NEON COWGIRL
Neon Cowgirl album cover for Tami Neilson
I first met Tami in real life at Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans. She was in town to play Jazz Fest and popped into the gallery to see my show. At the time I didn’t know she was such a neon sign fan and I really didn’t know the history she had with the sign I painted my Cowgirl from. But we snapped this photo in front of Cowgirl on the first day we met.
Not too many months later Tami sent me a picture of the postcard from my show ( the Cowgirl ) taped to the cover of her notebook for inspiration. Squee!
But then we started talking about using the image on the cover of the new album. Even more squee!
And then we took it a bit further and decided to try to turn my Cowgirl into Tami herself.
Now this was a project I wanted in on!
I started with my painting from the show for the structure of the sign, but I would have to redo all the neon myself to create Tami’s bangs, ponytail, and an ear. This would be the second time I was making up a sign of my own ( the first one was the Jazz Fest poster sign, which is why I met Tami in the first place, so this was a cool evolution ). I went through layers and layers of tissue paper trying to connect all the new neon properly to make it believable. Once I had the tissue sketch I liked, I used my iPad to add some quick color and then sent those off to Tami to review.
Once we had a plan I set to work transferring the sketch to a panel. She sent me the song she was working on for the album —Neon Cowgirl—and then sent me more, so I listened to the album as I painted.
I started the painting in New Orleans, but had to take it on the road with me to make the deadline because we were headed back out on the road. What I didn’t know then was that she wrote much of this album as she drove across the country. And now I’d be painting the cover on the road as well!
From Tami:
“The Neon Cowgirl, towering over Broadway like the patron saint of heartbreak in downtown Nashville as she smiles coyly over her shoulder in red cowboy boots, watched me grow up.
Basking in her glow, I walked wide-eyed into the Ryman Auditorium as a 16 year old, clutching my ticket. Later that night, dreaming of standing on that stage, I drifted off to sleep in the bunk of our home on wheels at the KOA next to the Opry. When I was 18, she saw me flipping through Loretta Lynn CDs in Ernest Tubb Record Shop after performing the breakfast and lunch shows on the General Jackson showboat with my parents and brothers in our family band, The Neilsons. At 25, she watched me running all over town, meeting up with other songwriters- writing, writing, writing- before I had to fly back home to Canada again. At 30, I returned as a newlywed on my honeymoon, flying in from New Zealand where I’d moved for love, holding hands with my new husband in Hatch Show Print, introducing him to her like a family member. A decade passed without her as I built a life on the other side of the world and raised 2 babies. My heart raced as I returned to her again to showcase at Americanafest, playing to 12 people at 3rd and Lindsley. 5 years and many showcases later, I swear she smiled right at me as I stopped to point her out to my two children as we walked past her, into the doors of the Ryman to finally perform for the first time.
NEON COWGIRL represents a lifelong dream of chasing Nashville and country music. I’ve loved her my whole life, even when she breaks my heart over and over again.
This album came rumbling to life on 6 wheels over the highways of North America. I wanted our children, born and raised in NZ, to get a taste of their Neilson family heritage- a 5 month pilgrimage from coast to coast and back again in a 36 foot RV. It was also my once-in-a-lifetime chance to really give it my all with my career, which I’d built slowly and steadily in small 2-3 week increments over a decade, running back and forth from the other side of the world. Then, only 2 months before our trip, I landed in the hospital for a month, battling for my life in ICU with sepsis. Our trip changed from one of me going full throttle to make a good dent in my career to one of recovery and slow healing. It became a time of embracing life fully and savoring the precious time with my family in a way one does only after a near-death experience. We zig-zagged across the country, from the ghostly halls of Graceland to the technicolor desert of Salvation Mountain, across neon graveyards in Las Vegas to driving alongside herds of buffalo in Montana. I collected the seeds for these songs in each place along the way. When they blossomed, there were crossbreeds of Presley and Patsy, Orbison and kd lang- the blues of Memphis, the twang of Texas, the cinematic torch of Judy Garland on a Hollywood soundstage. But, mostly, it became a love letter to my Neon Cowgirl. Or, more accurately, a lovelorn letter. Because she’ll just keep on breaking a foolish heart if you let her.”