Country singer Willow Avalon’s second album, “Pink Pocket Pistol,” unfolds like a movie: a series of vignettes about (in most cases) a man that has wronged her or another woman.
“My whole life, everything that I do, I think about it cinematically,” says Avalon, who performs Saturday at 9:30 Club in D.C. “I grew up not really watching television or movies, but when I would, it would be old-school: Alfred Hitchcock, ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’ When I start writing a song … I’m always visualizing the actual visuals that go behind that.”
Avalon, 28, grew up in Carlton, Georgia, a one-stoplight town with some 300 residents. When she would get into trouble, her dad, musician Jim White, would recount her misdeeds in vivid detail.
“When he would tell me something that I’d done wrong, it’s like he knew every single part of the story,” she says. “He would recollect it with such prose and color. Sometimes, I thought there was a little more color than what I actually had done.”
Avalon’s retro-sounding songs are filled with similar depth and wordplay. “It’s just in the blood,” she says. “I mean, every single person in my family can sit there and talk your ear off, but you don’t want your ear to fall off. They can tell you a story, and you’ll feel like you’re watching a movie. It sounds like there’s a soundtrack behind them, too. It’s just the way that they tell stories.”
That’s reflected in the female revenge tales found in “Pink Pocket Pistol.” “I think that there is very much a double [standard] of what women can say and the idea of what Southern women are supposed to be like,” Avalon says.
Take the album-opening title track, a spaghetti western murder ballad that would have slid neatly into a “Kill Bill” film. Or “Hypothetically Speaking,” a duet with Kaitlin Butts, in which the narrator helps hide a body after a friend murders her husband with a cast iron skillet. Then there’s “Hex,” in which she puts a hex on an ex and sings: “I threw out the flowers you sent to my door/ Along with the card where you poured out your heart/ I read it and laughed ‘cause you couldn’t spell ‘you’re.’”
Avalon started playing piano in the Baptist church and used YouTube to learn guitar to be closer to her dad. She battled mental health issues as a preteen, so her parents enrolled her in the suicide-prevention music camp Nuçi’s Space in Athens, Georgia, where she discovered her talent for singing.
“They fully saved my life,” she says. “I wouldn’t be where I am without the camp.”
She left home as a teenager, lived out of her car, moved to Los Angeles and got a record deal that fell apart. She worked as a waitress, writing songs at night, before moving to New York at 23. She fell in love with a Victorian apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that she had to talk the landlords into letting her (and her pet possum) rent. She met a guy whose friend, Caleb Simpson, was a TikToker who filmed apartment tours. They made a video, and it went viral the same day a video Avalon posted of her possum went viral, which ultimately led to a record deal with Atlantic Records.
“I have a really intense intuition in my body that I always listen to,” Avalon says. “It was so crazy that my music career started from my possum and my apartment.”
Avalon lives in Nashville now, and like many movies, “Pink Pocket Pistol” has a happy ending. “Georgia Mile” is a sweet ballad about finding a man she can bring home who will chop wood with her dad and make her mom believe, as she sings, “that good men ain’t just in the movies.”
“I don’t hate all men,” Avalon says. “I can write a lot of songs about being sassy … but it takes me being really vulnerable to open up and write about the softer side of me when I’m in love.”
Saturday at 6 p.m. at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. 930.com. $32.50-$90.95.
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