"I’m always on the outside, of the in crowd, outsider," Jackie Bristow sings on the title track of her new album.
And it’s never been more true than these past couple of years.
Gore’s finest musical export has been living and working in the United States for 15 years, but not these past two.
Covid forced an extended stay back home, during which her Green Card expired. Now, as far as the US is concerned, she’s an alien again, an outsider.
As Bristow tells the story, she’d been touring back in New Zealand just before Covid struck.
"I stayed about a week longer to stay for my Dad’s 70th and then my flight got cancelled and I couldn’t go back to America. Then all my touring for America and Europe got cancelled. And the Covid was so bad in America, I thought I might as well stay in New Zealand and enjoy being here, because I’ve been homesick for years," she says.
"Then I waited a little bit too long and my visa, my Green Card, there was a bit of a mix up."
The upshot, outsider status.
Making the inconvenient downright disruptive, Bristow had already begun recording the new album, Outsider, in Nashville and needed to keep that moving.
In the event, Bristow travelled to Auckland, recorded the vocals with friend Rikki Morris, and sent them to producer and close collaborator Mark Punch back in the US, who set to work.
At about which point, the luck began to change.
"Then we got some other musicians and special players and artists on [the album] that we probably wouldn’t have got, if the whole world hadn’t been in lockdown."
And it’s also at about this point that Bristow’s claims to outsider status start to look a little less certain, as she begins to list some of those players. It’s Bonnie Raitt’s drummer Ricky Fataar, and Dolly Parton’s drummer Greg Morrow on another track, and Norwegian cosmic folk band Darling West, who did backing vocals on three tracks, and Viktor Krauss.
That’s Alison Krauss’ brother, whose credits also include Dolly Parton and Lyle Lovett.
"He produced Surrender, and he played all the instruments. He’s amazing," Bristow confirms.
Then pedal steel legend Dan Dugmore lends his slide to another of the album’s tracks, Without You. He’s notable for, among other things, having played on a good many of Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor’s hits.
Without You closes with a full string section, arranged by another Nashville big-name, Kristin Wilkinson, who has graced the recordings of just about anyone who is anyone.
"So, yeah. There are quite a few legends on the album," Bristow sums up, sounding more like a fully paid up member of the in crowd.
And in fact Bristow’s been rubbing shoulders with musicians of that sort of calibre for a good many years now; opening for Jackson Browne, Art Garfunkel, Chris Isaak, touring with Bonnie Raitt and Boz Scaggs.
"They become your friends as well, you know. The two most successful things for me, I think, in my career have been the musicians I have been surrounded by for 20 years and the artists I have got to open up for."
But, yes, she confirms that Outsider, the song and album name are autobiographical, and it is about the work she’s had to do building a career as a fulltime performing artist, working in from the fringes.
"When I grew up doing music, you had to leave, because it was so isolated — Gore and all that," she explains.
First stop was Sydney, next to penniless and alone, knowing no-one, faced with breaking into the scene.
"And that’s kind of what it’s about."
"I went to LA, had to break into the scene in Los Angeles, and then I lived in Austin, Texas and I had to break into the scene there and then Nashville, I had to break into the scene there. I always feel when you first get somewhere, you are always on the outside, on the fringe, looking in. You have to pay your dues everywhere. Everywhere you go you almost start from scratch. Like in Texas, in Austin, they don’t care what you have done outside that town.
"Even for me back in New Zealand, because I have been outside New Zealand for so long, I am on the outside of the thing. That’s what it’s about, my story through life, travelling to these different places to break into the music scene."
Bristow pauses for half a beat before completing the picture.
"Then the magic happens and you meet your people."
Outsider is album number five for Bristow, six years on from the last one. The gap would have been shorter had it not been for Covid, but the singer-songwriter says that’s about her pace anyway.
"It always takes me a little bit of time to write an album."
In the case of Outsider, that’s contributed to the richness of the final set by providing a larger landscape of experience from which to draw.
When she began writing for it she was still based in LA.
"I was living in California and some of the songs have a lot of that singer-songwriter feel ... tipping our hats to Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones and Crosby, Stills and Nash — thinking about that romantic feeling of all those amazing songwriters writing songs in those hills, where we were hanging out."
Then, with the first half of the album written, she moved to Nashville where a different set of influences were at play.
One of those second-half tracks, Tennessee, is about finding her rock ’n’ roll home, she says, in around that musical heartland, drawing on the sounds of Muscle Shoals, Alabama and New Orleans to the south, where R&B, soul, country and rock’n’rock were shaped one by the other.
"I think I absorbed more of the R&B," she says.
"We put the horns on it and that’s got a bit more of an R&B feeling, in those songs."
The response to the album has been heartening, she says.
"It’s getting some radio play in America, it’s charting on the Americana radio charts, or starting to chart, so that’s exciting. And it’s got featured in some credible publications in the Americana genre too."
The growing acceptance of Americana as a catholic catch-all genre for musicians who parade their rootsy influences has been something of a boon for Bristow. It’s an inclusive umbrella under which you can rock and swing and dance — but also pick and slide.
The girl from Gore carried the South’s love of country music with her out into the world. Indeed, she and her sister started young, as the Bristow Sisters, doing local competitions, hoedowns. Hitchhiking with outfits and charts under their arms on one occasion, aged 11, when the family car overheated outside Alexandra.
But her music has outgrown narrow categorisation, after those years in California and mixing with the myriad influences that colour Memphis soul and Texas blues.
"I have a love of pop music," she adds, "pop melodies," before adding folk to the list, for its tradition of story-telling.
"My music has a little bit of all of it."
So, Americana is a good fit.
"You have a place, there is a place for you. There’s a radio format, there’s an audience. Because sometimes you can fall between the cracks."
What it all sounds like, is a woman on top of her craft. And the dedication to that art hasn’t been sitting idle during these twilight months of pandemic.
Bristow was asked to do some workshops while back living in Queenstown that spiralled off into the Jackie B and the Mini Band project, an EP of music co-written by Whakatipu youngsters, the backing music for which was recorded, produced and mastered in Nashville and Sydney. It was picked up by an American label and Bristow now hopes to do another one.
Not stopping there, she’s been developing a songwriting programme with Queenstown-based charitable trust Turn Up The Music and Youthtown, in collaboration with its chief wrangler Bill Moran, to offer further musical opportunities to youngsters, nationwide.
"There are a few girls from the first couple of groups," she says of the project so far, "that have taken to songwriting, so I am writing songs with them, on their own, and helping build their confidence so they can go off and have their own sound.
"There are a couple of them I am absolutely positive are going to do amazing things. It’s that thing that you have — I had it. At 11 years old I was devoted to music, it was my thing and it has never gone away. And my long-term friends in the music business, we’re all like that."
Bristow’s still like that, posters for her long-delayed New Zealand tour newly printed. It officially kicks off in Nelson in April, but there’s a Kinross, Queenstown show next weekend first — delayed a month because of Omicron.
After that, the US beckons once more.
"I’ve just been offered a couple of shows with Boz Scaggs, and I hope they come off, because they are a little bit earlier than I was planning," she says.
The outsider, heading back to rejoin her in crowd.
