Prior to this week, Tanya Tucker’s most recent album of new music was 2002’s Tanya. But the iconic country singer wants to make it clear that she hasn’t spent the intervening years resting on her laurels.
“I ain’t been twiddling my thumbs,” Tucker says, speaking by phone from her publicist’s office on Music Row.
Early in our conversation, she explains that she’s put considerable time and energy into a handful of projects that should see the light of day in the next couple of years. The plan is for While I’m Livin’, out Friday via Fantasy Records, to serve as her re-entry into the genre she’s done so much to shape.
Anticipation for new music from Tucker has certainly built a great deal. Her first hit, “Delta Dawn” — released in 1972 when Tucker was just 13 — paved the way for a slew of awards and accolades, among them 10 No. 1 singles on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. Once Tucker announced While I’m Livin’, the news that she’d collaborated on the project with co-producers Shooter Jennings and Brandi Carlile only intensified the excitement. All the same, working together came about in a casual way.
“Shooter Jennings, who I love, mentioned [doing a new album] to me, and I kind of forgot about it,” Tucker says. “Next thing I know, Brandi Carlile is calling me on the phone. I’d never met [her] or heard any of her music. She laid it on me, what she wanted to do, and I believed her. I said, ‘Let’s do this.’ ”
Tucker flew to Los Angeles to meet Carlile and begin recording, and found a kindred spirit in the younger singer, songwriter and producer. Tucker describes being most struck by Carlile’s deep love for and familiarity with Tucker’s life and body of work.
“I enjoyed so much working with Brandi,” she says. “She’s very easy, but tough at the same time. She’s fun. I know she really cares about me. I don’t have any doubt in my mind. It’s very obvious in how she communicates with me. … I’m really lucky for that. It’s almost unexplainable really. It’s hard to find the words to really capture the feeling of it all. I don’t think that it’s normal, for lack of better words. I don’t even know if it’s worldly. It’s in this world, but not of it.”
While I’m Livin’ features a number of new songs, the majority of which Carlile co-wrote with her frequent writing partners, twin brothers Tim and Phil Hanseroth. The trio wrote songs they hoped would ring true to Tucker after diving deeply into her catalog and imagining life from her perspective. “The Day My Heart Goes Still” is an ode to Tucker’s father, while opening track “Mustang Ridge” harks back to her childhood. Tucker is frank in expressing her awe at how well the Hanseroths managed to capture her experiences and point of view.
“Way after I cut the record, I asked the twins: ‘How did you guys write these songs? Did you just get in a room and say, “OK, this is what I think Tanya Tucker would want to sing truthfully”?’ They said what they did is, they rode around in their cars listening to all my music that I’ve ever done, and fell in love with my music and me. They Googled me and researched my life. And they did it. … They have a kind of talent that’s extraordinary in a way I’ve never witnessed before.”
Tucker co-wrote one of the album’s tracks, the stunning closing ballad “Bring My Flowers Now.” The song, one of the LP’s most powerful moments, relies on both Tucker’s wry sense of humor and her capacity for vulnerability. And as she remembers it, the song has been gestating since she was 14 years old, on tour in Texas with Johnny Rodriguez.
“I’ve had it a long time,” she says. “I had the chorus but couldn’t come up with the verses. [Carlile and the Hanseroths] hit me with a couple lines, and I hit back, and it just fell into place — almost like it was written a long time ago and we were just writing it down. It’s special.”
Tucker explains that recording While I’m Livin’ was a vastly different experience from any other she’s had, and that’s saying something for a career that’s spanned most of her life. Though it’s been a long time since she’s released new songs, spending time in the studio with a group of people who were on her wavelength already has her looking forward to the next album — “biting at the bit,” as she says, to bring her still-growing list of ideas for future projects to life.
“Everyone from the engineer to the documentary film crew to the guy who brought the pizzas — everybody was just really special,” she says. “That was a godly thing, I think. I really believe it.”
