Nine Songs: Willow Avalon

BEST FIT: I know the story here because I've heard your dad tell it before but I've love to hear it in your own words.

WILLOW AVALON: Well, the combination of my mom and my dad is a really crazy one. I don't know how it really happened. My dad's like 6 foot 2 for one, and my mom is 5 foot. She's itty bitty, and they're two southerners but my mom is the kind of southerner where she's like the sweetest, most loving, warm, most suffocating, crazy, little, small package of a woman. And my dad is a little bit more hands off; he's in his own world, in his own head, and he's a very straightforward guy, and not very gushy, not very lovey-dovey.

I don't think he ever expected to be a parent and it was something that happened by chance, you know. And for him, stepping into the role of being a father... I know it was a really scary thing for him, and not something he was not used to or comfortable with, and he had to figure out how to show some things he knew nothing about: that he loved me, and that was something that was always really hard for him.

He grew up in a family that was not that, and he couldn't really say he loved me at all growing up, and so he wanted to write me a song that told me how much he loved me instead. And in his words, it just kept turning out about crackheads and bad preachers and sad stuff. But my dad loves the rain and Blue Bird was always my nickname growing up – it was Tiki Bird and Blue Bird.. and so he's got the line "Finally found someone to love more than the rain / Bluebird I love you more than the rain."

That song still gets me to this day and it makes me cry and it's my favourite song that's ever been written on the face of the earth. Me and my papa are all lovey-dovey now, and he has told me that becoming a father is something that fully changed his life and his understanding of what it means to be alive. He's an amazing man: I love him, and I respect him so much.

Did you appreciate the song at the time?

I think he's got a line in there where, when he played it for me, I said: "Dad, it's sad and way too long", which is true. He writes like ten-minute songs, which is why him and the major music business in terms of radio play didn't work very well because he's Don McLean-ing it

But as a kid I loved going to the bars that my dad would play. I thought that the chalk for pool tables – because it was rounded out – was for your nose and there's photos of me where it's just my nose covered with red or blue or green chalk! But growing up watching him play shows, being submerged in that world and seeing how much his songs and stories resonated with people was awesome.

So that song means something so special to me but it also means something to another father with a daughter or a son or somebody that they can't say they love to.

My dad is like a hermit musician, you know? He doesn't go and do the three-month-long tours. He doesn't really do posting videos on the internet every day; besides his Facebook, he doesn't really have a social media thing.

But it's a very different job than what I thought it was as a kid, and from working every other job you could think of up until being able to do this full time... there's so much respect in telling stories about your life that are hard to tell to your closest friends, let alone the whole world. I grew up with my dad just saying: 'You know, if you're feeling down or if you're feeling happy or anything that you're feeling, just go and write it out.' And that's what I would do. I didn't have therapy.

It must be bizarre, having two very different influences in the way your dad approached music, and then the Nashville side, which is obviously much more about polish?

I'm very much in the middle of that. I don't really like the internet. I got that from my dad. I would rather be at home with all my little trinket things, and not partying it up, but that's part of the Nashville music scene. Networking is my dad's least favourite thing, and it's also my least favourite thing. But I love real conversations, I love playing shows for people where my stories resonate for them.

Me and my dad are eerily similar. I just have a little bit more of a drive and a want to be able to split down the middle of that lane, to be a little bit in both worlds where I can bend some of my strong-willed mental blocks into being able to do this, in this day and age. [But] my dad is the best storyteller I've ever encountered, and I definitely did get a little bit of that from him.