WILLOW AVALON: My mom loves Lucinda Williams. I grew up in a very big storyteller family and my dad – you know as well as I do that man can talk me under the table – loves Lucinda Williams too.

So I grew up listening to storytellers in particular and I remember I sang "World Without Tears" for my Baptist Church recital, where everyone goes up and plays one of their favourite hymns [but] I played that song, and I was not asked to come and play again at church. I don't think that that was really the vibe they were going for!

But I love that song, I love Lucinda, and I was just in a room with her the other day. I don't really go up to people – I've never really been someone who does that, and so I didn't say anything to her, but it was so cool to be in this room with someone that shaped my love of music, my storytelling and my family storytelling.

BEST FIT: Who else have you encountered in the last few years?

I don't run into many people but a new friend is Jason Isbell and I've loved his music forever. I grew up singing and harmonising to Something More Than Free in my car, it was the one CD that I had. I adore the way that he writes and the way that he can paint a picture without just flat-out saying it. My first show ever was opening for Drive By Truckers when I was 12 [Avalon won a local battle of the bands and landed an opening slot for the Truckers at the iconic 40 Watt Club in Athens] and it's where I had my first beer in the green room.

And then Lainey Wilson – she followed me on Instagram. We were at a festival over here somewhere, and she came down. I was on a beta blocker – I take those before I go on stage, because I get really nervous – and she walked through the kind of doors she should never walk through because she's a massive star, and she came down to the little green room in this big arena. She walked in and she came over and told me she loved my music. And I was like, shut your butt! [yet] I didn't say anything else because I just thought she made a wrong turn.

I'm pretty sure 50 Cent watched one of our shows too, it was a Coca Cola thing we did. I love 50 Cent, I do and he was side stage watching and my whole band was freaking out.

It's the one song that can make me absolutely sob. I remember I would be walking to the train in Manhattan, and everyone else is listening to something completely different, and I'm just sobbing listening to George Jones sing "They placed a wreath upon his door / And soon they'll carry him away / He stopped loving her today."

I love George Jones, I love Tammy Wynette and their love story is a whirlwind rollercoaster – two of the greatest voices in classic country music. One of my favourite tweets that I've ever seen is a photo of George Jones with a shotgun in his older years, and somebody tweeted, "WTF didn't anyone tell me about Willow Avalon?" and it's got like, two retweets, but it's just George – "The Possum" was his nickname– and I owned a possum too.

I went to an estate sale; I was trying to buy a house in Nashville, and I was looking at all these beautiful old Victorian-like country estates that I could not afford, that were falling apart. I went to one where they were gearing up for an estate sale, and it was full of the most incredible vintage and music history. There was gold records, there was everything in there and I was like, who is this person?

And so my real estate agent called the broker and asked if they could get me in for this estate sale. "Like maybe earlier, because she loves country music, she's in country music herself and she wants to preserve this and not let it go to eBay."

So they looked me up and then they liked my music and I started talking to the guy whose dad passed away and he used to play for George Jones and Dolly Parton. I went in there and I got vintage George Jones and Merle Haggard jackets, Highwaymen sweatshirts. I got so much – cassette tracks of live rehearsal recordings of George Jones and I have all that at my house now.

BEST FIT: Wasn't Tommy Wynette and her new husband in the studio during the recording too?

Have you seen the show about them? You have to watch the show, it's insane. Me and my boyfriend have been watching it, and it's absolutely crazy. Jessica Chastain, who plays Tammy, she walks into this hotel room with George Jones in one scene and she's wearing a jumpsuit that I'd seen before because it's in my closet! It's a one-of-a-kind handmade jumpsuit that I bought from a vintage store here in Nashville and they said they used it for movie props and stuff.

So I own Jessica Chastain's actual jumpsuit that they remodelled from Tammy Wynette's!

BEST FIT: Did you know this was written about Napster and file-sharing? Because this is one my favourite songs and I only learned this today.

Really? That's what I'm talking about in the sense of storytelling – you would never guess that's about Napster. That's the flyest, most incredible way of telling a story where you don't directly want to be Fuck You Napster!

I love Gillian Welch and I've covered this song a bunch of times. What I love about them is when they go and play a show, it sounds exactly like the record, which I think is so special and so awesome. It's so sparse, and it's just their God-given talent. And like me she also loves Gunne Sax dresses!

I just love Roberta Flack. Her voice is like no other: the feeling, the emotion, the grit... I have so many memories of sitting in my room and probably being a very bad kid and just listening to Roberta. Hers was the first record that I ever bought myself in a record store and I would sit there and I would listen to Roberta in my room on my record player.

My room was a disaster, I'm a maximalist and I can vividly remember this. I've been thrifting and collecting and yard selling with my dad, and antiquing with my mom since I was a kid. So I've got a vintage French armoire that my dad got at the flea market for $20 that's covered with velvet and bursting at the seams. And there's all of my mom's vintage clothes that were passed down to me.

My grandma's clothes are all over the floor. There's glitter, there's candles and there's incense, and then there's Roberta Flack playing on the record player, and Kool & the Gang, and Sly and the Family Stone, and Johnny Cash, and Earth, Wind & Fire, and Barry White.... and the memory of a big canopy bed with lace all over it, and it was literally a fire hazard waiting to happen.

I had a secret cat that I snuck in there too, that I found on the side of the road that my dad didn't even know was living there for a while!

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.