This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #103 (December 2002 / January 2003). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.
Kelly Willis Newfound Confidence
by Kerry Dexter
On an end-of-summer evening in Austin, Texas, Kelly Willis was back at work. Under the neon Lone Star and Tecate beer signs, with the small mirror ball over the stage catching the late afternoon sunlight, Willis, backed by a five-piece band including Amy Farris on fiddle and Cindy Cashdollar on pedal steel, rocked out the audience with her opener, "Take Me Down." Dressed in black and playing her trademark dark red guitar, she jokingly introduced "Take It All Out on You" as "a song that my husband wrote with my ex-husband one drunken night. There were many of those, and I guess that's what made it possible...and it qualifies me to be called a country singer!" Perched on wooden picnic tables, dancing by the stage, or chowing down on barbeque, the relaxed patrons at Stubb's, on the banks of Waller Creek in downtown Austin, appreciated the joke and followed along as she turned more reflective. "I've been working on a new record," she remarked, "and I think this next song is the heart of it. I like to find one song as the heart, and then build around that," she said, and then sang, "I want the sun to shine on me/ to show me the way and set me free/ How could I know, how could I know/ It'd be easy/ Easy as falling apart."
"Once that song was finished, I just felt like, this is the heart and meaning, this is a deeper song that could hold the weight of the record," she said later. "Sometimes the hardest stuff is the stuff you have no control over — you don't have to do anything, it just happens. The moment you accept what's happening is the moment you move past it."
That thoughtful recognition of meaning beyond the obvious marks all 10 cuts on the album, which has been topping Americana playlists. The record and the song are called Easy. It's a record that almost didn't get made.
"When I made [the 1999 release] What I Deserve, I didn't have a label and I was doing it on my own. So I was just approaching it like: This will be my swan song. But...I wanted to come out with something that was more representative of what I was trying to do than I had out there. That's the way I thought of that record. I didn't know where it was going to go. But then I found a label for it, Ryko wanted to put it out," she said, laughing, "and I found myself being able to do another one."
Though she's just in her mid-30s, the Austin-based Willis has had a good bit of experience with the roller-coaster aspects of the music business. Offstage she's a quiet, soft-spoken, and thoughtful woman. However, she's also a fiercely independent thinker and an artist with a rich sense of humor. Both traits are useful to a songwriter and performer — but Willis got into the music business in a sideways fashion. "I was 16, and I started dating a drummer in a rockabilly band," she recalled. Willis was living in the Washington, D.C., area at the time, "and his band split up, then they re-formed and they needed a singer. So he took his girlfriend in — me!— and said, 'She should be the singer.' I was really shy and quiet, and he kinda spoke for me for many years," Willis said of former husband Mas Palermo. For her demo tape, she belted out a rockabilly version of Elvis Presley's hit "Teddy Bear" in a boardwalk make-your-own-record concession.
Shy and quiet she may have been, but the distinctive stop-you-in-your-tracks voice was already there, and that's what club owners remembered about the band, which was soon renamed Kelly and the Fireballs. Though her career-soldier father would have preferred she accept the scholarship she'd won to Virginia Tech, when Willis graduated from high school two years later, the band moved to Austin.
And broke up after six months. However, Willis and Palermo soon put together another band, playing "somewhere between country and rockabilly," Willis said. The group was called Radio Ranch, with Willis on vocals, Palermo on drums, Michael Harwick on steel, and Brad Fordham on bass. Willis had also begun learning guitar. "When I moved to Austin, I started taking lessons from David Murray, who ended up playing guitar with me for a long time," she said. "I was 18, and I started doing it because I felt like I needed to be much more self-sufficient. I was really a shy person, really awkward onstage, and I thought it would really help me with my performance and would make me feel more confident if I could support myself that way." Did she find that to be true? "Definitely," she said without hesitation some 15 years later. Joking that at first it mainly gave her something to hide behind, Willis pointed to more significant effects. "Eventually, I was able to go on radio shows and play, I didn't need to bring other people, and I just started to feel more confident, and take more risks, to start writing more. To have that tool, it just gave me more freedom."
This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #103 (Dec. '02/Jan. '03). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.
