If she wanted to, Allison Moorer could be Faith Hill. Or Shania Twain, or any number of similarly attractive young country stars with big voices and gifted stylists. But Moorer has no desire to be Nashville’s next crossover sensation: Some days, she will tell you, just being Allison Moorer seems difficult enough. “If there was really anybody telling me what I needed to look like, or what I needed to wear, they’d be told to [expletive] right off,” she says cheerfully. “I have my own ideas, and selling out and becoming a pop star doesn’t interest me.”
Someone once called Moorer “Nashville’s leading anti-diva,” which pleased her enormously, even though it only tells part of the tale. Moorer, who recently released her sophomore album. “The Hardest Part,” is best known for “A Soft Place To Fall,” which earned her a spot on the “Horse Whisperer” soundtrack, and a 1998 Best Song Academy Award nomination.
Moorer lost to the startlingly bad Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston “Prince of Egypt” duet “When You Believe,” and the resulting national exposure didn’t ignite her career the way she had hoped. “I knew I wasn’t gonna win, but I got to perform on the show and wear a Vera Wang dress, so it was very cool,” she says now. “But the song wasn’t a hit. It got nominated for an Oscar, but it never got played on the radio. Still, I think people know me [only] from that song, but I think that’s changing with this new record; I’m not the `Horse Whisperer’ girl anymore.”
Another association has proved equally complicated: Moorer, 28, is the younger sister of Shelby Lynne, a former country starlet-turned-pop-soul singer of recent renown. Lynne’s breakthrough release, “I Am Shelby Lynne,” has positioned her as the next Dusty Springfield; Moorer, with her sad, gorgeous voice, may well be the next Lucinda Williams. The two sisters share a hardscrabble upbringing, an unrepentant feistiness and a certain innate prickliness towards the media.
“We’ve made the agreement not to talk about each other in the press, because we want to keep our relationship private. We just want to be sisters,” says Moorer, who has never collaborated with her sister and says she never plans to. “I have no rivalry with her whatsoever. I want her to be as successful as she can be. [But] we’re always compared to each other, when what we do are two totally different things.”
Moorer and Lynne were teenagers when their father murdered their mother and then shot himself. On the new record’s hidden track, “Cold Cold Earth,” Moorer addresses the tragedy for the first time, telling the story with an almost clinical detachment. It’s the only song on the record she wrote alone, and the only one on which she doesn’t sing in the first person.
Moorer hid the track because she didn’t want the potentially tabloid-y nature of the song to overshadow the rest of the record. “Because of the way that drama and trauma and the soap opera aspect of people’s lives gets treated in the press, I didn’t want that to be the whole story,” she says, although she knows that many Nashville journalists have focused on little else. “Someone called me naive, and I may be. [But] I was prepared for a certain amount of questions about it, and if I hadn’t been prepared to talk about it, I never would have put that song on the record. I wouldn’t say, `OK, I’m going to sing this, but don’t you dare ask me a question about it.’ That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all.”
“The Hardest Part” is lovely and bleak, an old-school country record that moves easily from acoustic-based tracks to string-infused dirges to rhythm and blues. It’s wholly preoccupied with love gone wrong; for most artists, this would be called a normal country record, but to Moorer (who has been listening to a lot of Radiohead lately, which might explain it) it’s a concept album, an almost linear tale of bad love and its consequences.
Moorer wrote most of the songs on the record with her husband and co-producer, Doyle “Butch” Primm. Does she think it’s healthy for a couple to spend so much time writing about busted relationships? “No. There’s nothing healthy about doing that,” Moorer admits. “There’s nothing healthy about this business. I didn’t get into this business because I wanted to be healthy, and I didn’t get into it because I wanted to be rich. I would have done something else, but I can’t do anything else. I’m pretty much screwed.”
Moorer was raised in tiny Frankville, Ala., went to college in Mobile, and eventually headed to Nashville in the early 1990s with dreams of becoming a backup singer. Moorer sang with her older sister, but otherwise didn’t get very far. It wasn’t until she met and began collaborating with Primm that she thought about striking out on her own, releasing her debut, “Alabama Song,” in 1998.
Until Robert Redford rescued “A Soft Place to Fall” from potential obscurity, giving it — and Moorer, who makes a cameo — a home in his film, Moorer’s career looked anything but promising (it’s telling that when the head of Moorer’s label called to tell her about her Oscar nomination, she thought he was calling to tell her she had been dropped).
Moorer says she wouldn’t mind becoming an actress, and has even read for a few parts, but otherwise pursues her singing career with a devotion that borders on religious. “I don’t have any hobbies, I don’t really want to have children,” she says. “This is my child. That’s how I feel. That might be sick, but it’s the truth. I’m not saying that I don’t want to be a star. I want to be as successful as I possibly can be, doing what I want to do. I don’t want to be a flavor of the month. I want to do something that will live on.”
