That New Nashville Sound
ISSUE #31
Greetings and congratulations to Kacey Musgraves for making Nashville bend to her musical integrity and winning the CMA Album of the Year, but before we get to the playlist today I'd like to direct your attention to the button below. I appreciate you all so much, and with Thanksgiving coming up next week, I thought I'd give you an opportunity to answer a question: What's one song that you're thankful exists?
It can be your favorite. It can be one that saved you. It can be a song that you can't believe somebody wrote, one that always makes you laugh. I don't care, as long as it's real! I’ve already submitted my answer. Next week, if we get enough participation, I'm gonna throw our blessed songs together and we can all hear what each other picked. We'll become a digital community, gather around the table of our collective headphones, and feast on the gift of music. So please click and enter your answer below (title and artist, please, so I know exactly which song to use):
Click to Add to our Thanksgiving Playlist!
Done? Thank you. Now, for this week, I want to talk about country music. Wait, come back! I meant good country music. It's out there!
Like a lot of popular music genres over the past few decades, country has split into two different lanes. There are the ungodly commercial behemoths like Florida Georgia Line, the kind that Bo Burnham expertly skewered in his Make Happy special (songs about beer, trucks, jeans, misogyny). Then there are the songwriters who dig into the profound subject matter of great country music (vulnerability, melancholy, lonesomeness, mortality) and are using those tenets to build something new of their own.
Those in the second column are usually working hard for little or no press. These people are experimenting with sounds and instruments not usually attributed to country music while filtering it all through the genre's traditions. Like the recent punk wave in Philly, this new generation of innovators has been dominated by women. Kacey Musgraves, Amanda Shires, early trailblazers like Neko Case and Lucinda Williams— these women sometimes barely sound country if it weren't for the twang, but their music is steeped in mountain spirit: one woman, a pillar, alone with (or against) God.
Artists in the first column are an insult to our emotional intelligence; artists in the second engage in it. Which is why Kacey's win is so cool. For all of Jackson Maine's preoccupation with emotional integrity, the thing that makes him a compelling character is that he pretty much has a point. We want songs we can connect to, plain and simple. We can tell when we're lied to, and pandering has been the norm in commercial Nashville. Hopefully, Golden Hour is the sound of change.
What I love about country, when it's good, is that it's not afraid to be vulnerable, to be heartbroken, to be sobbing drunk on the bathroom floor every once in a while. I'm thankful for those who are not afraid to wallow, because sometimes I just don't have the guts to post the lowest of my lows online for likes (God knows I try). When I don't have the digital means of gathering solidarity, at least there's someone brave enough to write me a song about mixing a drink and trying to drown this worthlessness. It's the sound of isolation, but also of strength. We may never have everything we'll need, but at least we can sit with our dog and build ourselves a fire— as American dreams go, at least this one's achievable.
So this is a collection of songs of that Nashville sound that I like, the ones that aren't bloated, glitzy, or lying to us. Listen to it while playing Red Dead Redemption. Even if you still can't get into it, maybe you can use it, because some day you could be stuck in a car with your cousin who only listens to country and you'll need some common ground— this was how I survived carpools to my high school in Southeast Iowa. Or maybe some day you'll just be in the cowboy mood. Nothing wrong with that.
Long live Jason Isbell.