SXSW Artist Spotlight – Paisley Fields
360°Sound is once again covering the SXSW music festival in 2025. As part of our Artist Spotlight Series, we spoke with queer country singer-songwriter Paisley Fields, who’s based in New York City and Nashville. Fields’s songs are tender and authentic, but they are also skilled at the time-honored country tradition of double entendre – in other words, they keep it fun. Their songs are mindful of tradition, but deeply informed by their singular background as a teenage Midwestern church pianist, a Manhattan piano bar survivor, and a former touring member of pioneering queer-country outfit Lavender Country. Paisley has a new single coming out (they shared a pre-release mix with us), and their appearance at SXSW (their fourth) is part of a larger tour, kicking off March 5 in Chicago.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Check out the full interview at the end of this article, and on our YouTube channel, @alanc152.sg-host.com.
360°Sound: I really appreciate your simple, authentic style. So much country music today seems to be dominated by performative stereotypes and power-pop production. I love that you don’t cop a fake country accent.
Paisley Fields: Yeah, I try not to. I am from Iowa, so sometimes the country will sneak out. But it’s a pet peeve of mine when people really lean into that fake southern accent – especially [artists] who are all about ‘authenticity.’
I dig the trad-country vibes on your tunes. Tom Petty famously said that country music is just bad rock music with a fiddle, but that is certainly not the case here. I hear some Gram Parsons influence in your writing, lots of pedal steel. Tell me about your instrumentation, your band, and the sound you guys are going for.
The Gram Parsons observation is spot on. I’m a big Gram Parsons fan. Fun fact – my bandmates and I stayed in the Gram Parsons room at the Joshua Tree Inn, and there were definitely ghosts.
Oh wow! That’s great. People should definitely look up the story of Gram’s death.
Crazy story! Instrumentation for this tour is going to be me on piano… We have a drummer, bass player, guitar player. With our last record, I experimented a little bit with some keyboards. We had a fiddle player. We had pedal steel. I love to play with a big band whenever I can. For my next record, I’m going to be expanding the sound a little bit and changing the instrumentation up. I like to do something different each time. But we’ve stayed in that ‘70s Gram Parsons feel for the last couple of records.
I love your straightforward writing style. Country music is, to me, a very literal genre, and it’s not afraid to tell a story and make honest statements. You provide a lot of moving details about your life in your songs. I’d love for you to share a little bit of your background and what led you to the country music stage.
I grew up in a really small town in rural Iowa. My first job was playing the piano in church. I come from a really big family, so there were always weddings and dances to go to. I was maybe nine or ten years old when we started going to line dancing lessons at the Electric Park Ballroom in Waterloo. That’s where I really had my first exposure to country music, where I felt like I connected with it. I would rebel against it; I thought it was a little too traditional for me. Being a gay person, being a queer person, I didn’t always gravitate towards that genre. But after being away for a while, it really had sunk its roots into me. I’ve always had that love there, and I came back to it.
How has your stuff been received on the road when you take it out?
Every audience is different. [chuckles warmly] Sometimes people aren’t really expecting it, but lately it’s been getting better each time. We’ve had a lot of success over in the UK. I’m really excited to be coming back to Austin, because we always have good crowds there. And it’s really nice to be playing SXSW again. You’re gonna be in for a treat this year, I can tell you that much.
I’m glad I didn’t read your bio before I jumped into your catalog. I received the full power of [Fields’s song] “Iowa” without any preconceptions. It’s a really, really powerful song. When you mention ‘the boy from Wyoming,’ I knew you were referring to Matthew Shepard, the young man who was murdered as part of a hate crime in Wyoming [in 1998], because he was different. How did that incident impact you at that time?
It reaffirmed that I needed to be fearful and needed to be cautious about who I told about myself. I grew up in the ‘90s when I was living in Iowa, and it just didn’t feel like a safe place. Laramie [Wyoming], where Matthew Shepard was killed, was very similar to where I was. And now there’s all these things happening in the news with Iowa about this anti-trans bill that’s going through, and it’s just kind of a long-running tradition of hate in that part of the country. Everybody’s not that way, and it’s a legislative thing, but there are a lot of people there who are discriminatory and hateful. It was pretty scary.
You’re not afraid of tough topics, and making reference to stuff that might make people uncomfortable. “Other Boys” is another one. I really connected with that song. I think everyone has this sense of being different, of not conforming to the other people that we see portrayed in our culture. It’s obviously a deeply personal song for you. But did you also have in mind commiserating with your audience as well with that lyric?
I’m really glad that people are able to connect with it, because it seemed so personal that it’s almost unrelatable. I’m telling my story in detail, but I do think it’s a song that anybody who has ever felt like an outsider can relate to. It’s really just that core feeling, you know? So I’m glad that people are able to connect with it, even if they’re not somebody who grew up gay, simply by feeling different.
That’s an interesting thing about songwriting – you can have the most personal thing that’s only relevant to you, but weirdly it has the opposite effect. It makes it more relatable, because you’re just sharing an emotion.
“Burn this Statehouse Down” is a kickass track you did with Mya Byrne to protest Tennessee state anti-trans legislation in 2023. I see it as kind of a love song to Governor Bill Lee.
Omigod, I’m so glad we were able to do that. It happened faster than anything I’ve done. We wrote it, recorded, and released it within seven weeks. I recorded it on tour. We did the shoot down at SX, actually, when Mya and I were both playing a couple shows together in Austin in 2023. We did the shoot down there, released it, and I play it every show. I am sad that it’s still relatable; I wish it was irrelevant. I do think it’s one of those songs that can be empowering to people, and I think it can help people get through these times that are very difficult, especially with all the new legislation against trans people. It’s constantly happening. It’s directed towards Mr. Bill Lee, but there are a lot of people who need to hear what we’re saying in that song.
Your new single, “Pancho and Lefty,” you recorded with singer/songwriter Laura Stevenson. Now, the Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard version from the ‘80s is quite different from the early ‘70s Townes Van Zandt original version [Van Zandt composed the song]. Yours seems to fit in the middle of those. It’s more perky than Townes’s, but not quite as ornate as Willie & Merle’s. What drew you to this song?
I’ve been playing this song for quite a while in my live shows. [Laura] and I, we were both drawn to this song. We were like, ‘Okay, this is something else.’ There’s something special about this song as a duet, and I really connected with it. I feel like it can be relatable today as it was back then. I was really excited that Laura was down to record it with me. She has such an amazing voice, and she’s a wonderful person. We recorded it down in Nashville. Andrija Tokic, who produced my last record, also produced this. And Aaron Lee Tasjan plays drums and guitar on it.
You said you find it as relatable today as it was back then. What is this song about, really?
I think there’s a lot of subtext in the song; it can be about a lot of things. That’s what I really like about songs like this; it can have a different meaning to you, as it does to me. I like songs that are open to interpretation.
What can people expect from you at SXSW this time?
We got a couple surprises. [chuckles] We’re going to be doing some new songs, which is very exciting. We played a show on Wednesday in Brooklyn, and played them for the first time. They went over super well. They’re a bit of a new direction for us, and they’re really fun to play with the band. They’re going to be on an album sometime next year. But yeah, new music, a couple surprises, some fun outfits, maybe some pyrotechnics. We’ll see…
Keep up with Paisley Fields on his official site, thepaisleyfields.com.
Experience Paisley Fields’s live set at SXSW 2025 at the 13th Floor in Austin on Thursday night March 13 for the Don Giovanni Records showcase. He’ll also be at the Saxon Pub on Saturday March 15.
