and all three of us sharing a dream. It’s a double whammy.”
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