Singing serious country

She looks like a model, yet it's clear that Alison Moorer has little or no time for posing outside the remit of her own publicity shots. Her polite, quite beautiful exterior belies a grim toughness that is the result of several things - living in Nashville for seven years trying to make her mark, being constantly compared with her songwriter sister Shelby Lynne, and the granny of them all: the murder of her mother by her father and her father's subsequent gunshot suicide.

As she puffs on a cigarette, noting that Ireland is fine for smokers, Nashville isn't so bad but California's terrible, Alison gives the initial all-smiles impression that talking about anything is fine. It's an impression that diminishes as the minutes pass.

Moorer's standing in the country music community is quite a respectable one. Her 1998 debut album, Alabama Song, was released on the back of Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer. Moorer appeared in the movie as a bar room country singer dishing out Oscar-nominated measures of melancholia as Redford nimbly fumbled with those darned itty-bitty buttons on Kristen Scott Thomas's dress. "The Nashville community rarely thinks about Oscars," says Moorer through a fag drag, "so they didn't take much notice, but now people in Hollywood know who I am. It opened some doors for me and I hope it will continue. Robert Redford? He was as nice as nice can be. He loves and cares about what he does and I love being around artists who feel that way."

Moorer's second album, the just released The Hardest Part (MCA Nashville), is proof positive that she's a country star in the making. A themed collection of songs, it broaches the die-hard country aesthetics of cheatin', hurtin', sex, death, love and misery.

"I guess I'm serious about music. That's not to say I don't like pop or all kinds of stuff, but in country music the best is the hard hitting, very emotional facts-of-life material. I think a lot of modern country music is light - you know what I'm saying? I don't really like that so much. One of the things that makes country music so unique . . . is its subject matter.

"This record is about a love story, and it tells that story from the beginning to the end. It's really about the side of love that is not expressed so much these days. A lot of stuff you hear on country radio in the States is all very positive: I love you, you love me, and isn't everything grand? And we all know that's not the way it is all the time. Love can be wonderful, but it can also be the worst thing ever and the most complicated issue in the world. So the album is about ups and downs, the emotional turmoil you go through when you're in any relationship."

The most unusual and enlightening aspect of The Hardest Part is that Moorer relates the tragedy of her parents' deaths in an untitled "hidden" track (after the album's official closer, Feeling That Feeling Again). When I ask why she chose to highlight a personal tragedy in such a public way, Moorer's tone alters, and the defence shutters slowly begin to come down.

"It's a just a song, that's all it is," she says. People write songs about things that happen to them all the time, and that's how I see it. If you listen to the album tracks one to 10, the story ends one way. If you listen to the hidden track, it ends another way."

How does one get over such a tragedy? "You don't. It's therapy, it's catharsis. It is a bit difficult to put something out there that is so personal, that is so obviously part of my life story. I had been trying to write that song for a long time, and I had to take myself out of it to do so."

Is she glad she did it? A clipped "Yes." What feeling does she get when she sings it? Another clipped retort: "Challenging. Talking about my parents is very painful. So can singing that song, but it also feels good. At the end of the day, my parents lives were so much more important to me than their deaths, and that's what I want people to know."

I start to tell Alison that last year I interviewed her sister, Shelby Lynne, but the shutters come clanging down as she intercepts: "I'll tell you this - we don't talk about each other in the press. It's a pact we've made with each other. Our careers are totally separate and our music is completely different."

And so the interview disintegrates into a brief question and answer session. What is her notion of country music? "Other than its subject matter, I don't have any preconceived notions. Musically, you can push the envelope in a whole bunch of different directions."

What does she think of country's newest female superstar, Shania Twain? "I don't . . . But I think anyone doing what they want to do is great. Anyone who has creative control over their music - go right ahead. And as for people who say what is or isn't country . . . Well, was Patsy Cline country? Was Jim Reeves country? It's a huge umbrella . . . For me, country music is whatever I think it is." And that, Alison Moorer's look tells me, is that.

The Hardest Part (MCA Nashville) was released in Ireland/UK last week. The album is released in the USA in September.