Willow Avalon is a reluctant gun owner.
“I really wish guns did not exist in this world and I don’t think they should. But we’re way past the point for that to ever be a reality,” she says.
“And as a woman in a public-facing career in a state where it is so unbelievably easy to get a gun, I chose to get one myself and be educated about it.”
Avalon’s gun is a pink Smith & Wesson pistol, much like the titular gun featured on the cover of her brand-new Pink Pocket Pistol album. Avalon may not like guns, but she was raised on them — and album’s cover art is an homage to her family’s fierce, wild past.
The front cover of Pink Pocket Pistol features a reenactment of a family photo of Avalon’s paternal grandmother holding a shotgun on a beach in South Carolina. The back of the album is a replica of a photo of her dad, holding the same gun.
“Keeping it in the family is my favorite thing to do,” Avalon tells Taste of Country.
She remembers one particular visit her great-aunt paid to her dad’s house when she was a young child. Her great-aunt was filing her nails on the couch as her dad did dishes in the other room, and Avalon, who’d been crawling around the floor, started rummaging through her great-aunt’s purse.
“And she yells at my dad, she goes, ‘Jim, you gotta keep that baby away from my purse, I’ve got a loaded pistol in there,'” Avalon recounts, dialing up her normally subtle Georgia drawl. “My dad runs in with there with soapy hands and picks me up as I’m grabbing a pistol.”
Avalon describes the women in her family as “protected” — by their guns, and maybe by something even more powerful, too.
“They’re not witchy, they don’t do ceremonies or spells, but if they believe something in their heart, and they wish and will that it’s going to happen, it’s very likely going to happen,” she explains. “Being on the bad side of the women in my family is something that all the men try very much not to do.”
Talk to Southern and Appalachian families and you’ll realize that Avalon’s story of a witchy bloodline isn’t uncommon. Though it’s not often talked about in country music lyrics, it’s an important piece of rural Southern lore, and a strong through line on the tracks of Pink Pocket Pistol.
The title track is an intoxicating, cool-headed revenge anthem, but another song — “Hex” — is even more explicitly witchy.
“I have put on a hex and I hope he feels it every day of his life,” Avalon says. “The hex wasn’t anything, like, deadly. I just hoped that he stubbed his little toe every time he wakes up in the morning.”
Attached to that idea of female lore is the idea of female camaraderie, which Avalon conveys in rare form with her Kaitlin Butts duet, “Hypothetically Speaking.” It’s a murder ballad — not a huge surprise from either artist — with gloriously gory lyrics about the proper way to dispose of a cheatin’, wife-beatin’ husband’s body without ever getting caught.
Avalon knew some of the more creative body-hiding techniques offhand while she was writing the song — like feeding a chopped-up corpse to alligators, since they’re protected under the Endangered Species Act — because she grew up watching Dateline with her mom, who warned her that men might threaten her one day, and she had to be prepared.
“So I know things like how to get blood to not show up on UV lights, and all these things that men never have to think about and that’s why they always get caught,” she says.
She knew that Butts had similar sensibilities and shared her dark humor, so she was her first and only choice as duet partner.
“As women, for generations we’ve had to make light of really scary situations…it’s really nice to be able to make light out of dark things, sadly. That’s a big part of Southern tradition,” Avalon adds.
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The singer’s big, complicated love of her family legacy and the 200-population hometown of Carlton, Ga., where she grew up is everywhere on this album. That love isn’t always thorny.
In fact, the final track, “Georgia Mile,” is downright dreamy. She says that she was inspired to write it after years of touring and living in big cities had her yearning for the simplicity of home, and she wound up traveling back to Georgia, renting a car to drive around the area that raised her.
But she struggled to write a simple, sweet love song about the place itself. After all, she’d felt like she had to fight and claw to get out.
She’d seen how addiction ravages impoverished Southern communities, and felt smothered by conservative politics and Southern Baptist religious ideals that didn’t gel with her beliefs. She watched other women in her family with the same dreams she had unable to realize them, falling instead into more traditional life paths like getting married and raising babies.
So instead she imagined her hometown as a person: The kind of person who feels like home, even when you’re far away.
“That’s one of my very few sweet songs, and there’s many more to come. I’ve gotten a little softer,” she says.
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Gallery Credit: Carena Liptak
