The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile - A Straight-Ahead Celebration of Country's 'Outlaw' Women

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The somewhat awkwardly titled documentary, The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile, turns out to be an accurate summary of a film that celebrates two women.

The first is the veteran country star, Tanya Tucker, now 64, who in 2019 recorded her first album of original material in 17 years.

Standing just behind the spotlight is Brandi Carlile, the six-time Grammy-winning country and roots musician who made it a mission to bring Tucker back in the spotlight. 

Tucker and Carlile: Two generations of country classics.

The film, by Kathlyn Horan, is an entirely straight-forward chronicle of the recording, release and eventual success of  Tucker’s 2019 album, While I’m Livin’, which earned Tucker four Grammy nominations and two wins.

 It was her first Grammy since she released her first hit single, Delta Dawn, at the age of 13. It also includes archival TV interviews, clips from the iron-lunged adolescent star, to her youthful period as a glittery country rocker who modelled her stage moves on Elvis Presley. 

Tucker is clearly revered by Carlile as a trail-blazer, the female answer to 70’s outlaw country heroes like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and David Allan Coe, who disdained Nashville’s slick production for a more personal musical story-telling.

Though she has done little in the last couple of decades, apart from a 2009 album of cover tunes, Tucker remains an influence on such independent country women artists as Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert and the members of The Chicks (formerly The Dixie Chicks). She’s also admired as by Americana fans such as Shooter Jennings (son of country stars Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter) who co-produced the album.

In archival clips, the film touches, but doesn’t dwell on Tucker’s years, including her early ‘80s’ fling with the late Glen Campbell, who was 22 years her senior. In the studio, Tucker, hair dyed pink, still smokes, though she frets she may have to cut it out if she goes back on the road.  

And she hasn’t entirely reformed. At one point Carlile affectionately complains she’s getting a headache every day trying to match shots with Tucker, who frequently employs her vocal lubricant, tequila with red grapefruit juice. Though Tucker’s voice sounds like she gargles gravel, the timing and phrasing are still impeccable. Like producer Rick Rubin’s work with late career Johnny Cash, Carlile is after the quality of weathered authenticity, not a slick sound. 

Carlile is an intriguing figure, a big voiced singer-songwriter who matches her artistic prowess and musicologists’ knowledge with a producer’s hard-nosed sense of the market: There’s a fascinating sequence where she talks about the benefits of booking Tucker into “perception” venues where the money is less than casinos, but much higher in cool factor.

If being a Grammy-winning gay mother in country music weren’t groundbreaking enough, the 41-year-old singer, songwriter and producer is helping shape country music history by building generational bridges. Earlier this year, in a moment that lit up social media, Carlile, the closing act of the Newport Folk Festival, brought out her surprise guest, the 78-year-old Joni Mitchell in her first full-length performance since the early 2000s. The two are now on tour together.

The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile. Directed by Kathryn Horan.  The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile opens in theatres on Friday, Nov. 4.