In Conversation With… Alice Wallace

For the podcast, we interview California-based singer songwriter, Alice Wallace about her love for the UK, learning to yodel and more.

How was the London show the other night and your experience over here? 

Yeah the London show was nice, it was a brand new venue that literally opened four hours before we played. We were the first show ever. We didn’t realise that, but it was a good sized room for our crowd, it was nice and cosy and sounded really nice in there. The one thing was that they had built the stage a little too high and my up-right bass player couldn’t actually have his up-right bass all the way vertical – he was hitting the ceiling with his up-right bass the whole show, he was having to squat a little bit and keep the bass down toward him a little bit. He got a bit of a workout during the show, having to adjust to the ceiling height, but it was like oh my gosh we hadn’t even thought about this – we’re going to lower the stage tomorrow. It was a memorable experience because of that, we had a great show. 

Obviously this is the tour for your fourth album ‘Into the Blue.’ First of all, congratulations, it’s such a wonderful project – what did you want people to take away from it when you went into it? Do you have a different vision of what you want people to take away every time? 

Yeah you know these songs really kind of came out of what has been going on in the world these past few years, there’s so many things to write about right now and the more I travel and the more I hear stories along the way, I feel like there’s so many stories to be told. I found myself writing less about myself and more about the things happening to other people; the environment – there’s a song about the Santana winds in California that kept starting the wildfires – there’s a song about a woman on the Mexican border trying to get across and give her baby a better life, things that just affected me over the last few years – they ended up becoming this album. Really I feel like the songs on this new album are the songs that I’ve been trying to write for years and with the production itself, we were able to get more funding than usual and we were able to get in some absolutely incredible players and put string and horn sections on certain songs, so that we could really bring these songs to life in a beautiful way that I never had the opportunity to do before. It was perfect for this set of songs because they’re a set of songs that tell stories and the instruments help them do that even more so. Really I’m so proud of how this album came out, and it’s really been such a pleasure this last year – it came out in January and this summer in the UK – playing these songs and I feel like I get great responses from people, the songs resonate with them because they are stories. 

Songs are a very important way to relay information and to connect people, maybe help them see an issue in a different way, presenting things. Songs are a way to connect people, and these songs in particular I really tried to do that and touch on these themes that everyone has heard about, but maybe present them in a new way that they hadn’t thought about. 

This was the first project released through all-female label ‘Rebelle Road’ – what did they bring to the project?

Yeah you know, I got affiliated with them because one of the producers on the record is a woman named KP Hawthorn and she’s produced my last two albums. I’ve been working with her as a female producer who has great vision. She was starting this new record label, which was meant to be a record label and production company, this team of women with this vision of promoting other women in country and Americana music based out of California. Their idea was to start festival stages associated with women. KP had just produced this new album for me and I was kind of trying to figure out how I wanted to release it, and she said ‘let’s put it out on Rebelle Road Records, let’s make it a record label.’ So it was her as well as a woman named Adrienne Isom and Karen McHugh, the three of them have varying expertise – Adrienne was the woman who shot all the photos and put together all the cover art and also directed all the music videos, she’s a very visual person and has this great artistic vision. Karen has much more of a marketing background and KP has the musical production aspect. Between the three of them I think we were able to do some great things with the release of the album. It is nice to work with strong, ambitious women in the music industry because there aren’t as many as I would like. It’s been a really great team to work with, and I also work with a team called JTM Music who have helped finance a lot of it and distribute the album, geared to the UK. I feel very lucky that I have a great team of people behind me, helping to put this album out there into the world and take a shot for it to be heard. You can make the most beautiful album in the world, but if no one hears it it doesn’t matter; that is always the thing trying to get it out to more and more people, so that they can hear it because I feel like when they do it gets such a great response. This album more than any of my other albums has got such a great response, over in the States it was written up by Rolling Stone Country and American Songwriter and Paste Magazine – some of these really big outlets who have never written about my music before. 

 

Going back, you’re based out of California, but what do you think has kind of shaped your music? 

I grew up in Florida, but my mother is from Los Angeles, so even at a young age I was hearing a lot of California country from Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s, like Gram Parsons and Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. It was really California country and I didn’t know that at the time, but because of my parents I always had a really strong influence through that and they were moving back to California about ten years ago and I followed them, so now I’ve been in California about 10 or 11 years. People think there isn’t a strong tradition of country music out there, not as deep as Nashville or Texas, but it goes back just as far in the 20s and 30s in the Dustbowl and people coming over from Oklahoma and starting these hillbilly bands in central California that would become the Bakersfield sound. There is a really rich history there of country music that I feel like influences me a lot. Although, when I get home after this tour, I’m packing up and moving to Nashville. (laughs) I’ve visited Nashville so many times and I’ve been in California for ten years and I think it will always be home but I decided I’m going to go and give it a shot in Nashville and see what connections I can make over there and start a new chapter. 

You’re from a very musical family. Do you remember when you started writing songs and playing music – songwriting does seem to be the integral core of your music? 

Yeah you know pretty much as soon as I wrote three chords on the guitar I wrote songs. I thought ‘ok, that’s all I need to write songs’ – I guess I was probably about 14 or 15 when I really kind of picked up the guitar and wanted to start learning it, and then I started writing songs immediately and performing at little coffee shops around my hometown and at little talent shows, I just wanted to start singing for people. Really, I taught myself guitar to back up my singing, I always loved to sing, but I hadn’t really thought about writing my own songs until I had this influence that I could take around with me and actually craft my own songs. Then that became my focus and I’ve been doing it ever since. 

And when did the yodelling start coming in and how did that come about? 

Yeah that was in college actually. I was a huge fan of Jewel. In high school I was around the era of Alanis Morisette etc, all these great strong women on the radio, which I think was a good time to be a budding singer-songwriter, but Jewel was one of my favourites – I loved her voice, because I’m just very vocally driven, when I’m attracted to an artist, it’s usually their voice first and foremost and I loved her voice. It wasn’t until I was in college that someone sent me this bootleg copy on Napster of her yodelling for an encore and I didn’t know she was a yodeller. I just had no idea people were still yodelling at all and of course she was one of the few, so I just got home that summer of college and locked myself in my room and just listened to that song over and over. I wanted to figure it out, I was like ‘I’m going to be a yodeller too.’ A lot of it was just trying to figure out what they sing and what they do with their voice, the core of it is getting that vocal break – that is the signature yodel – but a lot of it is also incorporating these strange syllables in conjunction with that. Now I’ve been doing it long enough that every year it gets a little bit better, it gets a little more intricate and involved, now it’s become a big part of my shows, I do a few yodels every show and I close it out with my big song about teaching myself how to yodel. It’s such a fun thing to incorporate because people don’t really expect it and it’s a lot of fun. I think it gets a little bit of a bad wrap because there are all these cheesy videos online of people yodelling to these funny songs but if you do it in a modern way it can be so cool and people don’t really know that, until they see it live. 

Finishing college and talking back to those first few albums, those first ones you predominantly wrote by yourself but then this most recent project you’ve had more co-writes. What has that been like opening your songwriting up? 

Yeah I was a solo-writer. I’d always been very hesitant about co-writing. I will say, in LA it’s not such a big thing, when you go to Nashville everyone is constantly co-writing and having all these writing appointments and collaborations, but in LA it’s a little more every man for themselves. I wasn’t even that familiar with the idea of it so I’d always written by myself. Then I started going to Texas, and I met my friend  – Andrew Delaney – at a songwriting competition outside of Austin and he actually broached the subject, saying ‘I’ve always wanted to write a yodelling song, but I’ve never known a yodeller who could sing it. We should write a yodelling song.’ So we ended up writing ‘Echo Canyon,’ from my new album. So that broke the ice, Andrew is one of my favourite songwriters, he’s just a brilliant lyricist so it was pretty easy with him and so we ended up writing several songs from the new album when ‘Echo Canyon’ went pretty well. Then I also wrote a song with my producer KP, the lead-off song ‘The Lonely Talking.’ I’ve gone to Nashville several times now, and I’ve met a girl called Caitlin Cannon – we’ve written several songs together that haven’t been released yet, which went really well. I’ve had so many co-writing appointments where I’ve tried to write songs with people and it’s just a complete failure. (laughs) Sometimes you click with people, sometimes you don’t. I’m interested in moving to Nashville to explore that more, meet more people and see if that will inspire more co-writing experiences, because I’ve been touring this year so much with the new album. I’ve been in touring mode, thinking about different things like how I’m going to get to the show, you’re not thinking as creatively. I don’t write as much on the road, there are some artists who get super inspired on the road, but I just get into show mode. I’m interested to see what new things will come out of this move to Nashville – it’s such a songwriting town, that’s where all the publishing is and people care about songs in this really deep way.

You’re off to Spain next and then will you start to think about the next project? 

Yeah I think when I get home from this tour, I’m going to pack up and move to Nashville at the end of November. I’m probably going to spend December getting acclimated to Nashville, but I am already looking to the beginning of next year with more touring, now I’ll be based in a different area it will be easier for me to get to the southeast and areas of the Midwest that it was really hard for me to get to in California, so I’m already starting to book more tours with a new booking agent. Next year is going to be a big one too, we’re just going to get things moving along.

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Final Few

Wine or whiskey? Wine definitely.

Would you rather give up songwriting or performing? Probably songwriting, I love performing so much. Giving up songwriting sounds awful, but I think being on stage and singing to people and seeing their response back is just the most rewarding thing.

Do you have an album you’re listening to on repeat? You know the new Yola album I got really into after Americana Fest in Nashville, I saw her live and she is just a powerhouse.

Record you couldn’t live without if you were stuck on a desert island? Emmylou Harris’ Quartermoon in a Ten Cent Town

Complete the sentence…

Music is… a beautiful way to express yourself and connect with other human beings. For me it’s life.

Country music is… at its core, songwriting that people can relate to.

Alice Wallace is… still discovering herself every day in new ways, and trying to figure out who she is exactly, but being on the road and writing new songs is getting me closer every day.

 

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