'I never thought I'd play more than two miles from my house,' announces an animated Willow Avalon on the final night of her U.K. and Ireland tour, which included sharing stages at the C2C annual event with Lainey Wilson, Dierks Bentley, Cody Johnson in London, Glasgow and Belfast. Avalon may not have been a headline act on that tour, but her show in Dublin this evening suggests she will be in the future.
Unlike many of her peers navigating the painstaking music industry, Avalon has not spent ten years in Nashville praying for a break. Having played piano and sang in church at an early age, she has been living in New York in recent years. She signed her first ill-fated label deal at eighteen, but her career has taken off in hurricane style in the past few years.
Signed to Atlantic Records, the title of Avalon's recently released album SOUTHERN BELLE, RAISIN' HELL was not dreamed up in a Nashville songwriting sweatshop by a panel of songwriters. Instead, it's a literal representation of an artist who grew up in a small Southern town in Georgia (population 260) and got her artistic inspiration from family members, predominantly female. That clan, and in particular her granny, whom she refers to on a number of occasions this evening, were not traditional middle-class folk. More accurately, they were church-going, pistol-packing and mace spray carrying women who grew up in a swamp area and took no prisoners.
There's more than a little early Dolly Parton swagger to her stage show tonight, and it's no coincidence that her playlist before taking the stage includes singalongs Nine To Five and Jolene. However, Glen Campbell's Gentle On My Mind fades into the background as her band arrives on stage. Kitted out in matching black suits, white shirts, and bolo ties, the four-piece band includes guitarist JR Atkins, pedal steel player Jack McLaughlin, drummer Noah Rauchwerk and bass player Ned Steves, who also doubles on banjo. Avalon follows them on stage in suitable Southern Belle attire, flowing dress and multi-coloured cowgirl boots before launching into Something We Regret ('I love you like sugar, you love me like sex. Put us both together and we'll do something we regret'), complete with Steves' whistling solo followed by another 'busted love' account, Honey Ain't No Sweeter.
Her between-song banter is fun-filled and engaging, and each song is preceded by a 'one-two-three-four intro.' She admits to not being the luckiest in love or in her choice of partners, and quite a number of those doomed liaisons created the backstory to a number of the songs on her album. Those romantic liaisons may not be her forte, but alongside a gloriously accented voice, clever songs and a killer backing band, she is blessed with a personality and stage presence that screams X Factor. The stories between songs keep coming; the useless boyfriend that couldn't change a tyre or handle his laundry is the subject of The Actor, as good a country song that I've heard this year. Baby Blue, introduced as an account of a boyfriend she pulled the plug on, is delivered as an acoustic three-piece, with the drummer Rauchwerk and pedal steel player McLaughlin taking time out.
Shots of whisky are downed ('Sorry, mama') by Avalon and her band by introducing Tequila or Whiskey before she closes the set with Yodelaheehoo leaving the stage to a deafening response. Crowd favourite Homewrecker is the one-song encore, and although the set is short at just over fifty minutes, she more than makes up for it with the intensity of her performance.
There is little doubt that Willow Avalon is destined for bigger rooms and arenas going forward. Times are always challenging for female artists in country music, but in the last decade, Kacey Musgraves and Sierra Ferell have made breakthroughs, and in more recent years, Kaitlin Butts. Avalon ticks all the boxes to follow in their footsteps. No doubt, most attendees at tonight's show will recall in coming years seeing this fireball in a medium-sized venue for a little over twenty euros. That's most certainly unlikely to be repeated.
Declan Culliton