Ellen Angelico: Hey everyone. Ellen here. This is part two of bonus episodes from The Girl in a Hurry live show in March of 2025. If you haven’t checked out part one, I’d recommend starting there with my interview with Karen Dee and the Broadband reunion performance. This episode is gonna feature my interview with Ann Powers and a few questions we took from the audience.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Alright onto the show.

Alright.

Hi, Ellen. 

Hi, Ann. 

Ann Powers: How are you? I’m good. I am nervous, but I’m good. Oh my goodness. Don’t be nervous. This is your night and Shelly’s night and all of your night and I’m just so moved. I really am. I’m Ann Powers. I work for NPR, and I’m also a writer and author. I have a book I published last year about Joni Mitchell called Traveling on the Path of Joni Mitchell, and a book, thank you.

And a bunch of other books. Someone here mentioned a book I did with Tori Amos many years ago. Thank you, Amy, for that. I have also a new book that is relevant to this, I think, which we celebrated last night at the Nashville Public Library that came from a project I did at NPR called Turning the Tables, which is devoted to telling the stories of underrepresented, overlooked, marginalized and hidden in plain sight artists, all of which I think describes Shelly perfectly.

And that book is called How Women Made Music A Revolutionary History. But here we’re tonight to celebrate this incredible podcast you did, Ellen Angelico, my multi-talented friend, Girl in a Hurry. So first I just want to say, massive congrats. This podcast is so great on so many levels. 

Ellen Angelico: Thank you.

Ann Powers: Let’s hear it for

It’s just a super fun listen, a great musical listen, it tells a very personal story that’s also emblematic, but most important to me and given my path in life, is that it does bring to life a woman who absolutely deserves for her story to be centered and all of her band mates, some of whom are here tonight.

Man, I wanted that set to go on a lot longer than it did. I have to say. 

Ellen Angelico: I’m determined to get us outta here. This is an Angelico show.

Ann Powers: Well, where’s the after party? That’s all I gotta ask. 

Ellen Angelico: Your own home, peace and quiet. 

Yeah. 

Ann Powers: Well, I hope you all reunite. Okay, so first question, just practical. You mentioned the ease of podcast software. Look, I work in this business. It’s not that easy. Can you tell us a little nuts and bolts? How did you begin this project? How were you inspired to tell this story? Why a podcast? And then kind of the basics of how.

Ellen Angelico: Okay, so podcast software is easy, but storytelling is not.

Ann Powers: Yes. 

Ellen Angelico: And I was inspired by our mutual friend and my former roommate, Teddy Minton, and his master’s project, which was an oral history of women musicians in Nashville. And I started collecting these interviews with members of Shelly’s band and had the idea that I would create this repository of Shelly information that anybody who wanted could access.

And I realized as I was starting to amass this glut of interview tape, that that was not a manageable amount of information for a lay person to parse. And it occurred to me that it needed to have a story. And I was not amassing a glut of videotape. So, podcast, it was.

Ann Powers: What about the story sang to you the strongest when you were first approaching it?

Because, as I know having done biographies, and we all know, any of us who are storytellers, there’s always about 50 different roads you can go down at the beginning. There’s that fork in the road, that’s multivalent. So what was the, what drew you forward?

Ellen Angelico: The biggest tine on Shelly’s fork was her work ethic.

Ann Powers: Yeah. 

Ellen Angelico: And literally every person that I interviewed mentioned it. Even people who didn’t know her personally knew that about her, and it’s almost like it was in her DNA. Karen mentioned in the podcast Shelly’s dad, Woody, and his work ethic. And it’s almost just like, that’s what she knew. She was a singer and she wanted to sing, and she wanted to entertain, but she was also a worker.

And so those two things were gonna be how she moved forward. I ended up not spending a lot of time talking about the nature of work in the podcast, because I don’t think that Shelly dwelled on it a lot. My therapist describes our selves as a coat rack and different things about ourselves are coats that we can take on and off.

Ann Powers: Interesting. 

Ellen Angelico: You’re a Cubs fan. You’re a 

Ann Powers: A mom.

Ellen Angelico: A bad trombone player or whatever. Yeah. But those things are just coats. 

Ann Powers: Right. 

Ellen Angelico: And the core of you doesn’t change. And maybe you don’t spend a lot of time litigating what’s going on in that core. I don’t think Shelly spent a lot of time litigating why she worked the way she did.

Ann Powers: Well, she was a girl in a hurry. 

Ellen Angelico: She was in a hurry. 

Ann Powers: And she entered a place. She entered a site that is in a hurry, the music business, particularly in Nashville. And one of the most valuable things to me about this podcast is really the story you tell of Lower Broadway and again, reclaiming stories of people who maybe haven’t been held up even within that story.

We think of The Brothers Osborne started down there. You hear these men mostly who went on to be famous, who used to play on Lower Broadway. But these great musicians, some of whom are here tonight reclaiming that. But let’s talk about Lower Broadway a little bit because it is not unique in that it has parallels like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, for example. But thinking about the kind of job it is, it’s a carnival, it’s an assembly line. It is a stage. It is all of these things at once. It’s elevating and denigrating at the same time. It allows you to hone your artistry while people are like screwing in the back room or getting messy drunk on piña coladas or Fireballs or whatever the bridesmaids drink.

I don’t know. All these contradictions. So I know you have experience down there. Shelly was, kind of, like, an angel of that space. So talk about Lower Broadway a bit.

Ellen Angelico: Elevating and denigrating is absolutely what it is. It’s denigrating because it’s a grind. It is hard work to play downtown and do it as your job. But it’s also elevating in some ways. I have friends that primarily play downtown to this day because they don’t want to do the hustle of what another type of music career would entail. The way that you make connections in the touring world, that happens a lot slower than the way you make connections on Broadway. So you get in on Broadway and if you’re getting in with the right people and you’re sitting in, somebody takes a bathroom break and they get to know you, you can get on some shifts in a way that doesn’t happen in the touring world. 

Ann Powers: Oh, interesting.

Ellen Angelico: So they may choose that, because they want to support their families and they want to stay in town, they want to sleep in their own bed. It’s also elevating because of the musician that you become on Broadway. I don’t want to over-romanticize the notion of paying your dues, because I think that’s fraught. But I think that I’m not the musician I was when I was playing down there. Karen and I were talking about that. Because Karen might be starting to play some more gigs if you need a bass player or a drummer. 

Ann Powers: Woo. 

Ellen Angelico: And how inserting ourselves back into that hustle is gonna ask a lot of us as musicians, even though we’re very experienced now, even though we’ve done some things at very high levels.

Ann Powers: Right. 

Ellen Angelico: It’s not the same as being asked to play this fiddle song at top speed. 

Ann Powers: Right. Right. At two in the morning or later. 

Ellen Angelico: Right. 

Ann Powers: Or 11 in the morning 

Ellen Angelico: When people are buying the whole band shots and, 

Ann Powers: Right. 

Ellen Angelico: And of course you don’t have to partake in that. But it’s a blur. Playing downtown is a blur. It’s sensory overload now more than ever. 

Ann Powers: You start the podcast by talking about yourself and I actually love how you start. I don’t know, who has “movie” in mind listening to this podcast? ‘Cause I totally, we gotta sell this thing. 

Ellen Angelico: Who would be Shelly?

Ann Powers: Oh wow. Well see, I would cast 

Ellen Angelico: Jewel.

Ann Powers: Laura Dern. Who? Laura Dern, maybe. I don’t know if she can sing, but I’m just seeing the, 

Ellen Angelico: She can make it work. 

Ann Powers: Seeing the vibe but I’ll have to think about that. But Amanda Seyfried just played the dulcimer on Jimmy Kimmel or whatever last night, no, Jimmy Fallon. It was incredible. So she might be aiming for a Joni movie, but I think a Shelly movie’s more important than a Joni Mitchell movie, personally. But when you start the podcast you say, I’ve been on private planes and tour buses and done all these great things, and it’s a Dorothy back to Oz moment, or Toto back to Oz or whatever.

Ellen Angelico: I’m totally Toto. I’m not Dorothy. I’m 100% an accessory.

Ann Powers: Talk about the emotional journey of returning through this narrative back to that place. 

Ellen Angelico: The emotional weight of it didn’t really hit me until I made the one minute trailer that Michael Eades insisted that I make, which, thank you. That is absolutely the right thing to do.

I just wanted to put this thing out and move on with my life. It turns out that’s not how most people release things. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. Marketing has to happen. 

Ellen Angelico: But it was putting this story to a visual that made it really hit home for me. I was playing a really strange gig with Caitlin Nicol-Thomas, who played fiddle for Shelly, and I showed her this video that I thought was fun and light and told the story in a minute, or a minute and 30 seconds.

And when Caitlin handed me my phone back, she was crying. 

Ann Powers: Oh, wow. 

Ellen Angelico: And I realized that I’d been talking about Shelly to everybody, but none of us had seen her. We hadn’t seen her body. We hadn’t seen her hair. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. Wow. 

Ellen Angelico: And there was something about that that really frightened me. I realized the weight of what I was carrying. 

I realized that I was holding the story of this woman that was gonna live on in everybody’s memories and stuff but didn’t have a tangible analog. It wasn’t written down anywhere. And that felt like an enormous responsibility.

Ann Powers: Well, we were talking a little bit beforehand about biography and this moment in biography. ‘Cause I do think this is many things, including biography. That in this moment, a lot of authority seems to be coming from the “I,” the first person. I use it in the Joni story. We look to the “I” as a source we can believe. But I also think that’s partly because it’s an acknowledgement that there really is no objectivity or one story for anyone. But you did invest yourself in this by sharing your own story, your story as a part of Broadband, but your personal story as well. So were there moments when you felt nervous about that or hesitant 

Ellen Angelico: About telling my own story? 

Ann Powers: Yeah. And how you interlace that with the Shelly story? 

Ellen Angelico: I don’t know. I didn’t really feel nervous about it for myself. I’m kind of an open book. I was nervous about it for Shelly. Because she couldn’t speak for herself. And how do I know how she wanted something to be portrayed? We get into sensitive stuff in the podcast, and I didn’t know, I mean, and sometimes, I did know how Shelly wanted it to be portrayed, which is that she didn’t want it to be portrayed. But I wanted people to know Shelly as well as I did. Which actually wasn’t all that well, everybody who was on stage with me tonight knows Shelly a lot better than I did. I only played with her for, a year and a half at the end of her life. So that did make me nervous. It was hard to know what the right thing to do was. Right by her memory. Right by her family. That kind of thing. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. It’s a lot of, it’s definitely a lot of pressure. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. 

Ann Powers: Did you go through, I’m curious, did you have to go through a legal check, like with a lawyer or anything? Okay. 

Ellen Angelico: Should I have? 

Ann Powers: Strike that. 

Ellen Angelico: Are there lawyers here? Regarding what, Ann?

Ann Powers: Well, I don’t know. Just like I had to do that with my Joni book, but, 

Ellen Angelico: Oh, that’s ’cause your book is a real thing.

Ann Powers: But when we get the movie made. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. Well, 

Ann Powers: Ellen

Ellen Angelico: Maybe that won’t be made with the duct tape and shoestring that this one was made with. 

Ann Powers: Let’s talk a little bit about the community around Shelly. Band members, many of you’re here tonight, I don’t know if family members are here also.

Ellen Angelico: Shelly’s cousin Sheila, right here. 

Ann Powers: Hi. And just gathering those interviews. I’ve been a journalist for a hundred thousand years, and yet I still feel nervous when I have to call someone and say, oh, would you talk to me? Did you have to chase anybody? Were there people you had to entice with a delicious meal at J. Alexander’s or something? 

Ellen Angelico: I did buy Paula Jo a salad at Nadeen’s, but I think she would’ve done it anyway. I got a cheese steak. The hardest person to get a hold of for this was Shelly’s best friend Brenda. And it’s not because Brenda wasn’t happy to talk to me about it. It’s just ’cause Brenda didn’t know me. And everybody else in the story, I pretty much knew. Or I knew somebody who knew ’em. I wanted to wait until I got Brenda, because Brenda represented this critical point in Shelly’s life that I didn’t have a lot of information on, which is when she had– after she had left living with her parents and before she got established in Nashville. Really needed that information. And then once I got Brenda and I started to think about outlining the story and how it started to coalesce, there were other interviews that I wanted to do. There were people that I tried to get in touch with, especially members of Broadband who were in the band before I was in the band. And after a certain amount of reschedules and whatever, you kind of just have to say, I gotta put this podcast out. You know? 

Ann Powers: Yes, for sure. 

Ellen Angelico: And I would’ve loved to have had their input, and I’m sure it would’ve been better for it. But I also recognized it was at the beginning of 2024, I realized that the 10th anniversary of her passing was coming up. And I didn’t want to, I was like, that’s a good goal, time to get this done. 

Ann Powers: I think it’s the perfect length. Because the story you tell, it feels archetypal and emblematic. And every episode takes us through this hero’s journey. I’m just gonna say, it’s schticky and whatever, but the hero’s journey is always a useful model when you’re telling a story. And Shelly is that, I mean her drive, it is inspiring, but it’s also a cautionary tale, and I wanted to talk about that too. I fell in love with her in this, but she’s not perfect, right? And how did you deal with the fact that, for example, as a driver on the road, she endangered her band mates apparently frequently. There are just things about her drive and her ambition and the way she lived her life that were not perfect. So how did you deal with that aspect? 

Ellen Angelico: I mean, we all gave Shelly shit about her driving, like, I mean, it was just plain as day. 

Ann Powers: I gotta just ask about the whole jackknifing the van thing and the nausea that ensued among the band members. 

Ellen Angelico: There’s a video I can show you later. I mean, yeah. If you’ve ever driven a van with a trailer you can get into some scrapes if the wheels of the trailer are going the other direction from the wheels of the van. And Shelly’s response to that circumstance was to lean into it.

Ann Powers: Well, lean in. It is a feminist motto, I guess. 

Ellen Angelico: She was leaning in before it was cool and she would just drive even closer to the trailer. And Mandy sent me this incredibly funny video of all of this going down and I was able to use a bit of the audio from it for the podcast.

But if you look on the video, you see it dawning on me what’s going on, which is that, no, Shelly is not going to back the trailer out from where it is stuck, which is what you would do, she is gonna further endanger the trailer, further endanger the van, to the absolute brink of where that could physically be possible, and then just keep driving. She was wild like that. I don’t really have a good explanation for it, except that she just, that was the path of least resistance. She was just like, this is how I’m gonna do it. 

Ann Powers: You also have a funny little section on the dancer she hired.

Ellen Angelico: Oh yeah. Legend. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. That was a wild story. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. It was interesting because as I talked to anybody who had something to say about it, but I mostly talked to Karen and PJ and Dawn Richey about it. And they all had different explanations.

So Shelly played this gig in Vegas, and for one reason or another, she hired a dancer to be part of the band. 

Ann Powers: I mean, why not? James Brown had dancers, you know? 

Ellen Angelico: There’s an organization to that that wasn’t present in this circumstance. Whether it was because it was self-imposed pressure from Shelly to make the band hotter, more interesting, or if it was pressure from the promoter because the band wasn’t young and hot enough, or Dawn had the story that they only brought five people and there was supposed to be six. So there’s any number of reasons why Shelly found Miranda or whatever her name was. What was her name? 

Audience: Melanie. 

Ellen Angelico: Melanie. 

Ann Powers: Melanie. 

Ellen Angelico: Melanie. Thank you. 

Ann Powers: Right, right, right, right. 

Ellen Angelico: Melanie. But Melanie was just dancing for the whole gig. The whole gig. There’s an incredible video of this on Paula Jo’s Facebook page because the band is just sitting there, doing their thing, playing Better Dig Two by The Band Perry, and it just pans over to this dancing, solitary woman and stuff like that happened all the time with Shelly.

Ann Powers: I love it. 

Ellen Angelico: It was like, where did this come from? 

Ann Powers: It’s just like endless creativity, I think or, 

Ellen Angelico: Endless openness to 

Ann Powers: Openness. 

Ellen Angelico: Openness to circumstances. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. But this leads me to want to talk a little bit about the quote unquote girl band, all woman band. This is another theme of the podcast. It’s interesting when we think about the Bangles, there’s a new biography of The Bangles out right now, or The Go-Gos, or if we go back to the great Fanny, I don’t know how many of y’all are Fanny fans. June Millington. 

Ellen Angelico: I once ran into June Millington at NAMM, and I just about 

Ann Powers: Did you freak?

Ellen Angelico: I just started screaming at her because 

Ann Powers: She’s amazing. 

Ellen Angelico: Oh my God. 

Ann Powers: I know. But I think you capture very well the paradox of the all girl band, all women, all one gender band, which is on the one hand, it feels like a selling point. On the other hand, it can lead to very kind of risky forms of objectification or limits and again, we’re back to the elevating and denigrating thing that is one of the themes of this podcast. What is the message, or if there’s one, or how did you think about the subject of the all girl band, trying to use quotes around that word. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. You know, it’s funny, I recognize all of those dynamics. Especially in retrospect. They were not of Shelly’s concern. 

Ann Powers: Interesting. 

Ellen Angelico: The objectification was of no matter to her. Obviously she wanted to look good and she wanted to be a star, so she wanted to dress like a star. She wanted to be beautiful. But I don’t think Shelly like really worried about people seeing her as an object or anyone in the band as an object. Because in a way, to her, it was an object. It was a means to an end. It was a tool to get her more gigs. 

Ann Powers: Ah, interesting. Interesting twist of the word object. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah, it was an actual object. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. 

Ellen Angelico: It was like a wrench, you know? It was a hammer and gigs were a nail. 

Ann Powers: Right, right. But also a goal, a means to an end, yeah. I’m trying to think of how this object turns into a subject though. ‘Cause in the interplay of the band, y’all are subjects to each other. There’s a special interplay maybe that happens in a all one gender band. Sometimes. All one gender band. Let’s just admit it. 99% of history has been all one gender bands. And that’s so boring. I’m glad we’re getting out of that phase. But all woman band. Are you saying you don’t think Shelly thought about what it meant to play with all women as a musician? 

Ellen Angelico: Maybe it occurred to her once in a while. I think she was proud of it. I think she was proud to have an all female band. You know, it’s funny, you’re talking about like the interplay between the band members and that was something really interesting that you talked about last night with Adia Victoria and how blues is felt by black women in the body, and how they relate to each other in the body. I don’t think that Shelly was processing the interplay of her band mates on that level. I think it was a more practical consideration for her. But the beautiful thing about it is that was happening. Even if Shelly wasn’t processing it. Even if it wasn’t intentional. She created this community of women who have gone on to do amazing things or totally ordinary things, and we all had this shared experience and remember the times that there was an owl on the hood of the van and stuff. And I think that’s the most beautiful thing about Shelly’s story to me. She had no altruistic intentions, maybe, but she had an overwhelming, to me, altruistic impact. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. I love that. And even thinking about what it’s like for an audience member, at Sturgis or even on Lower Broadway, for maybe a woman to walk into that bar and see an all woman band is a different feeling than they’re gonna get anywhere else in those circuits. 

Ellen Angelico: 150%. When I went downtown and saw Beth Garner playing at Layla’s with her Fender Quad Reverb amp. Now, many of you in this room are musicians. Fender Quad Reverb? You could Airbnb that for 600 bucks a night in Nashville. That’s a big ass amp. It is comically large for a venue like Layla’s and Beth just owned it. And she was everything, man. She was rocking and she was competent and she was sexy. And I was just agog.

Talk about the archetype. I was like, that’s my archetype. That’s who I want to be like. You know, maybe like, kind of the dude version of that. 

Ann Powers: That’s a huge gift, though, that Broadband gave to people. 

Ellen Angelico: Beth was sitting in with some other band across the street. And Suzanne Rohrer Mitchell saw her and Karen Dee told me this story in the podcast and said to Shelly, oh, you better get across the street. Looks like there’s a girl playing guitar over there. And she did. And she drug Beth across the street back to the Second Fiddle or Layla’s or wherever they were playing and just drug her up on stage. And they started playing. And that was Beth’s foothold in town. 

Ann Powers: I love it. 

Ellen Angelico: And now she does blues and R&B and country gigs all over town. She plays with Janelle Means, and she’s just like a monster. She’s so good. 

Ann Powers: Let’s talk a little more about Shelly’s artistry. First of all, she’s a great songwriter. Like these original songs are fantastic. I love the brightness of her voice and the relatability of her voice. So can you talk a little bit about what you admired in her as a musician, as a singer, and as a writer? 

Ellen Angelico: What I admired at the time, especially, was the breadth of her knowledge. She knew so much music, so much music. And then she also didn’t know some music, but she knew, like if it was country from before the year 2000, she genuinely knew it. She was not pulling up lyrics on her phone. I mean, sometimes she would, but this was before phones. When I was playing downtown with Shelly I didn’t always have the internet on my phone. I couldn’t down there and look up ultimate-guitar.com and try to figure out how to play whatever Merle song I hadn’t ever heard. She knew that stuff really well and she could communicate it really, really well. She did not know the stuff after 2000 as well, which led to all kinds of humorous things, including, and this story did not make it into the podcast, but it’s one of the funniest things that’s ever happened to me.

We were playing at Dick’s Last Resort on Second Avenue, and that was not a good gig. The load in sucked, you had to go through all the tables and people are at Dick’s Last Resort not to see Shelly and her band. The stage was up really tall. Anyway, it was a lot of reasons that it was not a good gig.

Somebody requested Taylor Swift, Shelly didn’t know a whole lot of Taylor Swift. So she whips out Our Song by Taylor Swift and the last lyric of Our Song go– were you at this gig KP? It was you, me, Dawn, and maybe you. The last lyric goes, I was riding shotgun with my hair undone in the front seat of his car. I grabbed a pen and an old napkin, and I wrote down our song. And Shelly, I swear to God, goes, I was riding shotgun with my hair undone in the front seat of his car. He’s got a one hand feel on the steering wheel, and I wrote it down on a napkin. And I just, I set my guitar into the stand and I laid down on the stage and I wept because she wrote it down on a napkin. I just couldn’t even. 

Ann Powers: She got the conc– I mean, like, the gist is there. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah, absolutely. She was absolutely riding shotgun with her hair undone, and she did write it down on a napkin, no question about it. What was your question? 

Ann Powers: Just about her artistry, what made her fun to play with.

Ellen Angelico: Well, that kind of thing. She messed up lyrics a lot, but she really genuinely landed on her feet. I did not have that ability when I would lead songs. I’d be so plugged into my iPad. You just, oh, when I got the iPad. That’s another thing. I think I am so inspired by who Shelly is, this is going to make it sound trite, and so I’m trying to figure out how I want to say this, but as a business. 

Ann Powers: As a brand, to use a very frightening 21st century term. 

Ellen Angelico: I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man, type of thing. She was a business, man. 

Ann Powers: Right. We could say a, what is it? A diva is a female definition of a hustler. 

Ellen Angelico: Yes. There we go. 

Ann Powers: Quote Beyonce instead.

Ellen Angelico: Yes, that’s right. And she was that, and I wanted to be that. I wanted to have my thing together that much. I was talking with Karen earlier today about Shelly’s little pull-behind zip overflowing with papers of all of the contacts of every booker in every city. She also brought two gigantic binders full of charts, A through M and N through Z. And they were huge. She couldn’t carry them. They had to be in a milk crate and on a dolly. And they were like this thick, and it was every song that you could ever be asked to play downtown. And she would, occasionally, new songs would come out and she would pay a guy a couple bucks to do a chart. And if you didn’t, if a tune got called out, well, grab the book. Other artists didn’t do that for you. Other artists, you were just on your own and you would hope that the band was generous enough to tell you how the song went, that you could have a foothold as things went down.

Ann Powers: But the music’s gonna be so much better if she provides that grace to her collaborators. 

Ellen Angelico: Totally. The product was better. And I don’t know where that comes from for Shelly. Maybe that’s feminine work in a way. 

Ann Powers: Interesting. You were talking about labor before and there’s so much invisible work in this story, 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. I mean, other artists don’t do that on Broadway. They don’t, you gotta bring your own charts. They don’t have the charts for you. 

Ann Powers: So one thing that really rang through the podcast for me was that there’s two drives in her. One drive is for fame and success, the next Reba as you title one of the episodes. And then another drive is just merely to work, and to be the queen of Lower Broadway or the best employee, the employee of the month on Lower Broadway, or at whatever casino or whatever, Sturgis or wherever those places.

Those of us who have watched artists try to ascend here, sometimes it involves laying very low, getting A&R, getting developed, not constantly booking new gigs. So how did you see those things either reconciling in her or crashing up against each other in her? 

Ellen Angelico: I think mostly crashing up against each other, ’cause the A&R man’s not gonna keep your lights on no matter how many meetings you schedule. 

Ann Powers: Oh, that’s very true. So in a sense it was practical. It was just more practicality. 

Ellen Angelico: I think so. I think it was Shelly’s job but she met with people more than anybody else met with people. 

Ann Powers: You were telling those stories. And the people who would be in the rooms sometimes on Lower Broadway, Barry Beckett and Buddy Cannon and just these legends checking her out. 

Ellen Angelico: She just hustled until they showed up. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. That’s wild. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah, it is wild because it’s so hard to get somebody to notice you.

Ann Powers: Completely.

Ellen Angelico: When you don’t have anything to offer them except, you know, maybe I’m good at music. 

Ann Powers: And they’re coming to see her, probably a cover set mostly. With a lot of drunk people around or maybe nobody around, just the sheer cajones, the sheer ova to put out your best show in a room where, that might have three people who are even listening.

Ellen Angelico: I mean, we played that 2-6 Thursdays to nobody all the time. 

Ann Powers: That’s wild. So this is a hard question, but she had everything. She was the total package. Ultimately why do you think she didn’t break through and have that moment, the Trisha Yearwood moment or something like that? Was it just luck? 

Ellen Angelico: I don’t know. I mean, I don’t spend a lot of time talking about it in the podcast because I don’t think it matters, for starters. 

Ann Powers: It’s not the center of the podcast at all. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. 

Ann Powers: You do raise some prejudices though. You expose some prejudices of Music Row, I think.

Ellen Angelico: Yeah, definitely. And that’s just it, the prejudices of Music Row. It’s the same, it’s everybody’s story, who doesn’t have a Tricia Yearwood moment.

Ann Powers: Who is it in the podcast that says, could you even imagine a female Jelly Roll? 

Ellen Angelico: Beth, yeah. 

Ann Powers: That’s so true. It’s sad but true. 

Ellen Angelico: It’s still, all these years later. We don’t have that example. And so it’s the same. I’m not saying woe is me or anything, but I know the conversations that I’m not in, in this business. I’m well aware. I’m aware of the times that my name does end up in those conversations and how quickly it gets swatted away. And it doesn’t bother me because I know that I want to go where I’m wanted. 

Ann Powers: Right, right. 

Ellen Angelico: The reasons that Shelly didn’t ascend to the level of fame that she aspired to are the same reasons that everybody doesn’t. 

Ann Powers: Exactly. And why we still have so few women’s voices on country radio, so few women’s voices on playlists, so few black artists charting, et cetera.

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. 

Ann Powers: I guess it’s just very obvious the answer to that question. 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. It’s no one reason. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. 

Ellen Angelico: It’s every reason. And I was at her longtime friend and former boyfriend Rod Janzen’s house, picking up all this incredible Shelly ephemera.

Ann Powers: I love the ephemera. It’s so great. 

Ellen Angelico: He was telling me about some of the meetings that she would go to that they said they already had a blonde girl. You know? So it doesn’t have to be that,

Ann Powers: What, in this town, they already had a blonde girl? What? 

Ellen Angelico: It doesn’t have to be for some nefarious, it can be as, 

Ann Powers: No, it’s carelessness. It’s the bad habits of the patriarchy. Which unfortunately 

Ellen Angelico: Become systems. 

Ann Powers: Yes, exactly. I feel like we can make her a cult artist quite easily because the music is so great. And there’s such an interest in that sound now. How would you classify the Broadband sound? Would you say it sits next to a nineties style?

Ellen Angelico: It’s like Jo Dee Messina, it’s like Lee Ann Womack. It stands up to all of those records. I have now in my possession eight Shelly CDs that if I could just get my dang CD drive to work, I would rip ’em and try to figure out, you know, what’s the status of these masters and put them up on streaming. There’s one record of Shelly’s that is on Apple Music that’s not on Spotify. It’s called Don’t Fall in Love. And I believe the reason that it’s up there is because of an Irish record label called L&M Records. Long defunct, good luck to me trying to figure out who owns those masters. I remember listening to it and just being like, holy cow. I had a college radio show called the Nashville Hotline because I was so obsessed. 

Ann Powers: Of course you did. Of course it was called the Nashville Hotline. 

Ellen Angelico: I was so obsessed with country music and I just remember hearing this record of Shelly’s and being like, College Ellen would’ve been all over this. All over it. It’s just good. 

Ann Powers: We gotta get it out there for sure. I think the world needs to wise up to Broadband for sure. The last question from me and then we’d love to hear any questions from y’all. You deal very sensitively, I think, with the end of Shelly’s life. It fits with the hero’s journey, the determination, even if it was medically, perhaps a little naive, unfortunately. How did you manage telling that part of the story? And you had great input from the family, which was beautiful.

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. Shelly’s mom, Shirley, was so generous to reopen that wound for me. That was the hardest interview to conduct because I felt the weight of a mother losing her child. It was so intense. I can feel myself getting, I can feel the liquid forming just thinking about it.

At the same time, telling that part of the story was in a way easier than telling some other parts of the story because I was there for that. I lived that. I was in the hospital. Not as much as some other people, but I did see her and I saw the state that she was in, and I saw the conversations that were going on and I was texting her.

And it was this whole conversation with all of us. Like, she’s going to Texas, what’s she doing in Texas? I was actually doing a radio tour with somebody in the UK, the day that she passed away. I remember processing all that and I went back in my journals and I found that time.

Ann Powers: I love that you include those entries from your journal. 

Ellen Angelico: I was able to go back to my own brain in that time and mine exactly how I was feeling. 

Ann Powers: In a strange way, there’s a circular quality to being a musician at any level, but particularly at the level that Shelly was at, where I think something happens. My friend Patterson, who has a song in the Drive By Truckers called The Living Bubba. And it’s about a sound guy they had who died of AIDS. The refrain of the song is, I’ve got another show to do. I’ve got another show to do. And even as he was heading toward the end, it’s just like you’re, you got another show to do. And again, it’s back to labor, it’s back to capitalism in a way, but it’s also back to artistry and that feeling that if I can just get in the music, it’s not that I won’t be in my body, but I will have another turn of the wheel.

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. That’s very powerful. ‘Cause that’s who she was. Playing shows is who she was. And so it’s almost like it would’ve been weirder if she wasn’t booking shows from the hospital. 

That would’ve been way less Shelly. It’s her identity and it gets me thinking about my own identity and like whether or not I better get some other marketable skills or something. 

Ann Powers: Given the state of the economy for artists. There’s also a powerful message in this podcast that relates to where we’re at today and given the continual incursions on the possibility of making any money as a touring artist. This is a very heady, this will be my final question, but do you feel there’s another way for musicians like Shelly, like Broadband, like you? 

Ellen Angelico: I hope so. When the effects of the pandemic began to play out on the touring music community, I hoped that it would lead to a renaissance in small scenes.

Ann Powers: Yes, me too. 

Ellen Angelico: And in some ways I see that, in some ways I see it in Nashville. And maybe I’m just not clued into it in other cities. The way that our mutual friend’s venue, Drkmttr, has thrived as a nonprofit. Maybe that’s a model that we can look to. But the going has been a little slower than I thought. I do hope for it. I also think, though, there’s a distinction between a working musician like me, and I’m not trying to say that it’s better or worse than being an artist or whatever. But I’m not the product. So as long as there are people who are willing to be the product, there will be work for me. The question of the artist is one that I haven’t spent as much time thinking about. 

Ann Powers: Maybe that’s your next podcast, Ellen.

Ellen Angelico: What? Should I write more songs? 

Ann Powers: Yeah. 

Ellen Angelico: I did write one somewhat recently, called Who’s Gonna Move This Dead Guy’s Truck and Get It Off My Lawn, based on the true events of my 

Ann Powers: A Nashville story 

Ellen Angelico: Neighbor’s 

Ann Powers: or Madison story 

Ellen Angelico: grandson dying with his truck right in front of my house. We had been asking him to move the truck for ages and then he just up and died. 

Ann Powers: Oh my gosh. That’s a classic, I tell you. 

Ellen Angelico: Does that answer your question? 

Ann Powers: On that note, does anyone want to share, ask a question or make a comment or? 

Ellen Angelico: Oh, hey Angie. 

Audience: Hi. Something I love about this project, similar to listening to one of my favorite albums, it feels like there’s this underlying truth to all of it, and I’m curious what that message was for you or what message you really want the listener to feel once they listen to her whole story.

Ellen Angelico: Angie asked, what’s the underlying truth of this project for me and what’s the message that I want people to take away? And that’s a big question. My gut reaction is that I don’t want people to take the histories they are presented at face value. I want people to find, I want you to find the people who widened the path for you and tell those stories. That’s the history that matters. 

Ann Powers: That’s beautiful. I love that. 

Ellen Angelico: The canons that exist in the music business are told through the eyes of the people who had the money to tell them. 

Ann Powers: Yeah. 

Ellen Angelico: So I want to challenge that notion. 

Ann Powers: Absolutely. You do, I think you really do beautifully.

Ellen Angelico: Thanks. 

Ann Powers: And also very powerful message about how music is community and music is interplay and music is friendship. And I think that can be something we can so easily forget as consumers of music when at this point, we don’t even know sometimes when we’re streaming our chill vibes making a stir fry playlist on streaming service. We don’t even know if that music was made by a person at this point, or, you know what I mean? AI is moving in all these things. But to me, the value of a story like this is that it’s just about love. Oh, God, that’s so corny, but it is, it’s about human bonds, you know? It’s about connection and that’s what’s so beautiful about it.

Ellen Angelico: Even as there’s an artificial nature now to the way that music ends up in our fore, I’ve never found that feeling anywhere else. That feeling when you’re making music some with someone and you’re really locked in. The feeling of being connected to that musician, to the people in the audience, to the notion that there’s something bigger than yourself that you’re experiencing. 

Ann Powers: And also the evocation of place is so great. I was thinking of— I’m from Seattle, Mia Zapata from the band, The Gits, who was like an amazing punk singer who was murdered right around the time Kurt Cobain died.

And I did a story for The Village Voice. I went back and it was so fascinating. I went back to tell the story of the aftermath of Kurt’s death. And what I ended up doing was telling the story of the aftermath of Mia’s death because Kurt was off being a rock star. And Mia was right there in Capitol Hill, right there in the city, connected to so many people.

Or I think of Jesse Mallon in New York City, the patron saint of the downtown New York scene. He suffered a spinal stroke a while back, and there was just this incredible tribute album to him, benefit album. That’s a guy who is glue, you know, and Shelly was glue in a way. 

Ellen Angelico: Jessi Zazu.

Ann Powers: Yes, Jessi, our mutual friend. Such an important person and yeah. 

Ellen Angelico: These people are connectors. 

Ann Powers: Yes, exactly. And you need a place to be connected. I mean, it’s cool to be connected online, but it’s not the same. Anyone else want to ask a question, make a comment? Hi. 

Audience: So on the road a lot of men diminish women in bands going on gigs and stuff, and I didn’t know if, because you were all forced together, if maybe you didn’t experience that as much on your own, or if people had little moments where you had with men on the road and stuff.

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. When did you, Broads, when did you encounter men on the road? 

Audience: That were diminishing of your abilities? 

Karen Dee: My personal experience in Nashville has been, for the most part, if you can play, you can play.

Ann Powers: But you can really play. So maybe that’s why.

Karen Dee: That’s been my experience.

Ellen Angelico: I don’t recall encountering men a lot when we traveled. I mean, there were sound guys, but we didn’t deal with them a lot. 

Ann Powers: Well, one advantage of being an all woman band is that unlike, say if you’re one woman in a band, you aren’t assumed to be a girlfriend or a groupie or a fanager or whatever.

I’ve talked to a lot of women that that happened to in the rock scene, where if you got one woman in the band, you’re kind of messed up because people, especially sound guys notorious for being like, what? Why are you on stage? 

Ellen Angelico: I’ve experienced that with people who are enormous successes. And it’s partly because I am pretty assertive and I have a masculine affect that somebody like that will come up to me and ask, well, where does this plug in? And it’s like, well, why don’t you ask Brandy fucking Clark? It’s her DI.

Ann Powers: Right, exactly. 

Ellen Angelico: Or whatever. Shelly kind of created, she didn’t mean it and she never read any books about it, but she sort of created a feminist utopia.

Ann Powers: That’s amazing. 

Ellen Angelico: Before we wrap up, I want to say a very special thank you to my friend Karen Pittelman. Karen is a musician. Her band is called Karen and the Sorrows. I know her through music, but it turns out she’s also a gifted writing coach.

This podcast would’ve been extremely bad without her. Please check out her beautiful album Why Do We Want What We Want? And thank me later. She is a legend. She’s a brilliant thinker. She has a great Medium piece called Another Country. She’s just really, she’s real bright. And she helped me out a lot.

I also need to thank Michael Eades of We Own This Town. Michael has given so much of his time and energy to this podcast. He made the website, he put the show out on his network. He talked me off of several audio engineering ledges. Nashville is lucky to have him and I’m lucky to have him. He is the embodiment of the Nashville I love best, what Karen Pittelman describes as “another country music, older and far more powerful, flowing underneath this industry, bubbling up through its fissures and cracks, rolling free out in the backwoods, out in the thorny brush where there are no industry profits and so no industry control.” 

Ann Powers: Beautiful.

Ellen Angelico: Also thank you to Whippoorwill Arts for providing me a grant so I could get professional transcripts done of these interviews. Y’all, I was doing the transcripts myself. 

Ann Powers: That’s the worst. 

Ellen Angelico: And that is so dumb. 

Ann Powers: Soul crushing. 

Ellen Angelico: And AI hadn’t really happened yet while I was doing that. And, and then AI came around and did a bad job. And so Whippoorwill Arts gave me a grant so that I could get humans to transcribe what the other humans had said. It wouldn’t have happened without that. Thank you to all of my friends and family who read and listened to this before it was ready for primetime. I saw Justin Hiltner at your thing last night, and I remembered that he listened to this when it had no narrative at all. And Jewly did too. When it was just the, when I was trying to just string the tape together. 

Ann Powers: That’s Jewly Hight. 

Ellen Angelico: I was making like, it was closer to a John Cage piece than it was to a podcast. So thank you to everybody who listened to this when it was inchoate and lousy. And thank you all for coming and being a part of this remarkable story. Have a good night. 

Audience: Yay.

Ann Powers: Let’s hear for Ellen. Yay. And like a true Lower Broadway, road musician. You’ll now break down the set yourself probably, right? 

Ellen Angelico: Yeah. Take these dangerous ones off first.

Girl in a Hurry was produced and edited by me. Ellen Angelico. This episode was mixed by Liv Lombardi. Special thanks to Karen Pittelman and Michael Eades.