Tami Neilson talks touring the United States with her heroes, and why nothing compares to a home crowd.
It feels rude to start an interview with a musician by asking them about another, more famous, musician, but Tami Neilson assures me, after unleashing her signature bellowing laugh, that she’s very used to talking about Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan by now. “To be fair, I’m guilty of it too,” she says over Zoom in front of a fetching cowboy applique wall hanging. “One of the first things I asked Willie Nelson Nelson when I met him was ‘what was Patsy Cline like?’”
Boasting big hair and blue eyeshadow even at 11am on a Tuesday, Neilson has recently returned to Aotearoa from an international tour supporting the pair of music legends. She’s also released her 10th album Neon Cowgirl, which she is touring around the country in October, and has been awarded the inaugural Country Music Honour for contribution to country music in Aotearoa. All that, and yet, she’s still not above dishing the goss on Willie and Bob.
“Bob is…” she pauses. “I never got to meet him – but nobody got to meet him. He basically rolls up right before his set, plays, and then rolls out and there’s no interaction. He’s notoriously private.” At the other end of the spectrum is her sometimes collaborator Willie Nelson. “He has this incredible generosity of spirit and doesn’t sweat the small stuff,” she says. “He’s such an inspiration to me because he didn’t break through until his 40s, which means he spent half his life as a normal person.”
Willie Nelson and Tami Neilson perform together on the Outlaw Tour. Image: Supplied
While it was a career highlight to open for the people who “have laid the foundations in music and songwriting that we all stand on”, Neilson says the gig wasn’t without its challenges. “I’m the first one on, so I walk out onto that stage totally cold. Nobody is there to see me. Nobody knows who I am, and I have 30 minutes to win them over,” she says. “It’s a very different feeling than when I walk onto a stage anywhere in New Zealand.”
There was another chill in the air given the current political climate in the United States. “You can feel this level of tension everywhere you go,” she says. “You don’t sit with your back to the door at a restaurant, which you never even think of when you’re in New Zealand. It’s something that Americans just live in, that it’s like a lobster slowly being boiled – they don’t realise the level of stress on their nervous system because it’s just become their normal.”
In the country music space, traditionally a conservative stronghold, Neilson worried about even saying where she was from in front of a big crowd. “I’ve never been nervous to say I am originally from Canada before, but this was right in the middle of the tariff stuff and I was worried I was going to get booed off the stage,” she says. “Willie also performs with a giant American flag behind him on stage and I didn’t want to upset anybody.”
Tami Neilson performs in the Outlaw Festival. Image: Supplied
While most of her fretting didn’t come to anything, there was an incident at US customs that proved the changing times. “I was standing in the queue, and ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ started playing over the speaker which I thought was a good sign that I didn’t need to worry,” she says. “I was nearly at the front of the queue when this man started getting dragged away and yelling ‘this is what happens when you vote for Trump’. It just changed the whole temperature of the room.”
Returning to Aotearoa just last month, she describes the homecoming as “one big exhale” after the US. In her new album she sings of how the titular Neon Cowgirl “felt like welcome home” in Nashville, but what makes her feel like home in Aotearoa? “Honestly, as soon as I walk through that marae archway with the beautiful carvings, and there’s the sound of native birds and playing over the speakers, tears fill my eyes,” she says. “It’s like the Stargate for me.”
And with country music experiencing a massive revival, Neilson says New Zealanders are just as passionate for the genre as those in Nashville. “A lot of people act like country music is this dirty little secret, but it’s no secret that we have loved people like The Highwaymen or Dennis Marsh forever,” she says. “The fact that my albums get to the top of the charts with zero radio play, as an independent artist, also shows how much New Zealanders love country music.”
Neilson says country music is no dirty little secret anymore.
When Neilson plays here, the place she has called home for nearly two decades, she doesn’t have to worry about winning people over any more. “There’s this warm, loving embrace of applause and it’s like, ‘these are my people, this is my whānau’,” she says. “When I come back from a big tour and people come to see me here, it feels like coming back to your family’s house, and everyone’s sitting around the dinner table being like, ‘OK, tell us all about it’.”
Embarking on her nationwide tour in October, Neilson says that nothing compares to playing live music at home. “There’s an indescribable energy that’s going back and forth between us, and it’s this beautiful connection that just fills the room.” Christchurch “feels like a homecoming” because everyone thinks she’s from Lyttelton, same with her (nearly) namesake Nelson. Wellington is “quite discerning and usually the rowdiest”.
But it’s in Auckland that Neilson has something even better than Nashville’s Neon Cowgirl, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan combined. “My boys are there and my family’s there,” she beams. “And I can drag them up on stage if they’ll let me.” And with live music constantly under threat thanks to skyrocketing touring costs, AI and streamers pulverising artist profit and, as she puts it, “the world completely falling apart”, Neilson isn’t taking any of it for granted.
“Getting on a stage in a room with people and making music is something that is getting harder and harder to do for musicians who aren’t huge stadium artists, but we are all still looking for ways to fill our lives with escapism and comfort and human connection,” she says. “I treasure every time that I get to do this – because it really is like nothing else.”