Jessie Buckley and Nicole Taylor on country music, mothers, Glasgow and their new film Wild Rose

Why I Love Country Music, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions

"I'M A bit embarrassed by this one," Jessie Buckley admits as she sits on a sofa in the library of the Dakota Deluxe hotel in Glasgow city centre discussing her latest musical love. "But I feel like I've just properly discovered Bob Dylan this last week. I've always thought he's a bit whiny." No longer. "I've just listened to lyrics and the way he tells songs," she says, the music of her Irish accent filling the room.

"That's cool," chips in Nicole Taylor, who is sitting beside her.

"It's like ..." Buckley continues, warming to the task. "You hate olives when you're young. And then you really love olives when you're old."

She thinks about what she has just said. "I'm comparing Bob Dylan to an olive."

"What's a good album to start with," Taylor asks.

"I never really know albums," Buckley answers.

"I forget. You're 10 years younger than me."

Buckley and Taylor. Actor and screen writer. Star of new film Wild Rose and its creator. You may have heard of it. It's a movie about Glasgow (Taylor's home town), motherhood and country music; the three themes of our conversation today.

Late February and later today, Taylor is bringing the film home for the Glasgow Film Festival. She is excited and happy, full to the brim at the prospect. "I walked into this hotel and just burst into tears," she admits. "Because I'm just so happy to have got this bloody thing made and to have made it with basically all my pals now and we finally get to show it go Glasgow. It's been a ride, man."

Buckley reaches over to touch Taylor's arm. They are friends, happy in each other's company and as happy to talk to each other as me. Buckley is red-haired, jump-suited and in her late twenties. Taylor is wearing a jacket and a few more years than her companion.

Read More: Jessie Buckley on Beast

Read More: Scottish music duo The Eves

If you've missed the hype Wild Rose is the story of Rose-Lynn Harlan, a Glasgow girl just out of prison who is pursuing her dream to become a country music star in Nashville while balancing (or, more often, not balancing) her life as a single mother of two under the unforgiving gaze of her own mother (Julie Walters).

As Rose-Lynn, Buckley's performance has already garnered claims that it's a star-making performance. To be honest I thought the same at last year's Glasgow Film Festival when she was here with the brilliant but disturbing thriller Beast. Wild Rose, by contrast, is a crowd-pleaser but it has sharp edges and Buckley is great in it. She can also hold a tune. Later this evening, after the film screening, she will appear on stage at the Grand Ole Opry and belt out Primal Scream's Country Girl (she also sings it on the film's soundtrack).

"I knew I was in safe hands the moment I saw a wee MP3 of you singing," Taylor tells Buckley. "I was like, 'That's it. You're not alone anymore. This is happening. Rose-Lynn exists.'

"It's been such a joy to find you. Not just because we're really good friends." She turns to me now. "We call each other 'school' because we feel we've ..."

"...Known each other since school," Buckley finishes her sentence for her.

"It's also such a relief," Taylor continues, "to let go of this person and hand her over and also see so many new things about her."

The question, I have, I say to Taylor is why country? It's her passion, she says.

"The epiphanous moment was watching the Country Music Association Awards in the middle of the night in the early 1990s just because I couldn't get to sleep. Mary Chapin Carpenter was singing He Thinks He'll Keep Her with a baking band consisting of Reba McEntire, Trisha Yearwood, Wynona [Judd], all these cool women. I just thought, 'Wow, what an amazing song. What an amazing woman. What an amazing group of women. I've got to find out more about this.' And then I got into Garth Brooks and Lyle Lovett. It was just my passion from then on."

Buckley admits she wasn't a fan before making the movie. Indeed, she has said in the past, she didn't know much about it. You grew up in Ireland, though, Jessie, how could you have avoided it? "Oh listen, it was just kind of mild impersonations of Daniel O'Donnell that were wafting around in hotels in Killarney. That's my relationship to it.

"I always loved blues and, actually, my first introduction was when I played Janis Joplin a few years ago. And then when Nicole introduced me properly, well, it's changed my life."

"But then you've introduced me to a lot of stuff that I didn't know about," Taylor tells her.

"Have I?"

"Bonnie Raitt."

"Oh, that's nice."

Side One, Track Two

"I think I'm goin' back/ To the things I learned so well in my youth …"

Goin' Back, Dusty Springfield

How did we get here? It's fair to say that Buckley and Taylor have had rather different career paths. Buckley was an early starter. The oldest of five, she left Ireland for London as a teenager, entered the BBC1 talent show I'd Do Anything, overseen by Andrew Lloyd Webber who was looking for a new Nancy for his revival of the musical. Buckley came second, won some musical roles anyway and then diverted to acting.

She has been very much the coming woman on TV in recent years, appearing in dramatisations of War and Peace and The Woman in White and appearing in a prominent role Tom Hardy's Victorian thriller Taboo.

Taylor's career, by contrast, was more of a slow burn. "I certainly didn't fall into it. I was a solicitor until I was 27. Bloody hated it. And I was desperate to write. I needed to write as much as Rose-Lynn needed to sing."

She started writing for ongoing drama serials like Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Ashes to Ashes and Scott & Bailey, but it was her 2017 TV mini-series Three Girls, based on the true story of three young women trafficked from Rochdale, that made her name.

She has been nurturing the idea for Wild Rose for the best part of a decade, so her delight this afternoon is understandable.

A year ago, Buckley was in Glasgow in support of Beast. At that point she had not long finished shooting Wild Rose and was thrilled about being back in the city. Today she is still buzzing about how much she loves the place. "It has stolen my heart."

Taylor's relationship to her home town is loving but maybe a little more nuanced. "I'm from here. My family are still here. I lived here until I was 17 and this year I will be longer away, which seems a major milestone."

The truth is, though, when she was a teenager, she couldn't get away quick enough. "Glasgow is quite small, so I suppose what I was trying to get away from was everyone knowing your business. And, of course, that's become the thing that I love about it and why I come back.

"It's that common experience of people thinking they have to leave where they come from to become who they feel they need to be. The film is partly an explanation of that."

As such, Wild Rose's setting matters. In fact, Taylor argues, it couldn't have been set anywhere else.

"No way. No way. It's as much about Glasgow as it is about country music. I think Glaswegian people are not brilliant at emotional expression and I think part of the reason country is so popular here is that it's so cathartic. Even if you don't know how to articulate how you feel, you can put a country song on and you feel, you know.

"Like Rose-Lynn says in the film, 'It gets what's in there out.'"

The script began, she says, when Rose-Lynn started talking to her. "One day this woman started chatting away in my head. This character was fully formed, just chatting. And it was almost as if I was transcribing her. And although I've written a zillion drafts of this script her lines really have never changed because Rose-Lynn is Rose-Lynn and she's just been there from the start. Come November it will be 10 years since she first started talking."

"Was she ever called anything else?" Buckley asks her.

"Never."

"That's so funny. I can't imagine her being called anything else either. What made you call her Rose-Lynn?"

There is a silence for a moment. "You're not allowed to say," Buckley realises.

What was your first reaction when you read the script Jessie?

"The first thing that came to mind was that it was a prison break film. And at the centre of that thought was this woman who was bold and had this explosive courage which was a catalyst for all the other women to break out of their prisons.

"And as well, this was a rusty, raw, humane woman. I felt like I had met her before and I was kind of unnerved by her, surprised by her ... Yeah, she was so surprising. You feel like she's feckless and tenacious and kind of battling through blindly. But all of those choices cost her. And you can see that in little private moments. That's what makes her so human and real."

At one point Rose-Lynn goes to Nashville on her own and I wondered if that rang a bell for the teenage Buckley who set off for London?

"Lots of people ask me this, but I feel that I never read a script and go, 'Oh yeah, that's me. Brilliant. No work needed. See you on day one.' If anything, I look for the things that aren't me.

"I could recognise the struggle and the fear of wanting something for yourself. It takes a risk and it takes courage to want that and I could recognise that.

"But I had grown up in a household where my parents fully supported and encouraged me."

Side Two, Final Track

"Mother. That's the sweetest name of them all …"

My Angel Mother, Loretta Lynn

We haven't talked about motherhood yet. And we should. Wild Rose is a film about creativity but also about the responsibility of being a mum and the relationship daughters have with their mothers. Writing it, Taylor says, she was thinking of her own mum, "and the opportunities that I have had compared to the opportunities that my mum had.

"She left school with no qualifications. She's cleverer than me. I'm not any more deserving of the opportunities that I've had. It's just that I came along 27 years later. That's complicated and I think people don't speak about that enough; what that must be like for women of my mum's generation to see their daughters having so many opportunities that they didn't have, and I am so interested in that tension."

Can you remember each of you the moment you realised your mother was not just "mum," but a human being herself?

"I think I have to constantly remind myself that my mum is not a superhero," admits Buckley. "Honestly. The minute you give birth you belong half to someone else and that's an amazing thing. But it's a complicated thing as well, and my mum has incredible resilience and a need to nurture herself and want something more for herself as well.

"She grew up in a time when there weren't options, really. You were told that your want wasn't valid. But, yeah, I have to constantly remind myself that mum is not super ... And sometimes I want her to be."

Have your mothers seen the film, I ask? Yes, they say in tandem. What was that like?

"It was overwhelming, wasn't it?" Taylor says, turning to Buckley.

"I think it was quite hard for my mum to watch it," Buckley admits. "She's a harpist and a singer. She grew up on a bull farm and she ended up becoming a primary school teacher and then lost her voice and then went back and started singing again. She had been taken to the Grand Ole Opry when she was 20 to sing. I think it was quite close to the bone for her."

Wild Rose is a film about friendship, about Glasgow, about country music, about mothers and daughters. And it's a film about women. And that is still all too infrequent.

"It's rare to see women who look like Rose-Lynn front and centre on the screen," Buckley agrees. "She's a very ordinary person who does something extraordinary with her life and those stories are important. They're important for me to tell my sisters that you aren't to be judged as a woman because of how you look or what you have in your life. Each of your own individual identities is a beautiful thing and has a space in the world. And there are more real women like Nicole", she says turning to her friend. "Let that be seen."

The needle hits the run-out groove and goes back to the beginning. The music starts again.

Wild Rose is in cinemas now