Bright Outlook Pam Tillis Doesn’T Allow Difficult Year To Ruin Her Life

Pam Tillis looks at Faith Hill’s life and wonders.

“How does that happen to a person?” muses Tillis. “She’s had her share of, you know, this-that-and-the-other, but man, I just go, ‘Wow! You’re talented, you’re nice, you’re born beautiful and you marry your co-star. I could do that.’ “

On reflection, though, Tillis says she guesses she should “consider myself fortunate.”

“I’ve had more opportunities to learn stuff than a lot of people. You know the saying, ‘God never gives you more than you can handle.’ He must think I’m pretty tough.”

This self-appraisal is inspired by a year that was, by her own description, “pretty awful.” She basically got two divorces, one from former husband (and noted Nashville songwriter) Bob DiPiero and the other from her manager of eight years, Mike Robertson. She says she’s “pretty proud” of the way she came through both partings.

“I wanted to just go away, but I didn’t - personally or professionally,” she notes. “I made an album, and I kept touring. I carried on.”

She also resolved to expand her horizons.

Her objective in signing a new management contract with longtime Nashville and Los Angeles talent executive Stan Moress, Tillis says, was “to start diversifying” her already substantial career with an eye toward lifelong longevity - the kind enjoyed, say, by her famous father Mel, with whom she performs each Tuesday at his Branson, Mo., theater.

Her current Christmas tour stops in Pullman on Wednesday.

She reserves the latter part of most weeks for her own shows, and one of the career-expanding moves she has made is toward periodic symphony appearances. Signing with Moress, she says, was also in the interest of seeking TV and movie acting opportunities and developing her profile overseas.

During Nashville’s annual summer Fan Fair celebration, she had a breakfast for fans and was surprised to find that some of them came from “South Africa, Germany, England and Australia.” She recently contracted with a co-manager for the Australian market and says she has heard that an album of hers reached number 20 on the British charts on the strength of just one BBC interview.

“I’m sowing seeds,” she says. “I sowed the seeds for the first half of my career 10 or 15 years ago, and now I’m sowing new seeds that I hope will come to fruition over the next few years.”

One of country music’s most adept and impassioned singers, Tillis released her sixth Arista Records album, “Every Time,” a few months ago.

Reflecting some of her mood over the last year, “Every Time” contains several songs (with such titles as “You Put the Lonely on Me,” “Whiskey on the Wound” and “Hurt Myself”) that hardly fit the prevailing up tempo-and-positive standard by which large-scale country commercialism now seems to be gauged.

“I saw that song performed live (on a songwriter’s showcase), and the audience went crazy,” Tillis says of “Whiskey on the Wound.” “Just because people aren’t cutting it right now doesn’t mean people don’t want to hear it. People’s taste is a lot broader than what they’re getting.

“It’s almost depressing when you’re feeling bad and you turn on the radio and everything sounds really happy. You’re like, ‘What’s wrong with me?”’ Tillis should know. She looks back on three different lives, the first two gave her abundant experience at dealing with dark nights of the soul.

The first, extending into her early 20s, was filled with “turbulence” stemming from her parents’ divorce and her “struggle” to deal with a face-smashing, near-fatal car accident at 16. The second was her life as a single mother “struggling in the business for all those years” after a brief early marriage.

The third, she says, dates from her first Arista Records single, “Don’t Tell Me What To Do.” That No. 1 country hit “started a whole new thing.”

“I think back before all this touring, and that feels like a whole different incarnation.”

None of it has been particularly easy. Not counting the recent marital and managerial vicissitudes, even her star period began dogged by the tall specter of her father, the Country Music Association’s 1976 Entertainer of the Year.

The daughter, who felt closer to her mother in the divorce, had to battle her resentment of a father beloved by the very country music audience from which she too hoped to make a living. “Yeah, that’ll mess you up a little bit,” she agrees with a laugh.

In recent years, Tillis and her 66-year-old father have mellowed. Their weekly shows together in Branson, where she reports that in two performances they play to about 4,000 people each Tuesday, have been “overwhelmingly positive.”

“To stand up onstage and sing with him,” she adds, “I just feel this overwhelming gratitude.”

Gratitude, she indicates, that life let them get far enough down its road that she can admire and feel close to him while he’s still around. But there’s another kind she could feel, too.

She obviously has inherited from Mel a couple of traits that haven’t hurt her in her profession. One is a keen sense of humor, the other an ability to write songs.

Yet she didn’t write or co-write a single one on “Every Time.” That, she says, is because she was too close to her latest traumas to want to immerse herself in them any deeper. Instead, she turned to the album project almost as an escape. Although she chose several songs that reflect unpleasant experiences, she got to pour her voice through the filter of other people’s imaginations.

“I don’t believe in hiding in your work, but I was really thankful that I had a career,” Tillis says. “I would feel sorry for someone whose life fell apart who didn’t have something else to get their self-esteem from besides whoever they’re involved with.

“I was very grateful that I had a life.”