Angaleena Presley Opens Up About Beer, Babies and Pistol Annie Brawls
Most country music fans know Angaleena Presley as one-third of Pistol Annies, the critically acclaimed trio formed by Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Presley in 2011. Together, with each adopting their own cheeky “Annie” alias — Presley was “Holler Annie” — the ladies released the brazenly country album Hell on Heels, which debuted atop the Billboard country chart and won over fans and Nashville as a whole with its throwback sound. Their second album, Annie Up, released in 2013, hit Number Two and was also enthusiastically received, but when the group cancelled several dates on the LP’s accompanying tour, tongues started wagging that drama and discord had torn the trio apart.
With the Annies on hold, Monroe refocused on her solo album Like a Rose, which she released a few months before Annie Up, while Lambert went on to continue her already established mainstream country career, releasing this year’s CMA Album of the Year nominee Platinum.
Now it’s Presley’s turn to explore solo success. On the disarmingly honest and thoroughly charming American Middle Class, released this week, she too makes a case for being one of country’s leading ladies. A series of autobiographical sketches from the Beauty, Kentucky, native, the bluesy album details the life challenges Presley faced as the daughter of a coal miner, a former waitress and as a college-educated single mother. There’s also a guest appearance from Presley’s father Jimmy (a recitation on the LP’s title track), and a scripture reading from one of Angaleena’s former neighbors, a drug-addicted woman who has since lost the battle with her own troubled existence.
While such tunes as “Pain Pills,” “Knocked Up” and “Drunk” may paint a darker portrait of life in the holler, Presley insists her upbringing wasn’t the stark, poverty-stricken one committed to record by the Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn. That doesn’t mean the Presleys didn’t struggle, however, or that the singer led a charmed life once she left Beauty. But Presley, whose son Jed is now seven, has managed to carve out a new life in Music City as one of the most sought-after collaborators of such iconic writers as Matraca Berg, Lori McKenna and Luke Laird. Likewise, advance reviews for American Middle Class have been deservedly glowing.
On a warm October morning at a trendy Nashville coffee shop, Presley, decked out in a white sundress decorated with bright red cherries, chatted with Rolling Stone Country about the women who fueled her creativity, the best aspects of motherhood and, yes, those damn Pistol Annies rumors.