Tag: Country

Jobi Riccio Believes Sensitivity is a Superpower

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When it’s time to recharge her creativity or reconnect with herself, Jobi Riccio goes back to nature. The mountains and hiking trails of her native Colorado were integral to her childhood and adolescence. Today, the trees, plant life, and paths of Nashville help bring her back to center.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that all things natural life and climate factor into her songwriting. Personally and professionally, Riccio has become a spokesperson for our global environment and its future. “Wildfire Season,” from her latest release, Face The Feeling, addresses these issues. Written in the aftermath of the 2020 Colorado wildfires, the song stands out in its unfiltered message, while at the same time slotting in as a perfect fit within the album’s context.

Face The Feeling was produced and engineered by Riccio’s longtime friends and colleagues Jesse Timm and Isaiah Beard. The album leans on her folk and bluegrass roots while injecting them with her passion for indie and punk rock. Riccio takes on mental health, grief, self-doubt, past and present hurt, and the long road to recovery and autonomy. It’s a lot of what is now commonly known as “big feelings,” and entirely the only walk that she knows and wants to take. All of this is served up with a healthy dose of fierce guitars.

Riccio last spoke with BGS in 2023, following the release of Whiplash. Phoning in this time to talk about Face The Feeling, she was days away from a June 9 performance at Wolf Trap as part of Songwriters Celebrate John Prine joining Emmylou Harris, Margo Price, Patty Griffin, I’m With Her, Lucius, Allison Russell, Hayes Carll, Fancy Hagood, and Tommy Prine.

Riccio’s connection to Prine dates back to her early musical influences, reaching a high point in 2023 when she was awarded the Newport Festivals Foundation’s John Prine Fellowship. The Wolf Trap concert was in some ways bringing her full circle, sharing a stage with colleagues, each playing one original and one song of Prine’s.

“I’ve done some stuff in the past with the Prine family,” she remarks. “They have welcomed me into their circle and they’ve been really sweet. It’s been a real blessing of life in Nashville, that whole experience. I’m honored and excited to get to do that show.”

Let’s start a little differently. Tell us about your day so far.

Jobi Riccio: Okay. I woke up and had breakfast on my front porch. I just moved neighborhoods in Nashville – I moved to Madison, Tennessee, and I have a nice front porch now, so I’ve been enjoying coming out and having coffee in the morning. And then I went to therapy, I came back and had a meeting with my manager, we did some co-working stuff together over Zoom, I had lunch, and now I’m doing this.

This album was written between Colorado and Nashville. How did both environments and both communities help shape the new music?

In terms of the lyrics, I feel like I have a lot of references to nature in Colorado and western nature, mostly because I’ve been speaking that language and speaking those names longer. I’m just learning the names of the trees, bushes, daylilies, and all the stuff out here now. I’ve lived in Tennessee… it’ll be five years in September, so I’m just learning everything that’s here.

Any time I’m feeling reflective, I call upon my past, thinking about my family or where I’m from. It’s a big part of my identity. But I definitely identify as an artist both from Nashville and Colorado. Nashville played a really big role in the writing of this record. I started playing a lot more electric guitar when I moved here. I started spending more and more time in my room playing. I was listening to a lot of country electric guitar, but for some reason it became this more indie-rock singer-songwriter kind of thing.

I think I wrote about Nashville and the community more. You hear that on “Love of the Song,” just kind of struggling to find my footing here, because it does take a while to figure that out. I was really lucky to know a lot of people before I moved here. I say this in the song – I was set up in all the right places, with all the right people, and I still felt a sense of “Damn, do I belong here?” The impostor syndrome of doing music for a job is really hard and I think women and femme people in general really struggle with impostor syndrome and living in our heads and second-guessing ourselves a lot more than men do. I address that in the song “Doesn’t Matter,” which closes the album.

So I think it’s a record where I come into living in Nashville and am also like, “I am worthy of doing this job and this job is such a big part of what makes this town this town.” Despite all the new development and changes that everyone’s always talking about, Nashville is and will always be Music City, and the community is what makes it great.

Where were you, mentally and emotionally, when this creative process began, and where are you now?

I was in a hard place when I started – and in the middle of it. I think it’s a brave thing that you really have to do in life, whether or not you want to, which is to own up to your shit. It’s a very crass way of saying it, but basically I was trying to outrun some shadows, trying to outrun some trauma, trying to outrun things that needed to be dealt with that were coming out in my life.

I was still pretty young when I started writing this record and [when I moved] to Nashville. I moved here almost five years ago and I started writing this record about three years ago. It’s been such an up-and-down experience. I feel like it’s mirrored the experience I’ve had with getting my sea legs as a touring musician, too. They’ve been very much in tandem.

Despite what you see online, it’s not this constant upward, “Everything’s great and it’s always getting better all the time, the gigs are always getting better.” Some nights you’re playing for 3,000 people, opening for Lucinda Williams – which I got to do – and the next night you’re in Utah playing for 50 people headlining. It’s a total rollercoaster. It’s about learning how to find the tools to ground yourself. I really needed to learn how to do that intrapersonally first, for myself, and I’m glad that I did at the beginning of writing this record. But it definitely chronicles a long journey of growth. I feel like it’s a weird time to do this job. And also growth is… you’re never done. It’s not linear. So I’m always doing my best every day, and that’s all I can ever expect of myself. And every day is different.

Were the songs finished when you began recording?

Most of them were, but not all of them, which is a new experience for me. I’m used to having all of them done and buttoned up and being like, “Okay, here we are. Let’s go record them.” But when we first started talking about what this album could be, I had the song “Doesn’t Matter,” just the idea of it, the guitar part, and the beginning of it, and I was like, “I don’t really know if this is any good.”

I played it for my co-producers, Jesse [Timm] and Isaiah [Beard], and they were like, “This is really cool. You should finish the song.” They basically watched as I finished it. I was writing stuff down actively in the studio, which I’ve never had that experience. I wrote more songs, too, that didn’t make the record. Whether or not those will go on another project or ever see the light of day, I don’t know. But I was open to seeing what would come.

Tell us about your working relationship with Jesse and Isaiah. How did it begin and how has it grown over the course of your albums?

I met Jesse at Berklee. We met on the first day of college. We were in the same dorm. They’re from Northern California, I’m from Colorado, they’re from a weird hippie town, I’m from a weird hippie town – we immediately understood each other. I feel so incredibly lucky to have met them, because not many people get to have someone who is so encouraging of their music alongside them at any stage.

Not everything I wrote in college was very good, but they were always very invested in it and also [in] finding their voice as an arranger and composer and writing string parts. I would come up with a song and they’d be like, “Oh, I came up with a string part for it. Do you like it?” That’s such a spoiled experience to have, because it would be a gorgeous thing. We’ve played together and been collaborators and friends for ten years now.

I met Isaiah through Jesse. Isaiah also went to school with us, but I didn’t know him. He was a few years older and worked the same student job with Isaiah in project bands. It’s where kids have their stuff recorded for different school projects. They both did admin work for these project band things, so they became friends. I had a friend from the songwriting program at school who had a record produced by Isaiah in Nashville. He moved here a couple of years before me, and he said it was an amazing experience. I listened to it and I thought it was just the coolest thing ever. I heard so much creativity in the production and the mix. Also, Isaiah has his own solo project and he’s one of the most creative people I’ve ever met. I reached out to him and that’s how we ended up working on Whiplash. It felt like a very organic trio and through that we became really good friends.

I moved to Nashville, he lives close by, and I feel like I’m very spoiled for having people who love and understand both me and my music. I feel truly blessed. I don’t know how else to say it. I hear how all three of us have grown as musicians on this project versus the last project. I’ve grown a lot as a writer, the mixing and production work Isaiah did is outstanding, and Jesse wrote all the string parts. I can hear all of our growth and development as individual creative people. My name is on the record, but it does really feel like a collaboration.

You play acoustic, electric, and baritone electric on this album. Tell us about your guitars – which ones you play on the album, which ones are going on the road, any backstories you’d like to share.

I only have three guitars in my personal possession, but Isaiah had a lot of guitars lent to him by our friend Jake Byrne, who works at Carter Vintage Guitars. So nice of Jake! We had a vintage Mustang that Isaiah played on “Buzzkill.” He played some very Green Day-esque type things on that song. It was just the most fun little guitar.

Isaiah owns the baritone guitar that I played. He won it in a guitar raffle at a benefit concert that I played when the Asheville, [NC] flood happened. We had a big fundraiser here in Nashville. We collaborated with some folks in Asheville to raise money and a guy out of Asheville who ran a guitar store put together this raffle. I was one of the artists on the bill, Isaiah and his partner came and entered the raffle, and he won this baritone electric with a metal neck. It’s the craziest guitar ever.

I have a Martin D-35 from 1993 that’s my baby acoustic guitar that you’ll see me playing all the time. I bought it at the Pickin’ Parlor, an acoustic guitar store in Arvada, Colorado. I was with my friend Al out around Denver looking for a guitar. I wanted a dreadnought because I was really interested in playing bluegrass. I was in college, 21 at the time, and interested in digging into flatpicking. I was like, “I need a dreadnought. There’s no other way.”

I played a lot of different guitars, and other Martins, and I fell in love with this one. It reminded me a lot of a friend’s guitar that I had played throughout the years at this bluegrass festival, RockyGrass, I grew up going to. I was like, “Oh, this feels like the twin guitar to my friend’s guitar.” That’s why I ended up buying that guitar. I’ve written so many songs on it, and it’s interesting, now that I don’t play bluegrass consistently, it’s got this whole other life and character to it as a guitar for songs. Sometimes I start writing on electric, but oftentimes I still write on that guitar, too, and transition over to electric.

I have a Fender Telecaster that Jake at Carter Vintage helped me [rig] so that it takes the flatwound strings that I like. It’s a certain sound I really enjoy that I heard Margaret Glaspy champion back in the day, and I wanted to figure out how to do that. We’ve done a lot of little mods to it over the years. I love that guitar, too. I bought it in 2021 off of a guy on Facebook in Denver. It’s not worth a ton of money, but it has a lot of sentimental value to me.

I have a Gibson Songwriter that I got through winning the John Prine Fellowship. Gibson Guitars gave me a 2024 Songwriter. It’s a beautiful guitar that lives at home on my couch. My amp that I have at home is a Fender Blues Junior. I bought it from another Berklee student for $400 on Facebook Marketplace during my senior year of college because I needed an amp.

You’ve talked, in this interview and others, about how being outdoors is important to you. Do you write when you’re out in nature? Do ideas come to you then?

Absolutely. A lot of times, if I’m stuck on something, getting out is good. I think there’s some science behind this, too – the dual motion of walking is really helpful to our brains. So I definitely find myself coming up with ideas while hiking or walking. I’ve always been that way. I’m always writing things down on my phone. Or while I’m in transit on airplanes, trains, in an Uber, or someone else is taking me somewhere, some other vehicle, in the back of a van on tour. Looking out the window, watching scenery go by, can be a regenerative, reflective place for me as well.

I probably write the most when I have a guitar in my hands, but I edit a lot and I have a lot of lyrical ideas while I’m out in nature, walking.

Phone, voice memos, pen and paper?

All three. If I’m out and about, I use my phone. I grew up writing in my journals and then I went to my phone. Everything was in my Notes app for a few years and then I was like, “I want to go back to having a journal and having handwritten lyrics. I miss going back into my journals and looking at my embarrassing little couplets of lyrics from eighth grade.” I want to be able to do that when I’m older, and look back and have more tangible objects in my life. I don’t want everything to be owned by my phone and put into my phone.

So I got several different notebooks of different sizes. I have a little notebook for journaling and writing more personal things, I have a big notebook, I have a legal pad for writing lyrics, and I have a little gratitude journal that I keep on my bedside. I have journals of all sizes now.

Are you particular about your pens?

Yes. I really like this one pen, the brand is Lamy. It’s the best pen I’ve ever owned. You can easily and accessibly buy them online, but I found it at a pen shop in Stockholm, Sweden. I think the romance of that experience also made me fall in love with this pen. They sell a lot of fancy ones that you use for calligraphy, but the one I am obsessed with is their ballpoint model. Occasionally I meet other people who love this pen. I see them with the pen and we’re like, “Oh, you like this pen too?” There’s a little cult following.

I’ve been getting into pencil recently, too. I got these free pencils at an Americanafest event, I think, and I have to figure out what brand they are, because I really like them. I’ve been enjoying having the ability to erase versus just crossing things out. It feels good. Tactile.

You write and speak openly about climate, ICE, politics, the state of the world, and of course about being an openly queer artist. You have received media attention for “Wildfire Season,” which has been called a protest song. Some people think musicians should make their music, share their art, and keep their opinions out of the spotlight. Other people, including quite recently Joan Baez, believe in using that platform to take a stand on issues. Discuss.

In the hardest times in my life, and I think this is true for most people, I’ve turned to music to process things. That was always the hope for this new record – that it could be a processing tool for anyone who needs it.

There’s so much hurt being done to people systematically right now, and I don’t think I could not talk about it. I think it feels very cathartic to attend shows where it is addressed within the lyrics, or in the banter when the artist is talking between sets. My friend Nathan Evans Fox has a great new record and he had a release show here in Nashville. He has a lot of great political country music and I felt such a sense of exhale being in that room. There was so much energy. To be in a room where it felt like church, the catharsis of release, there was such healing. It gave me a feeling of strength.

It’s a really hard time. Harm is being done to so many of us. I know that no matter what side of the political spectrum people are on, I’ve heard it said around here that everything is too expensive for most people and it’s too hot every year for most people. People are feeling the change in the air. There’s a lot of climate denial that still goes on, and yet people know that something isn’t right. Even extremely wealthy people who think they’ll be able to escape the effects of climate change, trying to shield themselves away from it, are being touched by it.

Tennessee is such a gerrymandered state. If you’re familiar at all with the political climate here, it’s really bleak, with the redistricting of Memphis and the current events that have gone down here recently. But going to protests in Nashville, showing up, is empowering. Why shouldn’t music be a space for people to feel through what’s going on, or to at least feel a little bit less alone, to feel stronger, to feel braver, to feel angry, to let that shit out? Because if you don’t let it out, then you continue to let it happen.

I feel that music is one of the most powerful tools of healing and understanding ourselves. People deserve to not feel alone, and they deserve to feel connected. If it’s upsetting to some people that I speak out about politics, I would rather call in people who are really hurting during this time and give them comfort and strength. That matters more to me than alienating people who think I should just sing songs about whatever. I really believe in the power of political songwriting, songs that do work.

When we started this interview with “Tell us about your day so far,” your list included breakfast, went to therapy, came home, met with your manager on Zoom, had lunch. You said, “I went to therapy” as casually as someone might say, “I went to the gym.” Was it a process for you to be able to say it so openly? There’s still so much stigma around mental health.

I think it’s two things. I have been described as sensitive for as long as I can remember by everyone in my family, and that used to be something that made me feel so shameful and embarrassed. I went to therapy for the first time when I was very young. I was in middle school and I was embarrassed about it at the time because this was the narrative I had around it when I was a little kid and things were very different. It’s crazy how much has changed. I think the pandemic changed a lot of things around mental health for the better. Back then I felt like, “I can’t get my emotions under control, so I have to go sit in this office and cry for two hours and it’s so weird, because I’m the most sensitive person in the world. I don’t know what it is.”

I came to songwriting as a teenager, and I found this channel of, “I can put everything in this place, and sometimes I create something that is so bad, and sometimes I create something that’s kind of good, and sometimes I create something that is totally neutral.” I used to go home after school every day and write. It was my confidante. It was what I turned to in hard times and in good times. It was how I processed my life. Once again, music as a way of processing life. Songwriting and creativity was that for me as a young, really sensitive person.

Once I wrote what I felt was actually a good song, I felt brave enough to show it to someone, and I played my first gigs, I was like, “Oh, people connect with this.” I got older, I went to music school, and I was like, “Man, maybe I really have something to say and people want to hear it.” And I met Jesse – going back to talking about them – and they’re a very sensitive person as well.

I’ve always had this thing about sensitivity is a superpower. You’re in tune to certain things that other people miss. I think most people who write songs are keen observers of the world. Sometimes you’re observing more negative things and that’s really hard, it’s painful, it requires tending to, and that’s what therapy is. I think everybody is deserving of taking care of their mental health. Now I’m in a city of songwriters, and every single person I know is a songwriter who does therapy, so I’m very much not in a stigmatized place with it because it’s been normalized to me.

I’m so much older, but it took some time for me to get there. I remember being embarrassed as a child doing it. But it’s been so many years off and on that I have done therapy, and I have seen the gifts and the fruits of my labor. So many of my songs have come out of the work I’ve done in there and the growth I’ve had. I don’t know if my therapist listens, but there’s a lot of inspiration taken from things we’ve talked about, and realizations and connections. I’m proud of myself for being able to get to that place, and I’m proud of others in my life who have had to overcome stigma about it. I’ve seen it open them up, and that’s beautiful to see.

Photo Credit: Rett Rogers

BGS 5+5: Creekbed Carter Hogan

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Creekbed Carter Hogan
Hometown: I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but before that I spent most of my life living in Austin, Texas. I wasn’t born and raised in either, but they are the places that have shaped me the most and I think that counts for something.
Latest Album: PEASANTS REVOLT! (out July 24 2026)
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): Creekbed, Creeky, Peepaw Creekbed

Which artist has influenced you the most – and how?

Like a Catholic cliché, my life has been changed forever by two women named Mary.

The first artist is Mary Chapin Carpenter. Watching your mom sing along to “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” with her eyes closed while she presses folded laundry to her chest, both wistful and hopeless… that does something to a person. In a family so Catholic, so conservative, so isolated – not just because of rurality, but also because of my difficult, isolationist father – Mary Chapin Carpenter was one of the few non-Christian rock-related musicians that scored my childhood, and her ferocious form of empathic songwriting has never left me.

The second Mary is Mary Gauthier. I remember the intersection I was stopped at in Austin, late at night, my now-girlfriend putting her on the aux. The first lines of “Slip of the Tongue” hit me like a gut punch: “Honey sit down, I got something to say/ Last night I drowned. I got carried away.” I remember gripping my girlfriend’s hand, crying and laughing and brimming with new, terrifying love as I listened for the first time to one of the few publicly queer Americana artists to really break through. Mary Gauthier made my life as a trans country artist possible. Nobody can see through to the soul of something like she can. It was an honor to release my cover of “Slip of the Tongue” this year, and it’ll be an honor for the rest of my life to know that my songs are in a lineage that includes her.

What other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, etc. – inform your music?

Man, I just really love art a lot. I’ll watch anything, read anything, listen to anything. I don’t think you need any special schooling or whatever to look at something bold and wrestle with how it makes you feel – you just need a lot of curiosity.

I’m putting out a new record in July called PEASANTS REVOLT! and in my liner notes I credit two books as inspirations: Fernando A. Flores’s Texan magical realist novel Brother Brontë and Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind, a beautifully rendered examination of how word-of-mouth led to the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in all of human history. Those two books gave as much to my new album as Hazel Dickens, Bobbie Gentry, Tracy Chapman, and ANOHNI did.

So did a whole library! The East Side Freedom Library in Saint Paul, which makes formerly private collections of union organizers, activists, thinkers, and artists available to the public. The Twin Cities United Performers, a musicians’ power org I’m a member of, helps me explore the art of organizing with fellow musicians for better conditions. Picket lines are an art form, and I remain inspired every day by the people who hold them. And my songs would probably sound completely different if I weren’t spending so much of my time watching movies like John Sayles’s Matewan and Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up.

Before I could leave my small rural community, art was a way of exploring the world. Now that I can live on my own terms, art is a way of understanding the world. As an artist, why wouldn’t I try as many forms of understanding as possible?

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

This is a long answer, but it’s a story worth telling:

This past winter, as ICE invaded the Twin Cities and abducted and killed our neighbors in our streets, I received a grant from the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis to write new labor and union songs. It was a jarring juxtaposition: how could I justify research and writing songs in my room when I needed to be out on the streets with a whistle in my hand, standing my ground with my neighbors against the federal government? But the truth is, I’d already cashed half the money and it had been a lean winter, so I had to make something to show for it. I went to the East Side Freedom Library, did a boatload of research, and then I wrote songs about regular Minnesotans who’d fought the government for dignity for all. From the 1910s miners of the Mesabi Iron Range to the Indigenous founders of the American Indian Movement in the ’70s to the Willmar 8 who held a two-year picket line every single day in every single kind of weather to an Appalachian-styled ballad that tied in the history of labor resistance to what we were all doing now to protect one another, as our own mayor and governor left us in the ice and the snow to fend for ourselves.

On February 20, I took the stage at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis with a four-piece bluegrass band and presented my grant work to 250 Minnesotans. I was terrified that what I’d written hadn’t done enough justice to this incredible place that had taken me in, given me lifesaving healthcare, and taught me new things about what it means to show up for your community – and even more worried that my performance wouldn’t be good enough to raise rent money for my neighbors who were trapped in their apartments, hiding from ICE. But when I started playing these songs, the reception filled me with awe. All 250 of these people sang with me, clapped with me, cried with me, felt pain and joy and despair and hope together, out loud, with me. After the set, we got a standing ovation – and then at the merch table, the line went out the door as neighbor after neighbor came up to me to tell me about the picket lines they were holding or had held, the Minnesotans they’d recognized in my lyrics, the pain they felt and the hope that sat right beside that pain that they could now feel because of what we’d just sung together.

I’ve played a lot of incredible shows to incredible audiences, many of them much bigger and “much bigger deals.” But that show on February 20 this year was the single most important performance of my life. It meant everything to me. And it taught me, again, why I’m still here, writing songs, doing something every single day to take my place in a lineage of resistance and make a new, better world for all of us.

If you didn’t work in music, what would you do instead?

Way before I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a nun. The nuns I’ve known work really hard for the liberation of all people, even from within the confines of a restrictive, colonialist, organized religion. The Sisters of the Holy Names were the ones who first taught me about protesting at the School of the Americas, for example, and the Catholic Workers movement introduced liberation theology to me,and taught me about fighting for a dignified life for every living thing. I’m not a Catholic anymore – Catholicism remains closed to me as a trans person – but then again, secular convents existed in medieval Europe for people who didn’t want to convert to Catholicism, but still wanted to live in community. So maybe being a secular, liberationalist nun is still an option?

What would a perfect day as an artist and a creator look like to you?

I would wake up and every single person in the United States would have universal basic income, healthcare that serves all of our needs, and the knowledge that our taxes are funding public services instead of wars and genocides and detention centers. I’d get up to eat vegetables from our garden and groceries I could afford, in a house I share with my friends that isn’t owned by a landlord or a bank, in a neighborhood where everyone has the housing they need. I’d pick up my guitar and head out the door to a park or a third space where other people would be playing music, sharing skills, and enjoying rest for free without fear of the cops or some arbitrary law that regulates who gets to rest where. And we’d all get to that space on free public transportation that runs well and doesn’t contribute to climate change.

We’d sing and play in the heart of a food forest and then we’d take a break to swim in water that’s clean in a park we all care for. I’d go to the library and read a book about moss or something, just because it sounds interesting, while people around me use public resources to sew quilts or study or listen to CDs, our phones nowhere in sight. In the evening, I’d go to a show with my girlfriend at a venue that receives funding from the government so they don’t have to rely on alcohol sales to make their business work, and I’d happily pay money that I know goes entirely to the bands playing that night. I’d dance and dance and dance, surrounded by all kinds of people who all have the basic things they need to thrive in the bodies they have, whose bodies are no longer regulated or targeted for state violence or kept out because of a disregard for accessibility. The bands would be shit hot, because they’d know they were making a living wage and that no one was gonna come into the venue to gun us all down.

And when I’d leave the venue with my girlfriend to get on our bikes and go home to sleep, the night air would feel clean. There’d be no wildfire smoke in the air. The stars would be out, and I’d be able to see them all. I’d pass neighbor after neighbor, grinning, happy to go home to a safe place, knowing that Palestine was free and Cuba was free and Puerto Rico was free and that “Land Back” had supplanted capitalism as our guiding principle and that every worker was treated fairly. And while nothing would be perfect, because there’s always work to be done, things would feel possible. Hope would feel tenable. Every living creature would feel valued. That would be one hell of a day, I think.

Photo Credit: Emily April Allen

Watch Carly Pearce Sing With Molly Tuttle and Dan Tyminski on Harmonies

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Award-winning and critically acclaimed country star Carly Pearce has unveiled the latest single from her upcoming album, Honest Woman, and the track should be of special interest not just to country fans, but bluegrass lovers, too. “What If You Loved Me,” available today on streaming platforms and via an accompanying performance video (watch above) features Dan Tyminski and Molly Tuttle on harmony vocals and mandolin and clawhammer banjo, respectively. It’s a lovely song of longing daydreaming and Pearce’s lead vocal shines bolstered by such talented and artful harmony singers.

“What If You Loved Me” is built on an absolutely classic country trope, the “opposite day” paradigm, asking seemingly simple but actually huge and daunting questions. It immediately recalls songs like Dolly Parton’s “The Grass Is Blue,” Zach Top’s “I Never Lie,” George Jones’ “She Thinks I Still Care” or “Just Someone I Used to Know” written by Cowboy Jack Clement, wherein the speaker says exactly what they want, dream of, hope for, and love – but by pointing out the opposite of each. Pearce’s incisive song is a lovely iteration on this age-old country theme, singing:

What if up was down and down was up
And you were the sad one
And I already found somebody?
What if I didn’t love you
And what if you loved me? 

It’s a heart-wrenching plea, the lonesome pining in the lyrics ratcheted to extremes by delicious, buttery three-part harmony. With Pearce on rhythm guitar, Tuttle picks up an open-back old-time banjo and frails along while Tyminski pulls limitless emotion from his mandolin with tremolos and tender licks. Both of these bluegrass pickers are accomplished multi-instrumentalists, serving any and every song and context in whatever way they need.

“Bluegrass is such a cherished part of who I am as it’s where I got my start,” says Pearce via press release. “To record a song that honors my roots with two artists that I have deep respect and admiration for is not only a special moment, but very emotional. 10-year-old Carly who grew up singing in bluegrass bands would be over the moon to know she has a song with Dan and Molly (as is present-day Carly!). This is the perfect moment in my career to show fans this side of my heart.”

It’s easy to trace the bluegrass influences through Carly Pearce’s country career, as the genre has been an important part of the Kentucky native’s creative life all along. But it’s especially apparent lately, with this collaboration with Tyminski and Tuttle, another track on Honest Woman featuring Tyminski as well, and Pearce’s recent CMA Fest appearance that featured Tuttle, Ricky Skaggs, young mandolinist Shay Morgan, and members of Skaggs’ band, Kentucky Thunder. Their performance of “From Now On” was a hit at Nissan Stadium and on the CMA Fest broadcast on ABC, too.

Bluegrass and country have always gone hand-in-hand, but with excellent songs such as these, artists like Carly Pearce help remind of their inseparable connection. Pearce’s brand new album, Honest Woman, will be out August 28 and her Honest Woman: Up Close Tour beings in September.

Photo Credit: John Shearer

River Shook Is as Disarming As Ever

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

After more than a decade fronting various alt-country bands – most notably the Disarmers – River Shook is now breaking out on their own.

The new chapter officially launched June 26 with the release of Shook’s self-titled debut. It’s stripped back instrumentally, but still features the same blunt songwriting and gritty vocals that longtime fans of the singer have come to know and love. As such, its 10 songs take listeners on a rollercoaster of emotions balancing equal parts sorrow and joy, ultimately reminding that we’re all stronger than we give ourselves credit for.

“This album is extremely dichotomous,” says Shook. “One constant is a theme of being able to hold two very contrasting emotions at the same time, which can be hard for many people and takes a level of self-awareness that I think we should all aspire to.”

Bringing the record to life was Shook’s bandmate and life partner, Blake Tallent, and together they produced the project inside their North Carolina home. That decision came after unsuccessfully shopping demos to record labels, then leaning on the guidance of friend and esteemed producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Mavis Staples), who stressed to them the need to build everything around the vocals.

“When he said that, my brain immediately went back to the times where we’ve made Disarmers records where I felt like vocally I was competing with the band and had to force my singing overtop of everything else,” explains Shook. “But with this album we wanted to figure out the vocals and build everything else around them. When we started recording we acted as if it was a demo, just me with an acoustic guitar, a mic and a click track in my ears. There’s still the rock ‘n’ roll people know me for, but it’s a lot more nuanced because we really wanted to make the vocals the North Star of this project. When I listen back to it now, I’m amazed at how natural my voice sounds – there’s no straining to break through the noise like before.”

Ahead of the album’s release, Shook caught up with Good Country to talk about disbanding the Disarmers, recording the new project exclusively at home with Tallent, why they opt to be so up front with pain in their songwriting, and more.

When did you first start planning for this solo project, and why was it important for you to effectively “kill off” the Disarmers before doing so?

River Shook: The Disarmers were together for about 10 years, but the last couple years of it we were dealing with the situation where we had all of these tours booked and my guitarist at the time, Eric Peterson, had to take a leave of absence because he was having some arm issues that were preventing him from being able to play. That started this weird cycle of having to bring in sub musicians and soon after everything fell apart. Our bassist ended up leaving followed by our drummer, leaving us in this mode of band-aid fixes since we had so many shows already on the books. We were so busy that we didn’t have time to even really be intentional about who we were bringing in, it was just a matter of “can they play the instrument well and are they available?” – there wasn’t any time to reflect.

I was also getting really burned out, and on top of that I’m a very introverted person, so it was really hard for me to get used to new people. Couple that with the fact that sometimes we would have people in the band that we just weren’t meshing with made it start to feel weird. I was constantly trying to hold together this thing that was determined to fall apart. Then in December of 2024 my other longest-running band member, Jack Foster – who had drummed with me for three or four years at that point – called me shortly after Thanksgiving and told me he could no longer commit to the band. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction that we’d all been having every time a band member left, I just decided to let go and move on. It wound up being a massive weight off my shoulders.

At the same time, I knew I [was] not quitting music, because it’s such a huge part of who I am, I just realized it was time for that chapter to come to a close. Immediately I began thinking about what’s next, not in a hectic or frantic way, but in a way that felt extremely liberating and inspiring. [I was] immediately inspired – like, I can take this wherever I want to.

You talking about feeling liberated has me thinking of the album’s opening track “Free At Last.” Was that your way of declaring you’ve broken free of what has weighed you down?

That’s absolutely what it felt like. That song is actually a reference to sort of a parallel storyline that was occurring at the time. I had to cut my parents off for a while, which is very hard to write a song about. Most people can’t relate to that, but I felt like if I can write this song about a divorce, that is something that so many people can understand. That – coupled with the fact that the Disarmers ending was very much a divorce in its own way – made this a song that I wanted to use to remind people that getting out of your shit is really hard to do. However, the freedom to do and pursue what we want on the other side is absolutely worth going through that heartache.

Speaking of your parents, you also sing about your up-and-down relationship with them on the record’s closing track, “Loving Me Is Like Rolling A Big Old Rock.” What was it like rehashing some of those memories and examining how your relationship has evolved with them over time?

I was working through a lot of stuff with all the songs on this record and trying to be more honest with myself about my childhood and my teen years, which were rough. I know my parents meant well and were coming from a good place, but it was a very controlling and authoritarian household where I experienced a lot of religious and gender-based trauma. In their minds I was born a girl, so I was only supposed to exist to be a wife, mother, and housekeeper. They’ve since come a long way with their beliefs and don’t think like that anymore, which I’m grateful for, but the damage had already been done.

More recently I was at a point where I [was] grappling with all this stuff as an adult and going to therapy to try to come to terms with it all. Therapy is a great tool, but it can only get you so far. There’s so much work that you have to do yourself and that’s part of what writing this record was, it was me therapizing myself. It was me having very honest and frank discussions with myself about what happened and what I need to do to have a healthier perspective of all of the bad things that I’ve dealt with.

So “Loving Me Is Like Rolling A Big Old Rock” is supposed to feel kind of mischievous and fun because it is touching on such heavy topics that unfortunately I think a lot of people can relate to. When most people become parents for the first time they’re not prepared, because their parents weren’t prepared to be parents either – it’s a tale as old as time.

You and your partner Blake Tallent produced this album yourselves inside your home studio in North Carolina. What led to that approach, and is it something you’d ever done before?

The first four Disarmers records were studio albums, but with my side project, Mightmare featured the only other record that I’ve made at home, although that was a completely different situation. That entire record was me, a MacBook with GarageBand, and a Scarlett Focusrite [interface] – it was very DIY. When I wrapped up the Disarmers, I had demos that our manager was shopping around. We were getting some interest but nothing more, and it got to a point where the timeline that I had with our touring schedule required that we release this in spring of 2026. That’s when we started making the record at home between just the two of us.

Blake is a killer multi-instrumentalist, so much so that it blows my mind. He lived in Nashville for a long time and still has a house on the east side. When he lived there he was producing records, playing instruments, and even mixing – he’s a fucking weapon! Our original goal with this record was to have a whole band on it and to capture it at Sonic Ranch, since that place has been on my bucket list for several years. When the things that you want don’t work out, you can get lost in the defeat and your emotions or you can notice it as an opportunity to do something else, and that’s how we chose to approach it. I’m so grateful that [Blake] was fully on board.

The Disarmers had a couple fly-out dates at the end of June 2025 and by July 1 we were hunkered down in the house and started making the record using Pro Tools. Blake taught me the basics of Pro Tools so that while he’s playing drums or bass, I can be running the session and he doesn’t have to multitask. It was also nice not running into that “too many cooks in the kitchen” issue, because both of our creative visions were 100% aligned. I can’t think of a single disagreement we had in the studio, which simply does not happen. Having a creative partner who’s also your life partner and being in alignment together on a project of this magnitude was incredible, and I think because of that our synchronicity really shines through on this record. It sounds very cohesive without any kind of dissonance or struggle.

How long has Blake been playing with you?

He joined the band as a sub in June of 2022, then we were seeing each other by August and fell in love on our first European tour together, completely unexpectedly. The story of how we met is told in “Running to Georgia.” It was a combination of crazy coincidences and planets aligning for us to have even met in the first place.

That’s funny, because the first time I listened to that song I assumed it was about you trying to get away from someone. How exactly did y’all find each other?

The Disarmers were playing the El Rocko Lounge in Savannah in October of 2021. When I walked in the venue I saw him across the room and immediately thought, “That’s my person!” It wasn’t like it was love at first sight or a sexual thing, it was just this acknowledgment and recognition. Then he walked over to me and held his hand out and said, “Hey, I’m your sound tech” and I was so embarrassed. [Laughs] I thought I’d made a terrible mistake, but then I ended up going out to a bar after the show to meet another friend who happened to be in town on tour and Blake was there. We wound up having this great night of hanging out with friends and talking, but the next day I was so depressed because I thought I’m never gonna see this person again.

Then a few months later we needed a guitar sub and my manager emailed me out of nowhere saying there’s this guy named Blake Tallent who knows all the songs and is available for all the dates, and my jaw hit the floor. It was destiny.

That’s lovely. I’m so glad you found your person!

The next song I wanted to ask you about is “Wildlands,” which was your first single as a solo artist but isn’t included on this album. Why is that?

“Wildlands” was a separate thing. When we made the record, the only instruments that Blake didn’t play were banjo and pedal steel. But immediately after we made it, he got a pedal steel and stated that he wanted to do it himself next time – which he did when we eventually recorded this song. At the time we were talking with a label and everyone involved was 99% certain that we were going to sign with them, but it ended up being an absolute fiasco. Initially we planned for the song to be a single leading up to the album singles, but when this label deal fell through I realized we had no option other than to self-release unless we wanted to move the album to the fall. At that point I’d already put a band together and promised people jobs so that wasn’t going to happen, but I still really wanted to get the song out since I knew fans were hungry to hear what this new project is gonna feel and sound like.

In that sense it was like revenge putting this out. I didn’t know if we were going to find another label or distribution partner – or what-the fuck-ever – but [“Wildlands” was] going to be a standalone thing, which I think was very symbolic. In the end, that single is 100% independent – I own the masters, the publishing, and the songwriting. We were very fortunate to find a distribution partner for the record, but I think that song is really special and has its own thing going on.

In lieu of not landing a record deal you released the album under your own imprint, Blackberry River. Mind telling me about the origins of its name?

I’ve been working on a memoir … When you’re having to really rethink your childhood and the things that occupied your time– one big thing for me was summer, because winters in Western New York are absolutely brutal. It’s like six months of winter and gray sky, so spring and summer have always been my favorite seasons. My favorite thing about summer was our backyard, which was pretty big and had these amazing blackberry bushes that my older sister and I would go out to with baskets to fill up while also eating them right off the bush. The wild nature of blackberries – not as a thing that’s an agricultural commodity, but something that is just literally wild and free – is something I relate to so deeply. So Blackberry River is just a nod to my 8-, 10-year-old self that was barefoot running through the yard with purple blackberry hands. [Laughs]

What has bringing this record to life taught you about yourself?

I learned that less is more sometimes and that I can be a very hyper-focused type of person, which sometimes means I need to step back and take in the bigger picture. I’m just now developing the ability to step back and see things more as a whole than as individual parts. Doing that gave me a lot more perspective on how to make this album really shine.

Photo Credit: Jillian Clark

Steve Wariner Draws Parallels Between Music and Painting

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When the world locked down during COVID in 2020, Steve Wariner was determined to use his time productively by dedicating himself to his two passions: guitar and art. That meant a lot of writing, practicing, and painting – and expanding his skills by exploring new areas.

“I told myself that I’m going learn some things, I’m going to go to work,” he says. “Of course I started writing. I’m always writing songs, so the music part of what I do will never go away. I write all the time, and I’m lucky to write with some wonderful co-writers. I wrote with a lot of people by Zoom. That was a weird thing. I did a bunch of that.

“I painted every day and built up a pretty good body of work. I started diving into oils, which I never did much before. I didn’t like how long it takes to dry, and using chemicals with it – turpentine, linseed oil, so forth. But the reasons I was hesitant are the exact reasons I love it now. You can go back and paint a week later, it’s still wet, and you can add things to it.”

He worked diligently with no specific goal in mind, other than broadening his horizons and satisfying his need to create. “I really paint for myself,” he says. “It’s like my songs. I just write, and if they get heard, if they get out there in the world, that’s great. If not, that’s cool too. I write for me, mainly, and same way with painting. I’m lucky that people every now and then hear my songs and cut them, and every now and then I sell paintings.

“I sold a couple pieces last year. And of course, this year at the show we’ve sold some. But it’s not something I’m aspiring to do all the time or make a living doing it. It’s something I do because it’s therapy and something I love. It’s joyful to get out and paint. You get in the zone, too. It’s real easy to get lost in it.

“Rain Out There” by Steve Wariner.

What he didn’t expect was that his time and effort would lead to the aforementioned “show.” Through mutual friends, the staff of the Monthaven Arts & Cultural Center, in Hendersonville, Tennessee, found out about his work and requested a viewing. The result is the Flip Side, a collection of 60 pieces in various mediums. The show opened on June 21 and runs through July 26. On June 25, Wariner performed an intimate concert as part of The Monthaven’s Heritage Music Series, making him the first artist/musician to simultaneously exhibit art and perform onstage.

Music has always been Wariner’s first love. His tremendously successful career is filled with dozens of Top 10 and Number 1 hits and a multitude of industry awards and recognitions. He has also painted throughout most of his life, and sold his first piece, a pencil drawing of a country store, when he was a high school sophomore – his art teacher purchased it for twenty dollars.

He is no stranger to exhibiting his work, and sometimes donating it to the best possible causes. In 2014, he created a fiberglass Basset Hound statue for Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary’s fundraising auction. In 2016, he participated in an artists’ exhibit at the Tennessee State Museum.

Between then and now, he has shown his paintings in California and sold numerous pieces, but “never anything on this scale,” he says about The Flip Side. “When this started out, we were talking about 35 to 40 pieces of art, and I thought that was pretty overwhelming. I’ve got tons of art, but Ruth Chase, the curator, and Cheryl Strichik, the executive director of Monthaven, looked at about 89 pieces of my work, total, and wanted to run with 60 pieces for the show.

“It is daunting, the work that goes into doing this. People don’t see that work and I never realized it either, to be quite honest. It’s time-consuming, and it takes a lot to frame and wire and get everything ready. Even placing it on the walls, matching it up, is an art. When you walk into the museum, it’s really nice; it’s got a nice flow to it, how they put it together. I’m really pleased.”

Let’s try something different with this interview, drawing parallels between painting and playing guitar. Let’s start with the tools: selecting the medium, brushes, paper, and so forth and selecting guitars, amps, pedals. The signal chain for each craft.

Steve Wariner: My first thought was watercolors would be like the acoustic guitars. In my guitar collection I have some old Martins and an old Epiphone Broadway that’s more of a jazz kind of guitar. Watercolor is very loose and free and unforgiving. If you mess up with watercolor, you start over because there’s no fixing it, unlike other mediums. I think that’s why a lot of times watercolor is harder than anything.

I think people take acoustic guitar for granted sometimes. If you’re not in that bluegrass or Americana world, where it’s very acoustic-driven, a lot of people think, “Oh, yeah, that’s acoustic.” No. It’s an art unto itself. People that play acoustic really well, the great players like Tony Rice, Mac McAnally, Bryan Sutton, they make it look easy, but it’s not. And that’s watercolor.

An oil painting, let’s say a beautiful English landscape, is like a vintage D’Angelico or Gretsch or some kind of beautiful archtop electric guitar that’s smooth and nice and elegant. That’s what I would equate with an oil painting. If you switch over to an abstract painting, something that’s more hard, that’s very expressive and can be loud, that would be the rock guitars, a Les Paul into a Marshall amp, or a Fender Strat, something very expressive, with a Nobels pedal or any kind of overdrive. That’s the abstract painting.

There are so many parallels with music and art. You start with a blank sheet of paper and you start writing, you start making something out of nothing. You start writing a song and you put a few words on there. On the blank canvas, you start putting a few colors on it and then, “Oh, this looks good with that.” With writing a song, you go, “Oh, that sounds good with that. If I say this, maybe I should…” It’s same with painting. It builds up as you go along.

With music and art, it’s not about what you hear or see. It’s about what you feel. A lot of people don’t understand why they love a painting, and it doesn’t matter; they just love it. A lot of the reasons why are the colors, the values, the way it’s put together, the composition, the harmony of it. In music you talk about tone, harmony, values, space. You hear a song and you love it right away. The song just hits you and it connects with you.

We always hear that tone is in the hands, it’s in the individual player, which is a parallel to painting and the individual painter.

Two people can pick up the same guitar and it sounds different. Two artists will look at the same thing, their paintings look different, and both are beautiful. I really do believe … a little bit of my faith has to come through because I think it’s a God-given talent in a way. You can hone it, like music, and when you love it so much, you’re going to do it. You’re driven to do it. But part of it is a God-given thing. I think you’re just born with it. You can hone it. It can be taught. But a lot of it is natural ability, too, I believe, and it’s something you’ve just got to do.

Does mood affect the choice of medium and, if so, how does that parallel mood and choice of guitar?

It is the mood. Some days I feel like doing a watercolor, and some days I say, “I’ve got a giant canvas out there and I want to just put some paint on it. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, or what or where it’s going to take me, but I’m going to put my old overalls on and paint.”

That’s me with the guitar, too. Some days I go out to my recording studio and, for example, I’ll say, “I feel like doing a Hawaiian song today,” and I’ll get out my Rickenbacker lap steel and start. It’s where the mood takes you. That’s what you feel like doing, and you can dive in and be creative.

You mentioned that with watercolor, you can’t make mistakes. Watercolor is to painting what tape is to recording?

That’s exactly correct. Chet Atkins used to talk about direct-to-disc recording, which means they would have one shot at it. It’s basically being cut into a disc when they record it, and you didn’t want to be the one making a mistake, because if somebody messed up, that’s it. That’s a watercolor painting.

The musicianship in that era was so strong. Their ear training was great because they had to figure everything out. Technology today makes it easy. You can tune it, fix it, slide it, do all these things. Don’t get me wrong – there are some great players today. But tape makes you really on point because if you mess up, it’s over with.

That’s the way it is with watercolor. If you mess up, you have to start over, and that’s what I like about it – the danger thing. I’ve done it before, where you have a beautiful thing going and you have to start over. With oils it’s still wet, so you can wipe it away and go over it, or when it’s dry, just paint over it.

Oil is Pro Tools. You can fix it in the mix.

Totally. Absolutely. The “undo” button makes you bold!

“A Glorious Day in Berkeley” by Steve Wariner.

Do you sometimes sketch first, or do you go directly to paint?

I do both. I keep sketchbooks and I sketch. My wife Caryn and I have a little RV and sometimes we go on road trips. I don’t want to carry all my stuff, so a lot of times I’ll just sketch, make notes on colors, and go back to it later. I also use my phone and iPad sometimes.

Sketching is the demo process, the pre-production.

That’s correct. There’s the demo in my sketchbook, now let’s make a record. Let’s get out the big canvas and make the painting.

Does your music or your guitar playing ever inspire a painting, and conversely, do you sometimes paint something, “hear” it on the canvas, and then it becomes a riff or a melody?

The answer is yes, to the first. I have thought of some guitar pieces, compositions. Both are compositions, but I have thought of that. Sometimes I paint with a certain mood or riff or song in mind, and if I have a name for the music piece, I call it that.

I have a piece in the show called “The Ocean’s A Little Bit Bigger Tonight.” It’s the name of the painting. It sold the other night. It’s a large abstract landscape, but it was inspired by a song I wrote with Bill Anderson called “Two Teardrops.” The first line of the chorus is, “Oh, the ocean’s a little bit bigger tonight, two more teardrops somebody cried…” That song is about the circle of life, and that’s the painting. As I was painting it, I kept thinking you could see the ocean way back in the back. It’s very abstract, but it has a lot of textures.

Bill came to the opening of my show and I showed him that painting. I said, “Bill, it’s like you when we first started writing this,” because he had part of it started and he was saying, “Wariner, you’re going to think I’ve either lost my mind or I’m a genius, I don’t know which, but it’s about two teardrops talking to each other.” The painting is that way. I told Bill, “You may think I’ve lost my mind with this abstract painting, but to me, that’s what it represented: two teardrops.”

Could abstract art be parallel to instrumental music? It’s open to interpretation from the viewer or listener, versus a painting of a specific subject being more like lyrics – even though those things can certainly mean different things to different people, too.

That’s a good way to look at it. It could be instrumental music, or more to me, I think freestyling. When you look at a jazz or bluegrass band, they get to the back half of the song and they’re just passing it around. Everybody’s playing – “Now you play eight bars, now you play eight,” or whatever. They’re freestyling. To me, that’s more what it is. It’s whatever you feel, it’s whatever you are interpreting, and I always loved that.

My first thought is Sam Bush. I love playing with him because with those songs where you do freestyle, I can’t wait for him to get ahold of his eight bars when it’s his turn, because he’s into it all the way. A lot of times that’s what I think an abstract might be, something like that. I like jazz, too, and some of those players get lost in their own world. They’re painting, they’re really layering and throwing some colors on there. It’s about the freedom.

You had to select 60 pieces for this exhibit. Is that parallel to putting together a song list for a show or sequencing an album?

Yes. It came down to that. It was interesting for me and very liberating, because I wasn’t in on making the set list necessarily. My suggestions were there, but that would be the difference. When I play, I make the set list, but they had the curator Ruth Chase, who’s wonderful, and she’s an artist in her own right. She had some great suggestions and great ideas, so she helped me put together the set list.

The curator is the co-producer.

Exactly, and the director is the engineer. She puts the whole thing together. It really is a team, the players.

In addition to your exhibit, something else that’s in the news is 75 years of Telecasters. Would you agree that it’s still the guitar that defines and is associated with country music?

That’s true. Number one, it’s so versatile. Maybe distinct is a better word. The West Coast guys, Roy Nichols, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard … they were certainly using them in Nashville, too, but the Bakersfield records really made the Telecaster, in my mind. It’s an iconic instrument.

James Burton turned me on to the Telecaster, no question. I saw him bending strings when I was a kid. I didn’t know how he was doing it, but I wanted to do it. It was like a magic trick I had to learn. Later we became great friends and we still communicate. He’s the king of the Telecaster, in my opinion. Roy Nichols was a big influence too.

We know you have quite a guitar collection. When did you get your first Tele?

I didn’t own a guitar until I was a sophomore in high school. I learned to play on my dad’s Jazzmaster, which he bought brand new in, I think, 1962. I still have it. Every time I played it, I dreamed and acted like it was a Telecaster. In my mind, it was a Telecaster, even though it didn’t sound or twang like a Telecaster.

When I was a sophomore, I had saved up about 400 bucks and I bought a Telecaster sight-unseen from a catalog. I ordered it from a store in Fort Worth, Texas. It was a ’71 or something like that. They sent it to me and I drove like a maniac to what is now Indianapolis International Airport to pick it up. I had an old 1964 Volkswagen and I blew the engine up going to get that guitar. I left it on the side of the road on [Interstate] 465, called my dad at work, and he came and got me and took me to pick up my guitar. We left my car sitting there for five days. I got my Telecaster and I was absolutely thrilled. That was my first guitar, and it’s now on display in a case at the Musicians Hall of Fame.

With all this talk of guitars and painting and writing, are we going to enjoy new music from you anytime soon?

I’ve got a stockpile of songs that I’ve been writing and going, “Ooh, I like this. I’ll put that over here.” I’ve got probably thirty songs or so that I just love, new ones I’ve written and that I’ve not really pitched around. I don’t have any plans right now. I don’t play them for anybody. I just sit on them. But I’ve thought about getting back in, getting some players together, having some fun, and see what comes out.

In the press release about the exhibit, there’s a quote: “Painting has always been a kind of therapy. It’s my sanctuary and escape.” How do painting and guitar fulfill and heal you therapeutically?

I think any artist will attest that you’ve got to find a place that you can go and just get away, get in a zone. It’s the free time that you’re not thinking about [anything else]. Music does the same thing. If I’m writing a song, I’m concentrating on what the song says. I have to force myself not to write about what I’m trying to escape from. But that’s good, too, to actually talk about it sometimes.

Painting is a place where I can turn my phone off. I’m listening to music in my headphones and I’m painting. I don’t know what time it is and I don’t care. I just go and go. No phones, no bother, nobody worrying you, nothing going on. It’s an escape and it’s great. It’s a really safe, free place.

Photo Credit: David Abbott. 

Reproductions of Steve Wariner’s visual art appear with permission, titles as marked. Images courtesy of the artist.

Thomas Csorba is Bringing Tender Country Back

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Thomas Csorba’s new album, Tender Country, is a tip of the hat to a gentler time in country music, when songs about family life and nostalgia were easier to find on the radio dial.

For this album, his fourth, Csorba (pronounced Chor-ba) drew songwriting inspiration close to home – specifically his wife and two young sons. Raised in Houston, Csorba naturally found an early affinity for Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and Don Williams, all of whom came up in that city’s live music scene. In 2019, Csorba graduated with an English degree from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. It’s no surprise that his literary leanings are evident in his lyrics, while his low-key vocals fit right in with his musical heroes.

“I’m obsessed with Don Williams, and what I love about Don is that it sounds like he’s sitting down on every recording, every vocal delivery,” Csorba says. “The thought and spirit behind this album was like, ‘Let’s make a record like those Don Williams records that I want to listen to when I’m doing laundry.’ I’m not in the business of making ‘exciting music,’ or what the world says is exciting. What’s exciting to me is something disarming and something thoughtful.”

Now based in Dallas, Csorba will hit the road later this summer with fellow Texas artist David Ramirez. In the meantime, calling in from a family vacation in Colorado, Csorba chatted with Good Country about his responsibility to share good music with his kids, the revelation of Tony Rice, and his long-held Grand Ole Opry aspirations.

I like that kind of comfortable, relaxed feeling on this record. What was the vibe in the studio during these sessions?

Thomas Csorba: It’s funny how relaxed and comfortable it was, in contrast with how quickly we worked. Most people would think that when you’re trying to record 10 songs in two days it’d be pretty uptight and stressful, but the goal was really like, “Hey, I got two extra days, let’s go record whatever we can.” Because I felt so comfortable with the guys, because I felt so comfortable in the studio, and because the players are so damn good, I was able to say, “Hey, here’s the next song.” Everybody charts it and I’m like, “All right, you want to try it?” And by the third take, it’s like, “All right, that feels good.”

Obviously, we live in a world of perfect and auto-tune and Melodyne and AI integration into Pro Tools. And, for better, for worse, I can’t understand how and why. I just can’t see myself getting into that. I don’t have the time or energy, so I’d much rather turn and burn with guys in the band, overdub a couple things, and what comes out of it is like, “Oh, this feels nice.”

I was curious about “Homemade Margaritas,” because to me it sounds like the spirit of Guy Clark and “Homegrown Tomatoes.” Was he an influence on you?

Yeah, absolutely. When I was a kid, my mom sang Willie Nelson songs to me. The mother-son dance at my wedding was “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” She’s a Texas gal and loved Jerry Jeff Walker and Willie and all those guys. She knew about Guy, but my older brother, Will, who’s a phenomenal old-time player, who’s wicked smart and wicked talented – he’s the kind of guy that’s frustrated with me and doesn’t think I’m cool because I have words in my songs. He’s quite the purist, but he was the one who introduced me to Townes Van Zandt’s music when I was 14 or 15 years old. And my parents are rolling their eyes, thinking the older brother’s corrupting Thomas.

I fell in love with Townes and my brother was like, “Great, if you like Townes, you’ve gotta like Guy and Blaze Foley and Rodney Crowell.” Then I went down that deep dive and his response to that, he just kind of walked through with me and said, “If you like all these guys, and if Townes is your favorite and Guy is your favorite, you’ve got to like the people they were obsessed with.” So, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Willie McTell, and this kind of lineage.

I don’t know how relevant this is, but the big through-line there is that everything I love, in some way, comes from the bedrock that is Black American music. Guy certainly embodies that, Townes certainly embodies that. Guy was a big influence, and Texas Cookin’ is one of my favorite records of all time. Especially on “Homemade Margaritas,” I’m like, “Man, let’s do something fun like that.” … Anything I can do as a songwriter to have somebody listen to my record and be like, “Oh, this reminds me of Texas Cookin’,” mission accomplished in my book.

Since Good Country is on the Bluegrass Situation, I do have to ask about “Tony Rice & Beans.”

Hell yeah! I wrote that song with Matt Tedder. He plays guitar for me and he’s a phenomenal thumbpicker. He can play Western swing stuff. He played all over my record, has toured with me, and has been a dear friend for ages now. Matt knows the songbook. If I get booked for a private gig, and I know I’m gonna have to play covers, I bring Matt because he knows every word to every Merle Haggard song, and I can just sit there in a cowboy hat and strum.

He can tell where I am musically and what I want musically and point me in the right direction. All that to say, over the past 10 years, especially, a lot of our heroes from the ‘70s, who made those recordings that I love, have passed away. Jerry Jeff and Merle and obviously Tony Rice. For half of these folks, like in memoriam, it’s like, “I’m going to go listen to Jerry Jeff today,” in honor of Jerry Jeff, and I know exactly what deep cut I want to listen to.

Other people of that era have passed away, and I’ve been like, “Man, I know ‘Church Street Blues,’ but why have I not done the deep dive?” That was Tony Rice for me. When he passed, I did the deep dive, and Matt was there to hold my hand and point me to the right records and tell me what to listen for, because I’m much less musically advanced, as a way to put it. So, he pointed me through those records and I just fell in love. It made me want to start trying to practice guitar again, and get better flat-picking, which I am still a beginner at.

I think it’s because I was so new to the idea of Tony Rice that I was like, “Why is there no song called ‘Tony Rice & Beans’?” So, Matt and I wrote that tune and tried to shoehorn about as many references from the country and American songbook as we could. In Matt’s favorite line, the fact that we fit “The mule and the grasshopper are eating ice cream” from “Stay All Night, Stay a Little Longer,” from Bob Wills and Willie… It’s like, “What the hell does that line mean?” I don’t know, but there it is in my song, too.

Is it fair to say that one of the obligations of fatherhood is introducing your kids to good music?

Oh, totally! Maybe this is hyperbole, but I’ll say it anyway: There’s no better feeling as a father than your kids sitting in the back seat and saying, “Dad, can we listen to ‘Working on a Building’ but the Stanley Brothers’ version?” It’s like, ‘Dude, you’re not even four. Why do I want to cry right now?” Our oldest son turns four in July, and he’s requesting Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt and the Trio records, and loves Doc Watson.

Obviously he wants annoying brain rot songs, as well. There’s this song called “Chicken Banana” that he’s obsessed with that’s just terrible. We listen to soundtrack stuff and even in movies, it’s like, “Yeah, let’s watch Robin Hood, and let me tell you about Roger Miller.” It makes it much more enjoyable for me. … I think our kids need to listen to stuff they don’t understand, and I think they need to sit there in adult conversations about music and about art that they may not understand. But they’ll sit there and they’ll absorb it.

I just think my responsibility as a parent is to put the right things in front of them and bring them alongside of where I am creatively, where I am socially, and not draw the line between what Dad listens to and “Dad music,” and what the kids listen to and what “kid music” is. Because it’s unfair to them. It’s unfair to me, too. So, that’s my spiel on kids listening to good music.

I did want to ask about “He Would’ve Loved This.” In country music, there are a lot of songs where Dad is talking about the lessons he’s learned, or saying something with wisdom, but this song has a list of action items that show love. He’s trimming the trees and checking the gravy, and so on. Who were you thinking about when you wrote that song?

I was thinking of my granddad. We called him Papa. He passed away when I was in high school. My oldest son carries his name, which is really sweet. The guy was a chain smoker since he was 12 years old, and worked drywall in Canada after he moved over from Hungary. He’s got this amazing story, and because of his history and his background, his whole spirit was kind of like, “Isn’t this awesome?” Even the little things. And that permeated through all of his life.

You know, he was certainly a crotchety old man at times, but there was a sense of gratitude that was kind of unfathomable, literally. I couldn’t understand it, even if I tried, just because of where he came from. All he wanted was to survive and start a family one day, and there he was watching me grow up and taking me to baseball practice, and trying to correct my attitude on the golf course as a 10-year-old. It’s like, the fact that he was there embodied that gratitude.

So, as my wife and I are watching our boys grow up doing all these menial, seemingly throwaway things, I have to remind myself that if Papa was here, he would be beaming with joy.

You’re not even 30 years old yet, and I know time passes fast, but do you consider yourself to be a nostalgic or sentimental person?

Yeah, I’m a “hoarder lite.” I hang on to things. On this record cycle, I’ll be transparent here, it’s like my big dream – if there’s any record I’ve put out so far, this is the one that would bring me to the Opry. I think it just fits the spirit of the history of the Opry. That’s been a dream for a long time. I’ve wanted to do that, and my manager and I talk about it, literally, every phone call.

The other day, my wife said, “I understand the historical significance, but what’s the deal? Why do you want to do the Opry so bad?” In the same way I talk about these records being handed down to my kids, I was kind of like, “I really want to have done it. I really want my kids to be like, ‘Dad played the Opry!’” Not to look cool, but mostly as a nostalgic thing, to get them to come and stand side stage, whether they understand it or not.

Those moments of nostalgia, in conjunction with the moments of nostalgia around the house, paint a really idealized, probably, but really beautiful picture of what I am up to, what I want to do, and how I want to show my kids I’m going about life.

Photo Credit: Alex Csorba

Paul Overstreet Joins the Country Music Hall of Fame

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

As a nine-year-old kid in Mississippi, Paul Overstreet was fascinated by Your Cheatin’ Heart, a 1964 film about Hank Williams’ life and career. The Hollywood treatment of Hank’s life sparked such a strong interest in writing and performing country music that Overstreet started entering school talent contests, played honky-tonks in Biloxi while still in junior high, and moved to Nashville after graduating from high school in 1973.

This fall, in a full circle moment, Overstreet will join his hero, Hank Williams, as a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. In that hallowed rotunda in Nashville, Overstreet’s bronze plaque will hang alongside a significant number of artists who found radio success with his songs, including Kenny Chesney, George Jones, the Judds, Ronnie Milsap, Randy Travis, Tanya Tucker, and Keith Whitley. Overstreet wrote many of his biggest “career songs” with Don Schlitz, thus creating one of the most prolific and poetic songwriting partnerships in country music history.

Overstreet enjoyed a good run as a recording artist, too. He achieved a No. 1 country hit with “Baby’s Got a New Baby” (recorded with songwriters Thom Schuyler and Fred Knobloch under the band name S-K-O) in 1987, and with “I Won’t Take Less Than Your Love” (with Tanya Tucker and Paul Davis) in 1988. By 1991, he’d also notched eight consecutive Top 10 solo hits while signed to RCA. Many of them offer a relatable look at family life, with “Seeing My Father in Me” perhaps his most poignant release.

When Overstreet moved to Music City as a teenager, he didn’t even own a suitcase. (He just threw everything in a laundry basket, grabbed his guitar and some football jerseys, and headed north.) Now, at 71, he’s almost always on the go – he got the call about his Hall of Fame induction while on a sightseeing cruise in Southeast Asia. Good Country caught up with Overstreet via Zoom during a Caribbean beach vacation.

You’ve seen a number of people closely associated with your career go into the Hall of Fame, and now it’s your turn. What was your reaction when you learned that you were chosen?

Paul Overstreet: I have to tell you, it was a shock, actually, to me. I’ve been to a lot of the ceremonies because I always like to go. I watch people and I learn things, and I see people talking about their career. It’s always fun and interesting, but I never really thought I would be one of the people going in, just because I don’t have a manager or any of that stuff. I’m kind of solo as far as what I’m doing now, but through the years I had great publishers and people that I worked with and great co-writers. I was in the mix pretty good there for a long time.

Don Schlitz [a 2017 inductee] sent me a text message, telling me, “Man, you’re going to go through several phases here.” He said he and his wife were screaming and jumping up and down when they started doing the announcement, and heard them say that it’s a writer from Mississippi. He was so sweet about it, and just told me that you’ll go through some phases, and you can’t believe it’s happening, and all this stuff. That’s really kind of the way it was for me. I was just in amazement.

That must have been a great feeling to share that moment with Don.

It was, and it shocked me and my wife both when we got the news that he was gone.

Had you stayed close throughout the years and kept in touch with each other?

Well, we talked a lot. But after we’d written so many songs together, it just kind of started to… he got into another type of writing, and he was doing a lot of things like that, and of course I was, too. I was writing with a lot of different writers. You always wonder why writers that wrote so well together stop writing, and I really don’t know the answer to that, totally, with everybody.

I think there’s a period of time that you have, that an energy is there between the two. At some point it just wanes a little bit. I mean, you could probably still write, but we had such a magic. We kind of both knew when it wasn’t there. It’s no use trying to do stuff that just wasn’t happening. We never really said, “Let’s don’t write anymore.” We just kind of stopped writing. But I think a lot of writing teams might go through that phase.

You also had nothing left to prove. You had written so many incredible songs together, and you could part as friends. There’s something to be said for that, too.

Yeah. And you know, Don was very organized. He kept a little notebook, the kind with the little rings where you can’t move the pages around. They’re locked into place. He said to me one day, “Come here, I want to show you something.” We wouldn’t have known at the time we were writing, but he started flipping pages, and it was one No. 1 song after another. I don’t know if it’s five or six, but it was very consistent. We just kind of laughed and went, “Man, that’s great!” Looking back, it’s a great feeling to know we were hitting it.

After you moved to Nashville, it took nine years before George Jones had a hit with “Same Ole Me.” Did you have people encouraging you at that time, or did you have close calls?

Yeah, and it can be your friends or just people that go, “Man, that’s good. You need to do something with that.” Dolly Parton’s uncle, Bill Owens, was wanting to co-write with me and I wrote some songs with him. I had some songs [before that] and he kind of helped me put them together. We hung out a lot and he wanted to manage me up front, but you wind up finding your own path eventually. Having those people along the way is so valuable. They encourage you and tell you about the industry. I had to learn what publishing was, what a record company was. You go to Nashville, you don’t know all this stuff.

Did you get to interact with George Jones much at that time?

No, not too much. I was around him some, but mostly the Oak Ridge Boys. I was writing for their publishing company at the time. They had a relationship with [famed producer] Billy Sherrill and Billy had told them, “If you ever have a song for George Jones, bring it to us.” They thought that song [“Same Ole Me”] would be a good one for him, so they took it. Tony Brown had heard the song first, and Tony was like, “Man, we need to demo this.” And I was like, “We do?” [Laughs]

So we demoed it, and then the Oak Ridge Boys took it to George, and they said, “If y’all cut it, we’ll sing the backgrounds on that.” That was the first big national recording. I had some other recordings by Stella Parton. She had her own label and I had some songs on a couple of her albums, but they never were released as singles. The George Jones one was the first one I realized how much music meant to people.

This year is the 40th anniversary of Storms of Life by Randy Travis. When that album took off, did you notice a change in the kinds of songs that people were looking for, or wanted to record?

Yeah, because a lot of people were doing crossover country stuff during that time. You had Kenny Rogers, who crossed over into the pop world, and then Crystal Gayle started sounding a little more pop, and then it seemed like everybody was trying to cut those kinds of songs.

I just kept writing country. And along comes an artist that all he wanted to do was country. We had some songs that were right down that road. I had cut “On the Other Hand” at a session to get a record deal with. I didn’t have my record deal in place at the time, though, so Don [Schlitz] and his company pitched it to Kyle Lehning for Dan Seals to record. Kyle said, “I don’t hear it for Dan Seals, I hear it for this new artist I’m doing.” And I was resistant because I’m a new artist and I’ve got a cut on it.

Basically it was a God thing, I think. I heard a little Bible verse in my head one day: “It is more blessed to give than receive.” So, Kyle told me they were thinking that maybe if they sold 35,000 units that they’d get to cut another record, but that album they cut, they had no idea it was going to sell 5 million albums. [Storms of Life] just turned things around in the industry, because it was country. And I think our industry needs that now. It needs those country songs that are new, but they are of that chemistry. Our industry is all separated. It needs something to bring it back together.

How did you get the word “exhuming” to fit so well in Randy Travis’ “Digging Up Bones”?

That word… it’s hard to know how to even say that word. [Laughs] Just putting stuff in a song that’s really off the beaten path… It’s almost like you can talk to people in a language that everybody understands, and a dialect, but sometimes you can add things in there that are different from what you normally use, and it kind of educates as well as entertains. And it’s fun because you get to learn a new word. Don Schlitz learned a new word every day, just to increase his vocabulary.

Sometimes in Nashville, songwriters will write for a specific artist. Did you do that too?

You know, I never really had much success with that, because every time I’d sit down and try to write for an artist, it just seemed like it didn’t work for me. I always feel like the song is the star, and the song should be the most important part that you look for. But some people could write for certain artists and make it work. It wasn’t my thing, but I think as long as the song is great, it’ll lift the artist up as well. But if you’re just counting on the artist to make it a hit, I don’t think the song’s going to be that good. But who knows? It can be done a lot of different ways, I guess. Sometimes you’re just in the right place at the right time, and I think there’s a reason.

Luck plays a role, but the hustle and the showing up – that plays a role too,

I remember “Forever and Ever, Amen” was written after I’d been playing golf in the Music City tournament and I was tired. I’d played 36 holes and I got a call from Don saying, “I got a great idea for us to write.” I said, “You want to do it tomorrow?” He goes, “No, we need to do it now.” [Laughs] I knew better than to put it off. Songs are hot. Whenever the idea is there, it needs to be written.

Since this is for the Bluegrass Situation/Good Country, I did want to ask about bluegrass influences. Keith Whitley and Alison Krauss each recorded “When You Say Nothing at All,” and you had several cuts with Ricky Skaggs when he was on Epic. Was bluegrass an influence on your music?

Yeah, I love bluegrass. I would do a show with an acoustic flat-top picker and a fiddle player, sometimes I’d take steel, and we had an upright bass player who would go with us. I was doing these shows for this all-day event and we would go play right after lunch, when nobody else wanted to play. I’d go out there with just those musicians and it was great! It was more like a broken-down, front porch kind of thing, but we could kick it up.

I used to do some bluegrass things in my show, because I’d learn them from some of the bluegrass groups. Our band learned to play them and just have fun with them, because they always pumped up the night. And if I carried a banjo player with me, it blew people’s minds! I’m telling you, banjo players are great because when they go out there, people love it. It’s just an amazing energy that comes off that instrument.

When I first got to Nashville, the morning I drove there I had 650 AM on, or some radio station, and all they were playing was bluegrass. I was like, “Wow! This is really interesting.” And I used to do “Forever and Ever, Amen” as a bluegrass song. I’d go through it, and when we’re finishing it, I’d just kick it off, almost like “Rocky Top,” and just do it bluegrass, and people would freaking love it.

What do you like the most about this time in your life and career?

I think the beauty of it is I don’t feel pressure to do anything. Like you said, I have proven to myself that I know how to work, and I know how to work hard, because I did that for years. I sustained raising our kids and everything, and still kept doing what I love to do, so that was really nice. And I think now it’s a little bit of me time. I get to relax and do the things I like to do, being on the beach, just playing golf, or being around horses and being around rodeos. I love that stuff. So, I don’t feel pressure when I’m doing it now. I used to think, “Well, I better get back to town and back to work.” [Laughs] Now I can just work anywhere I am. I can write songs sitting on the beach, and I like that.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Basic Folk: Outlaws’ Almanac (Kimaya Diggs & Lizzie No)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Lizzie No, Kaia Kater, Nathan Evans Fox, Olivia Ellen Lloyd, Tray Wellington, A.J. Haynes, and more are featured on the new compilation album Outlaws’ Almanac, a response to the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. Led by executive producer Lizzie No, the project features a diverse range of songwriters and storytellers working in broadly defined folk, Americana, and roots traditions. Lizzie envisioned the compilation as an opportunity to be in conversation with the American project, taking an oft-overlooked perspective. Their curation centers Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, rural, and women’s voices, with traditional and contemporary music melding in a manner that brings to mind America’s promise of being a melting pot.

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Lizzie No and Kimaya Diggs (who also appears on the album) join Basic Folk for a candid and vulnerable conversation about the project and its inspirations. We talked about how they each relate to outlaws and the difference between them and those tasked with protection within the law. We also talked about the significance of the album art by Mia Kristen, a folk art-inspired painting of a woman with a guitar riding a donkey surrounded by corn and flowers. I get into the details of some of the bungled celebrations of America’s major birthdays (namely the 100th and the 200th) and why those celebrations continually leave out marginalized and overlooked voices. We talk about how there are Black people in the future and why that is actually a radical idea in 2026. We end with a lighthearted Lightning Round called “IS THIS OUTLAW?” Thanks to Lizzie and Kimaya for being so open and honest in this intense and special conversation.

Photo Credits: Lizzie No by Mandi Fountain. Lead image of Kimaya Diggs courtesy of the artist. Alternate images of Kimaya Diggs by Jo Chattman. 

20 Years Old, Then Again by Rodney Crowell Is Remarkably Current

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Some records arrive exactly when they’re meant to. Others wait patiently in the dark, gathering meaning with every passing year. For Rodney Crowell, Then Again belongs to the latter category.

Recorded in 2006 but quietly shelved for nearly two decades, the album was never abandoned because Crowell doubted the songs. Instead, time itself became part of the recording’s story. When he eventually rediscovered the tapes, he wasn’t simply listening with older ears. He was listening with a different heart.

“I heard a record I wasn’t tired or bored of,” Crowell said with characteristic candor. “I was no longer tired and bored with myself. That’s what 20 years will do for you.”

It is a remark that says as much about life as it does music.

At 75, Crowell has little interest in nostalgia. He speaks instead about perspective – about learning to regard the younger man he once was with affection instead of criticism. The years have softened neither his standards nor his curiosity, but they have granted him something perhaps more valuable: compassion for himself. Then Again sounds less like an archival release than a conversation between two Rodneys separated by 20 years yet bound by the same restless artistic spirit.

That spirit was forged long before Nashville embraced him as one of America’s premier songwriters.

Crowell’s education began in southeast Texas, where songs traveled not through record collections but from one human voice to another. His father, who grew up on a sharecropper farm in western Kentucky, possessed an extraordinary gift for remembering music.

“He had a butterfly net to catch songs,” Crowell recalled. “Once he had them, he knew them.”

As a boy, Rodney sprawled across the floor while his father sang old Appalachian ballads, heartbreaking country laments, and weathered tales passed along through generations. There were no carefully cataloged albums lining the walls, no elaborate stereo system. The music lived in memory, carried from person to person through an oral tradition stretching back decades. Those songs became Crowell’s first inheritance. When he left home at fifteen to join a band, his father’s advice proved surprisingly prophetic.

“Tell them you write your own songs.”

Rodney didn’t write songs yet. He promptly claimed an Otis Redding classic as his own before the rest of the band recognized the bluff. The deception didn’t last, but the challenge did. His father had planted an idea that would eventually shape American songwriting.

Those early years unfolded across Legion halls, rodeo dances, Gulf Coast clubs, and small-town gathering places east of Houston. The humid Texas evenings smelled of beer, cigarette smoke, and dusty dance floors. Bands moved effortlessly between Beatles tunes, country standards, and surf instrumentals, playing whatever kept couples moving beneath strings of lights hung over community halls. The venues have mostly disappeared.

“I went looking,” Crowell said of one former dance hall. “The location was there, but the building wasn’t.”

Like so much of America, those landmarks surrendered to suburban expansion, leaving only memory behind. Memory also carried Crowell to Nashville, where another education awaited. He arrived knowing few original songs but possessing something the city’s finest writers admired: an encyclopedic knowledge of old country music learned from his father. Around late-night gatherings with Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Mickey Newbury, Crowell discovered that his familiarity with forgotten ballads earned him a place among extraordinary company.

Guy Clark became a mentor as much as a friend. Crowell remembers first hearing Clark’s name from an unlikely source before unexpectedly finding the legendary songwriter asleep on the bed he had been renting. Their friendship blossomed into an apprenticeship unlike any classroom could offer.

“Guy was a curator of early Nashville songwriting,” Crowell said.

Clark introduced him not merely to songs but to standards. He played Bob Dylan recordings. He encouraged deeper language. He challenged Crowell to pursue authenticity rather than cleverness.

“Your language has got to be that real.”

Townes Van Zandt provided another kind of lesson. Late one night, around one in the morning, Van Zandt quietly announced he had written something new. Then he played “Pancho and Lefty.” Crowell sat stunned. Inside, he remembers thinking, “This is what you’ve got to do.”

Van Zandt possessed a competitive streak, unveiling masterpieces that simultaneously inspired and humbled everyone fortunate enough to hear them first. Clark, by contrast, nurtured younger writers with generosity. Mickey Newbury demonstrated that lyrical sophistication could coexist with a soaring tenor voice, freeing Crowell from believing every great songwriter needed the baritone gravity of Cash, Kristofferson, or Billy Joe Shaver.

Together they became an informal graduate school of American songwriting. Years later, Crowell would write songs that entered the same conversation. Yet success brought its own hazards.

When a remarkable run of No. 1 country hits made him one of Nashville’s hottest writers in the late 1980s, Crowell sensed something unsettling happening. Walking into rooms, he realized people no longer saw Rodney Crowell, the songwriter. They saw Rodney Crowell, the hitmaker. He began constructing, almost unconsciously, a version of himself shaped by other people’s expectations.

His ego, he says now, became a dangerous collaborator. “If you let your ego get involved, you can get hurt,” he reflected. “It would rather sabotage the art.”

Rather than feeding celebrity, Crowell deliberately resisted it, sometimes awkwardly. During promotional radio appearances, while enthusiastic hosts tried to sell records to morning commuters, he answered questions with monosyllables, refusing to play the role expected of him. Looking back, he laughs at his own stubbornness while recognizing the lesson beneath it: fame is fleeting, but authenticity demands constant vigilance.

That understanding would prove invaluable during another extraordinary chapter of his life – one lived within the orbit of perhaps the most recognizable voice in American music. As Johnny Cash’s son-in-law, Crowell could easily have embraced proximity to legend. Instead, he did everything possible to establish himself as his own man.

“I ain’t coming around here because you’re Johnny Cash,” he remembered thinking. “I’m around here because I love your daughter.” Cash understood. More remarkably, he respected it.

Years later, after his marriage to Rosanne Cash had ended, Crowell discovered just how deeply those family bonds still ran. When Johnny and June learned that Crowell had begun dating Claudia, the woman who would become his wife of more than three decades, they invited the couple to dinner. Driving home, Claudia couldn’t understand why Johnny and June had worked so hard to make her feel welcome.

“I said, ‘Because they love me.'”

It remains one of Crowell’s favorite memories – not because it involved two American icons, but because it revealed the generosity beneath their fame.

Cash also delighted in gently puncturing Crowell’s youthful swagger. Looking back now, Crowell smiles at the younger version of himself who insisted on proving his independence every chance he got. Rather than embarrassment, he feels something closer to tenderness.

“I’ve developed a compassion…for that me,” he said. “Good go, young Rodney. You were just trying to establish who you were.”

It is difficult to imagine a better description of Then Again itself. The album captures an artist still determined to prove himself, while the older Crowell who finally released it understands that proving oneself eventually gives way to understanding oneself. Time didn’t erase the younger man’s ambitions; it simply placed them within a larger frame.

That perspective echoes throughout one of the album’s most affecting songs, “If I Could Speak to Leonard.”

Written years before Leonard Cohen died in 2016, the song has become something more profound with time. What began as an expression of admiration now sounds almost like a farewell whispered across generations of songwriters. Crowell insists it was never intended as an imagined conversation.

“It was a love song,” he said simply. “It’s expressing my love for his work.”

For Crowell, Cohen represented far more than literary songwriting. He offered a blueprint for aging with artistic purpose. While many performers spend their later years revisiting past triumphs, Crowell watched Cohen continue reaching toward new creative heights. Albums like Old Ideas and You Want It Darker became, in his words, breadcrumbs showing how an artist could continue growing even as the body inevitably slowed.

“I want to continue to create art at a high level as I wane,” Crowell said. “I don’t want the art to wane with my physicality.”

That aspiration permeates Then Again. Although recorded years ago, the album feels uncannily current because Crowell himself has finally caught up with it. Songs once left behind now carry fresh emotional resonance, illuminated by experience rather than youthful urgency. The years have also sharpened his awareness of time itself.

“I’m 75,” he reflected. “Time is more precious. I don’t have much time to waste.”

There is no trace of resignation in those words. Instead, they carry the quiet urgency of a man determined to spend his remaining years loving his family well, encouraging younger writers, and pursuing songs that continue asking difficult questions.

He speaks often of longing – not for youth, but for continued artistic growth. That philosophy shapes the songwriting workshops he still conducts, where he finds himself most energized by young writers willing to rethink a lyric or reshape a narrative. Their openness reminds him that songwriting remains an act of discovery rather than certainty.

For Crowell, certainty is often the enemy. The same conviction explains his skepticism toward artificial intelligence creating music. Songs, he believes, are more than carefully arranged words and melodies. They carry the fingerprints of the people who lived them.

As a child listening to worn Hank Williams records spinning across the living room floor, Crowell wasn’t merely hearing music. He was beginning a relationship with another human being. That relationship later extended to Buck Owens, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, and eventually Leonard Cohen. Great songs invited listeners into another person’s emotional world, something Crowell doubts machines can genuinely replicate.

“I want to wrap my arms around the artist,” he explained.

It is an observation that also reveals why Then Again feels so personal. These are songs created by a younger Rodney Crowell but embraced by an older one, each version reaching across time toward the other. Crowell often compares an album to an art gallery.

“When you walk into the room that is this record,” he said, “there are ten or eleven paintings hanging on the wall in the form of music.”

It is a beautiful metaphor because it captures the experience of listening to a complete album. Each song occupies its own space while contributing to something larger. Rather than rushing past individual tracks, listeners wander from one canvas to another, discovering unexpected connections along the way.

That idea feels increasingly radical in an era dominated by playlists, algorithms and abbreviated attention spans. Crowell remains committed to albums as immersive experiences, invitations to linger rather than scroll. Perhaps that explains why Then Again never sounds like an artifact rescued from storage. Instead, it resembles a gallery whose doors have finally opened. The paintings were always there.

Only, the artist needed twenty years before he could walk through the room without judging every brushstroke. For Rodney Crowell, that may be the greatest gift age has offered. Not perfection. Not certainty. Simply enough grace to recognize the younger man who created these songs and enough wisdom to appreciate what he had accomplished before he knew it himself.

Some records capture a particular moment. Then Again captures two. In an industry that often celebrates novelty over endurance, Crowell has offered something rarer: proof that good songs, like honest friendships and enduring love, are not diminished by time.

If anything, they become more fully themselves. And perhaps so do we.

Photo Credit: Claudia Church