How Did the Women of the Pistol Annies Get Together to Start a Band?
It was all thanks to MySpace and a late night phone call.
It’s been quite a few years since Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley combined forces to create the unstoppable girl band called the Pistol Annies. Though they’ve been on hiatus for awhile, the group is gearing up for the release of their third album.
As they work towards the next chapter of their critically-acclaimed group, Monroe reflected on how the band formed during an interview with the Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett for his podcast, Walking the Floor.
Monroe and Lambert were tight-knit friends, who hung out “all the time,” remembers Monroe. It was during a night in Lambert’s Oklahoma home that Monroe began to think of Presley and knew her fellow singer/songwriter needed to hear her sing.
She pulled up Presley’s MySpace account (yes, Myspace) and the two began to listen to her music.
“Miranda goes, ‘it’s a band. It’s a band,'” says Monroe.
The two quickly called up Presley at a late hour to pitch their idea.
“She was like, ‘Why are y’all calling me up at midnight?’” Monroe recalls of Presley, who had a young child at the time. “Miranda was like, ‘Do you wanna be in a band with us?’ And [Angaleena]’s like, ‘Y’all high?’ And we were like, ‘Yes, but we still want to be a band.’”
Despite the late-night phone call, Presley agreed, and the trio became the Pistol Annies, each with their own Annies nickname.
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#Repost @pistolannies ・・・ Sangin’ some songs. #staytuned #hollerannie #lonestarannie #hippieannie
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They soon became thick as thieves, releasing two wildly-successful albums. After their 2013 release, the three women separated to concentrate on their solo endeavors, finally reuniting at the end of 2017, early 2018, to work on their latest project, Interstate Gospel.
“This [Annies] record more than ever, we were just in constant communication about the music,” shared Monroe. “All three of us have very distinctive sounds, but we’re all fans of each other. I like it when Angaleena is like, ‘I have a production idea,’ because I’m gonna like it and it’s gonna be different. We all really do equally contribute. If there’s anything that comes up that we’re ‘I don’t know,’ we really talk it out. We respect each other so much as artists, that we really listen to each other.”
