Tucker, Tanya - Country Music Legend
By: Dominick A. Miserandino
Country legend Tanya Tucker talks about the evolving music scene over the span of her career, acoustic versus produced, and 'feeling' the music from the heart.
DM) How has your career changed over time?
TT) That's a loaded question because there's lots of things that have changed. One thing about music is that it's constantly changing, and we've just been able to roll with the changes. Maybe it's because of my age, maybe it's because I'm trying to be hip to what's going on... Definitely the music is technically better, it's gotten so much better, but some of the feel might not have gotten better. We might have lost some of the feeling along the way. But for me, I always try to keep it in there because that's me, that's what I do. The last album has been more "felt"... you [have to] feel the album. I want people to feel what I felt with those songs. It's a "feel" thing for me, though. We don't know yet, but I hope this album is successful, and then we'll know we're on the right track.
DM) When you started recording, did you have that feel in mind beforehand?
TT) Yes, always. When I hear a song, I don't really listen, but I try to see how I feel when I hear it and how I feel when I sing it. What the words are saying and what I'm trying to get across. These most recent songs are definitely "feel" songs. The feeling was there from the very beginning. Some of the songs are so real to me. I didn't find them hard to sing at all. I didn't want to do anything that I thought was difficult to me. Challenging, yes... but not difficult. The album became so easy, I wondered if it was anything good. We sat in my house a couple of nights and recorded a lot of the songs in my house, and a couple of them we left just that way. Just me and the guitar.
DM) That rawness of the recording must have come out with a totally different feel...
TT) Yeah, absolutely. Very real, and very raw. Just like peeling back the onions. It's very revealing, I think. And I felt confident enough to do that, and it turns out, they're now some of my favorite songs on the record.
DM) Do you prefer that acoustic feel or the more produced feel?
TT) Well, we didn't want to do it to feel over produced--when I say, we, I mean me and my fiancé. We didn't want it to be produced where you could really tell it was. We wanted it to be when you listen, you don't think of anything else but what the song was saying--not the instruments on it or the production aspects at all. It's kind of like when you listen to a harmony part--when you can tell the harmony parts apart--we wanted it to be a nicer piece as a whole, and to just listen to it as entire compiled piece.
Sometimes I listen to a record, I think it's a great harmony part when I can't distinguish whose singing what from what because it was done so well together.
DM) When you talk about feel, somebody once told me that "Country music is just like the blues... it's all about singing from the heart." Is that true?
TT) I think that's what country music is all about, totally. From the days of Hank Williams, that's certainly what I discovered in the beginning. When you listened to one of his songs, you realized he was living it and going through it. He was feeling every inch of what he was singing. That's the beginning to me. That was the ultimate of country music, and that's hard to do. There's a few people who do it, and do it well... they don't do it all the time, but there's a few people who can really get in there. It's a business where you're always trying to satisfy the public, and you're always trying to second-guess them. No matter what anybody says, I just try to please myself--I don't want to please anybody else. Well, to be a winner in this business, they better think about what somebody else wants to hear. I can't imagine just doing what I want to do. That would be a perfect world type of thing, but that's not the way it is. I try to second-guess the common man and try to imagine what they feel. Sometimes it's something that I might not feel 100%, but I want to try to feel what they feel.
My dad was the biggest advocate of that. He was my coach and used to say, "You have to make that person feel like you're going through it even if you aren't."
DM) That must be pretty hard to do: to put a feeling in a song, a feeling that you might not feel yourself at the time.
TT) I think that's where being the artist comes in. Because it's kind of like acting. Jack Lemmon told me, "Acting is honesty, if you could fake that..." and you couldn't hate him.
DM) Is there an element of acting within music?
TT) Definitely. I think there's acting in your daily schedule. When you don't want to do something and you got to try to get through it. You need to sometimes do what you don't want to do and it takes a bit of acting to get through it.
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