From the first ponderous plucked strings, you’ll easily hear that “Miss Tilly” is a different experience. The song feels like a sketch, a work in progress that’s beautiful in its own right: something that both is and is becoming. Among the half-heard lyrics, it’s clear that 3hattrio celebrates the intent of the song, its emotion, over all. We’ll get into the song’s story below, but the sense of striving stands out most, and is the reason it’s haunted my inner radio for the last month.
3hattrio hails from Zion Canyon in Southern Utah and includes Hal Cannon who is a singer and plays banjo and guitar. He is also a cowboy music scholar. Greg Istock plays acoustic bass and foot percussion. He has a Caribbean music background and sings in a haunting and soulful style. Eli Wrankle, a classically trained violinist who studies at Southern Utah University and comes from a family of artists.
The band lives in a place that has a great and lasting indigenous imprint on it. They don’t attempt to perform the music of the nomadic Native peoples who have lived here for centuries. They are modern day settlers in a place where settlement is not all that old. Folklorist and musician Hal Cannon says, “From our vantage we are not all that different from other pioneers who came from diverse places to make community. From our varied musical backgrounds something truly American can be made out of the necessity to find sociability in an isolated place and to come with the intention to create something new.”
As for “Ms. Tilly,” the song’s cinematic feel makes sense, as the complex interplay between the three singers and their instruments represents characters vying to get their way:
“This is Greg’s little soap opera. The cast includes a team of manipulating bastards, Timmy and Tina. They work with an unsuspecting and vulnerable Hollywood actress telling her that they like another actress better than she. They do this just to undermine the actress’s self-confidence and bend her to their will. Greg sings,
The liars are only
Selling fear
A poison to sucker you in
Liars wrench you down
They’re pushin’ you down“