K.T. Oslin, resurfacing after a couple of low-profile years, remembers a night on The Nashville Network’s “Nashville Now” show shortly before she retreated from public view.
She recalls that a young singer enjoying his first single-a marginally talented young man who thereafter was dropped from the roster of his record company like a stone-did his song and then, during a commercial break, turned to Oslin with “innocent, wide-open eyes.”
“He said, `Isn’t this fun?’ ” she says, first dramatizing the young man’s Gomer Pyle-like naivete and then following it with a southerner’s belly laugh that 22 years as a New Yorker couldn’t take out of her.
“I’m thinking, `You’ve been in this business a month, and I’ve been in it 30 years,’ ” she says. “No, it isn’t fun. Most of it isn’t fun.’ “
That view led Oslin, a lifelong single woman who is now 50, to pick up her career’s marbles a couple of years ago and head home to a Tennessee house paid for by her brief, but brilliant, stint on the skyline of Nashville stardom.
Hitting the Tennessee capital on the backside of age 45 and dramatically raising country music’s female consciousness with such hits as “’80s Ladies,” “Do Ya,” “I’ll Always Come Back” and “Come Next Monday,” she then “started to slightly come apart at the seams,” as she puts it. Tired of each other, she and country radio finally resorted to what became at least a trial separation.
Now she’s back with a new album, a greatest-hits-and-more package distinctively titled “Songs From an Aging Sex Bomb.” But she isn’t necessarily back on country radio. She isn’t even necessarily back for long.
“I’ve never been entirely enchanted with the business of this business,” she explains. “I love the performing, the writing, the creative part of it, but the rest can go fall in the lake.
“Most of the performers in this business work very hard, too hard, and I just basically got tired. I also suffered some personal losses. My mother, my only surviving parent, died, and it affected me more than I ever thought it would. My wonderful old dog got old and died, and my kitty got old and died. Everything was dying.
“And when you get to be 50, a lot of lights come on and a lot of gears change. You go, `This is really stupid, really dumb, and I’m just not going to waste my time on it.’ I started looking at this business like it was the silliest stuff in the world. I didn’t enjoy any of it.”
So what prompted her return?
Well, she hasn’t completely returned. She will be seen along with some other Nashville names in the upcoming Peter Bogdanovich movie “The Thing Called Love” (opening in August), and she has this more or less new album (four cuts previously were unreleased), but she isn’t out there again beating the white lines off the nation’s superhighways between one auditorium and the next.
She says she still is “tired” of the business and is “not interested” if she has to engage in it the way she had to before-and her direction this time isn’t country. Although “Songs From an Aging Sex Bomb” currently occupies a respectable position in the country album charts, it was recorded as a pop project, she says, adding that RCA/BMG boss Joe Galante had been pressing her to record a “pop” album for three years.
“I would very much like to go in a pop direction,” she says. “I’d like to have the freedom to just go wherever the writing takes me. That was another thing that had bothered me. I’d think, `OK, I’m in this country format, so I owe it to them to be as country as I can’; and I started feeling like I was in a straitjacket.
“Joe asked me if I’d do four kinds of pop songs to see how that shoe fit. He just wanted me to stay in it. With the poppier songs I’m trying to reach a different audience than with the other stuff, but I think the new audience will like the old stuff as well. If I get a good response from pop I might consider doing another album, but I’d do it (her career) in a slightly different way.
“Country music is driven by performance; for most of them (performers), the only way they can make money is to go out on the road. And I can’t honestly say I’d like to get back into the touring scene or even heavy into the record scene.”
Oslin says she prefers staying home, “digging in the yard” and occasionally driving to the grocery store in the Jeep she bought six years ago-which now, she apologizes with a laugh, still has just 20,000 miles on it.
She says she recorded the four new cuts for the current album reluctantly. She “just kind of backed off” a couple of years ago after a not overly successful domestic tour was followed by a killer USO trip to the Caribbean where, because it was being filmed for a cable TV special, she had a camera in her face “from 7 in the morning until I staggered into my hutch at night.
“When I came off that, I just said, `I hate everything about this,’ ” she recalls. “I said, `I don’t want to tell my life story, don’t want to be interviewed, don’t want to go to (business) meetings, don’t want to answer fan mail. I don’t want to do any of it. I want them to leave me alone.’ “
In truth, Oslin and country music perhaps were never 100 percent right for each other. A sort of musical bridge between Sophie Tucker and Tanya, Oslin may have exhibited a little too much of the Broadway vamp to ingratiate her for long with mainstream traditional country audiences.
There also was the fact that she appeared on the scene on the threshold of menopause, two decades senior to most of her female Nashville peers. She was ahead of them in some other ways, too, that made her far more important than the brevity of her brightest stardom suggests.
Twenty years in New York had given her a to-the-bone feminist independence that kicked the last subservient note out of Nashville women’s music. Oslin, though, indicates she feels she just arrived at the right place at the right moment.
“It was just a matter of time,” she says. “Country music was just a little behind the rest of the country. It was like the last decade hadn’t gone by. I came down here from New York and it was like, `Where’ve you people been for 10 years?’
“That’s what made me such a weirdo to some people-so abrasive.”
If the “pop thing” happens, Oslin says she doesn’t plan to move away from Nashville.
She says she always has wanted to “string my music together with some dialogue” and do a “one-woman” Broadway-style show, but she abhors the idea of having to become a New Yorker again for six months to do it.
“I live very modestly,” she says. “I’ve handled my money very well. I could quit now and never work again and live quite comfortably.”
She purses her lips in reflection.
“I accomplished a lot,” she says. “I did some things people will not be able to top for a while, and I enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t ever want to go back and repeat those five years. It’s just too much.
“If I ever have something to say and want to write it down in a song, I’ll do that. And if I end up with enough songs to do an album, then I might do that.
“Or I might, you know, never do this again.”
