It’s a little early to call it, but Angaleena Presley, perhaps best known for her work alongside Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe in Pistol Annies, might have made the best country album of the year. Wrangled, the follow-up to Presley’s critically beloved 2014 solo debut American Middle Class, sees the Music Row songwriter doubling down on her facility with innovative, story-driven country for an album that is as heart-wrenchingly honest as it is infinitely listenable.
While not exactly a concept album, Wrangled, as both its title and cover photo suggest, is loosely organized around Presley’s frustration with the commercial country music industry — particularly the favor that country radio gives to male artists, which she speaks about frankly.
“I’m bound and gagged on the front cover,” she tells the Scene. “But that’s how I’ve been feeling the past few years. On my last record, I got so many questions about, ‘What do you think about the lack of women on country radio?’ I would give these generic answers like, ‘Well it’s cyclical. There’s room for everyone. I think it’s going to change.’ But it hasn’t changed. If I have to be the whistleblower, so be it. I’m 40, I don’t have anything to lose. This is my F-you record.”
Album highlight “Country” addresses those feelings head on. The track is the sonic equivalent of dousing a laundry list of commercial country clichés in kerosene and setting the whole damn thing alight. Presley wrote it after a coded conversation with her publisher left her, in her words, “heartbroken.”
“I was saying, ‘Have you been pitching my songs? What’s going on? What’s the reaction?’ ” she says. “He was like, ‘You know, we love what you do, but the only people who are getting cuts right now ...’ It was basically the dudes who were singing about trucks.”
Current Nashvillian and Alabama native hip-hop artist Yelawolf has a verse on the track, an unexpectedly perfect cameo with razor-sharp lines like, “Thank God for Sturgill Simpson, because Music Row can’t fucking save it.” Presley and Yelawolf were brought together serendipitously by a mutual friend, with his contribution to the track coming in at the last minute.
“What he does is like the backbone of what all of those people were trying to do on country radio, but he’s doing it for real, and it’s honest,” Presley says of Yelawolf. “So I thought it would be really fitting for him to come and do that part.”
While she may not get the love from country radio she deserves, she makes up for it in spades with admiration from some of country’s most respected artists, including the late Guy Clark and Wanda Jackson, both of whom appear on Wrangled. Presley and Clark had a years-long friendship that eventually became a standing weekly writing appointment. The pair collaborated on Wrangled standout “Cheer Up Little Darling,” which ended up being Clark’s last co-write before his death from lymphoma at age 74 in May 2016.
“The day that we wrote ‘Cheer Up Little Darling,’ I went over, and that was after his health had started to decline,” Presley says. “I went over that day and he was like the Heartworn Highways Guy. He was full of energy, and he wasn’t using a cane. He was so excited about it. He was like, ‘I’ve got this hot shit idea, I’m telling you!’ ”
That song would grow to mean a lot to Clark in his final days. Presley says Clark and friends like Steve Earle, Sam Bush and Rodney Crowell would host impromptu pickin’ parties in Clark’s hospital room, and he always wanted to play “Cheer Up Little Darling.” The gently inspirational number is anchored by his favorite line, “It feels like a tight spot / But it’s just a loose end.”
“It’s like his last little tidbit that he left in the world,” Presley says. “I just hope I did it justice.”
Presley found a similar kindred spirit in Jackson, who at 79 appears to be just as spirited as she was in her days as the Queen of Rockabilly in the late 1950s. Together Presley and Jackson wrote “Good Girl Down,” a bass-heavy groover that emerged from an unfortunate spill Jackson had taken earlier on the day of their writing appointment.
“She showed up, and she’d fallen at the airport,” Presley says. “She had a shiner, and I said, ‘Wanda, why? We could have done this the other day.’ And she goes, ‘Heh, you can’t get a good girl down.’ ”
Presley was quick to note the parallels between Jackson’s career and her own. “It was like she was telling my story. And it was shocking that it hasn’t changed.”
Jackson also told Presley about her first (and only) appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, where her off-the-shoulder dress caused such a stir that the show’s producers forced her to wear a male artist’s coat to “cover up.”
“They put some freakin’ coat on her, and she went out and played,” Presley says. “She said, ‘I walked off that stage and looked at my daddy and said I’ll never do this show again.’ And she hasn’t. But she’s coming back in June to do it with me. I’ll probably wear something real slutty.”
Throughout the conversation, Presley makes several mentions of wanting to be “brave,” a descriptor she freely applies to Jackson and one she brings up again when discussing her recent participation in both the Women’s March and the A Day Without a Woman protest.
“I believe in equality,” she says. “I believe in love. I believe in tolerance. I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. When that’s being threatened or challenged, we have to speak up.”
On Wrangled, Presley is unapologetic about being herself. It’s an act of radical honesty, the kind that marks the catalogs of the genre’s best. The man in the 10-gallon hat who appears in the gorgeous Pistol Annies-assisted opening track “Dreams Don’t Come True” may never roll up in his red Cadillac and offer to make Presley a star. But she’s given us an album that will be a compelling listen long after this week’s airplay charts are history.
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