Tag: real country

Outlaw Country That’ll Make You Smile

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Holding the attention of a roomful of moderately smashed bar-goers is no small feat, let alone with a traditional Irish folksong. But last May, country singer-songwriter Dylan Earl ended his set at Brooklyn’s Skinny Dennis standing on top of the bar and singing an a cappella version of “Wild Mountain Thyme.”

“Will you go, lassie go/ And we’ll all go together/ To pull wild mountain thyme/ All around the blooming heather,” Earl implored in his warm baritone, towering above the room in worn jeans, boots, and a sleeves-cut-off T-shirt from his Arkansas-based label, Gar Hole Records. In spite of all the alcohol collectively consumed by the listeners who packed the venue to its beer-tinged walls that evening, the room was just about as quiet as a divey honky-tonk can be.

By ending his set with the kind of folk song which, passed down through generations, comprises one major lineage of country music – indeed, “Wild Mountain Thyme” is based in a much older Scottish folk song – Earl invoked a deep vernacular tradition and history often left out of modern country. Earl’s music attracts labels like “old-school” and “classic country,” and his voice certainly lends itself to those comparisons, but his own compositions convey a whole lot more. Rejecting the banality of tired Southern stereotypes, Earl writes punk-hearted, poetic music rooted in a love of people and place; music which is both socially and class-conscious and captures wide-ranging cultural unease and indignation with nuance and wit.

On his fourth studio album, Level-Headed Even Smile (released September 19), Earl makes clear that his is not a return to a bygone era so much as a carrying on of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and of imbuing dimension and worth into the lives of overlooked characters and issues too easily reduced to absolutes.

“I’d rather be an outlaw than in with the law/ All this authority worship is the strangest thing I ever saw,” he sings in “Outlaw Country,” a thesis statement of sorts for the album and Earl himself. Earl wrote “Outlaw Country” out of frustration at how many people made assumptions about his beliefs and morals because of his appearance – and because he plays country music with a whole lot of Southern twang. Earl wanted to make it clear where he stands.

“I finished high school in a very rural part of Arkansas; I identify with the Deep South, but I don’t identify with its most prevalent fucking right-wing rhetoric… I still want to remain approachable to those people I completely disagree with, because I think that’s an important part of making art, is creating discourse,” he says. “I want to try to approach these people and try to have that conversation. Be like, ‘Listen here, brother, I’m just like you, but you don’t have to be a racist piece of shit. It’s way more fun in life to be happy and be inclusive. Your soul will be happier because of that.’”

Lately, outlaw country morphed from its subversive roots into a shorthand for wicked good independent country or a slightly more specific alternative to Americana. While both wicked good and independent, Earl’s version also rekindles contempt for the establishment that fueled the original outlaw country movement:

I’d rather be a bootlegger than a bootlicker
A side stepper than a homewrecker
And I don’t get a pick me up
From putting other people down

It’s clear to see by the air I breathe
Working class solidarity
Is the only way
We’re gonna stamp that fascist out

Sardonic and irreverent, “Outlaw Country” is an anthem for anyone who ever believed in love and community over corruption and power. But rather than a callback, Earl’s music is of and for the next generation of ne’er-do-wells and dreamers living on the fringes, hoping for something better.

Earl grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he split his time between separated parents. Chafing at the craven habits of money and influence that he witnessed from his father, a powerful local lawyer, Earl preferred the warmth and love he felt in the house his mother shared with his grandmother. (Despite a rocky childhood, Earl’s now building a relationship with his dad.)

“I was living in poverty on one side and then I was living in opulence on the other side, and the poverty side is where I wanted to be, because that’s where all the love was,” Earl says. “I’m so lucky to have that, to be able to have identified where love was at a young age and identify where my soul felt good.”

Earl’s mother showed him how to seek joy and adventure, filling life with road trips and camping weekends. When he was just five years old, Earl’s mother plopped a map in his lap and taught him to navigate. Perpetually tight on money and resources and mired in an enduring custody battle with his father, she nonetheless taught him how to get away from it all, instilling in him a curiosity about the world. On the road, they stopped to check out historical markers, explored parks and rivers and the Gulf Coast, and watched giant boats come in while picnicking along the Intracoastal Waterway.

“That developed a sense of wonder and being like, ‘I don’t fucking need money to feel this type of happiness, to feel this sense of joy and adventure and love of life, just life in its purest form,” Earl says, choking up. (He firmly believes more men should cry, and that it helps him be more humane.)

“Her sense of adventure, her true passion for living, it’s amazing to me; it still is amazing to me.”

The album’s title and thematic heart – level-headed even smile – are derived from that approach to living life fully. For Earl, it’s an essential mechanism of coping and connecting. Remain engaged in the world and aware of all its horrors and tragedies, he says, but then, when it gets to be too much, know when and how to take a break:

Some nights I’m crying on the backroads
Rolling my smoke backwards
Trying to keep a level-headed even smile
Don’t you know I might take a while to get there
Just hoping I get anywhere
Trying to keep a little level-headed even smile

“At some point we’ve got to unplug from the fucking screen and just go explore things that are fucking real, like the trees around us, or the grass, or the water, or the sun or the moon, and try to get in touch with that more primal sense of ourselves,” Earl says. “That is where we can really most quickly and most efficiently achieve happiness, it’s getting in touch with the simplest form of ourselves.”

Beside the love from his mother, Earl describes himself as a depressed kid who struggled in school and wanted desperately to escape his hometown and father and stepmother. At 15, he convinced his father to send him to boarding school which, in part because of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Louisiana, ended up being in rural Arkansas. At the Subiaco Abbey and Academy, Earl studied with monks who’d taken a vow of poverty and offered rigorous, benevolent study, kindness, and care. Though he’s an atheist, Earl counts the monks, whom he visits regularly, as mentors, connecting with them still through shared spirituality.

“We all fucking showed up pissed off as hell. And we found love and we found love amongst each other; we found love from those monks and found nature,” Earl says, reverently, of his time at Subiaco. “It saved my fucking life. The whole thing; I found joy and happiness for the first time in my life.”

Level-Headed Even Smile is dedicated to Earl’s late friend, William, who was the first to befriend him at Subiaco. “He helped me clear my heart,” Earl says. As he sings of those halcyon days on “Two Kinds of Loner,” “We were two kinds of loner/ A misfit and a wayward son…”

Armed with the sense of wonder his mom taught him, liberated by the fallow morals of youth, and subsumed by the ready escapism afforded by their surroundings, Earl and William learned every back road. They’d steal beer from the back of William’s dad’s Crossroads Tavern and drive for hours exploring the backwoods and levees along the Arkansas River.

“William was the first to show me the country air. Hanging out with him, something about getting in that truck after class, taking off down Lile Ridge Road, cracking a beer, putting on whatever weird music he was listening to at the time, that was the first sense of fucking true freedom I ever had in my life,” Earl says.

Stopping just shy of wistful, “Two Kinds of Loner” is a bittersweet, intimate portrait of the desperately important work of becoming oneself as a teenager – and of the raw beauty in forming kinship through human connection rather than blood relation:

Down where the kudzu meets the bodark
And the darkness first let go of me
High in a cab of a buddy I had
He showed me the county air
I used to not care about nothing
Because no one seemed to care for me

After high school, Earl attended Hendrix College, a liberal arts school which lived up to its name situated in Conway, Arkansas. A few years earlier, Earl borrowed his father’s old guitar – a Yamaha FG 180 Red Tag, which he still plays today – and learned enough chords to make himself useful around a bonfire and impress the local girls. Encouraged by one of the monks at Subiaco, who noticed him straying from lesson plans, Earl started writing his own music.

When he got to college, he landed feet first in a robust DIY music scene. Together with a group of friends – including Gar Hole Records cofounder and label manager Kurt DeLashmet – Earl played a circuit of local house venues: White House, Blue House, Brick House, and occasionally Shit Mansion, where both also lived for a time. To this day, their two-day, 28-band Butt Ranger music festival thrown by friends at the White House remains one of Earl’s favorite shows.

“We were drunk off our fucking asses on plastic bottle whiskey and snorting Adderall and fucking ripping cigs and shit like that. It was fucked up. It was so awesome. It was just blood and piss everywhere,” Earl says. He recalls the floor at White House buckling so deeply that by the end of the night all his gear, including his oversized amp, wound up in a pile in the middle of the floor. Volume was of primary concern, tone and other nuances distinctly secondary. “What a fucking beautiful, carnal, amazing culture to be a part of,” he says.

Two songs on Even Smile come from those early days playing music first in college and, afterwards, in Little Rock, where Earl and his band Swampbird moved. (Earl lived in Little Rock for a few years then moved to Fayetteville, where he still lives.) Both songs are paeans to the chaotic moil of early adulthood rendered heady and hazy by too much booze and too little grounding: “Broken Parts,” which he first recorded with Swampbird, and “Little Rock Bottom,” about his time in Arkansas’ capital city.

“I don’t really quite realize it until I am talking about it, how much of my life and my story is wound up into that album,” Earl, who’s now in his mid-30s, admits. The album feels like a fitting way to process and close that chapter of life. “I do feel like I’ve left it on the table and I’ve left it all out on the field, so to speak.”

In total, Even Smile is a loving, layered depiction of both Arkansas specifically and the south in general. Among his many influences, Earl includes Arkansas gonzo poet Frank Stanford (who also attended Subiaco and whose burial there Lucinda Williams memorialized in her song, “Pineola”). Stanford’s realism and wild abandon creep into Earl’s songwriting sensibilities; they share a love of the South and its complexities and a reverence for and dedication to illuminating those stories.

Alongside a few cheeky disquisitions on life on the fringes – including road dog ode “Get In The Truck” – throughout the album Earl relishes the beauty of his home territory. Perhaps nowhere more so than on “High On The Ouachitas,” an extended soliloquy on the wild beauty of the mountain range, his chosen retreat for a reset and solace:

When I’m high on Ouachita
High as I ever saw the Arkansas
With goldenrod and reindeer lichen
Twist flowers in bloom
There’s just no place
I’d rather waste my afternoons
Than high on Ouachita

“I love it so fucking much, because I know all of the nuance and I know all the beauty that’s deep underneath all of the stereotypes. And just how fascinatingly complex our communities are,” Earl says. “It’s fucking beautiful. You have two and a half million acres of national forest. So we have the cleanest drinking water in America; we have endless amounts of outdoor recreation; the food is fucking kick ass; the people are the sweetest ever.”

Earl rounded out Level-Headed Even Smile with two very on-theme cover songs: beloved Arkansas folksinger Jimmy Driftwood’s “White River Valley,” a love letter to Arkansas’s pastoral beauty, and Utah Phillips’ peripatetic wanderer’s lament, “Rock Me to Sleep,” which concludes the album. Together they bracket the glib “Lawn Chair,” written with Cameron Duddy and Jonathan Terrell.

Earl jokes when playing the song live that it might be the worst song he’s ever written. And superficially it sounds like the kind of redneck anthem that might confirm the uneducated listener’s worst stereotypes about uncouth Arkansans: “It’s a whipass life just being me/ It don’t cost much to be the free/ I got my lawn chair/ And I’m sitting on top of the world.” Yet the song is also a sly rebuke against taking everything too seriously. Convivial in its roughness, it’s a gleeful, carefree reminder of the many ways to keep a level-headed even smile.

“If I’m feeling bogged down and feeling depressed, oftentimes it has nothing to do with the task at hand, it’s just that I’ve been absorbing how terrible the fucking world is and it makes me incapable of interacting and interfacing with my immediate world, because I’m so fucking caught up in that goddamn bullshit… and it is not allowing you to reach your full potential as a biological piece of anatomy that is somehow living on this planet,” Earl says.

“[A level-headed even smile is] an attempt to focus on your humanness and try to reattach yourself to the earth and detach from the problems of the earth; and just go out and find your smile. Go find your joy amongst all the fucking evil.”

Photo Credit: Justin Cook

Country Songs for Fall

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Fall marks the beginning of “over the river and through the woods season,” whether your destination is grandma’s house, an off-season beach, a u-pick apple orchard or pumpkin patch, a spangled and harlequin forest, or an autumn music and arts festival. As you navigate the changing season and enjoy leaf-peeping, apple butter, hot cocoa, and hot dogs roasted over the fire, there’s one genre certain to accompany you through each and every picturesque context the “-ber” months give us – that’s Good Country.

Country is perfect for fall, whether you’re raising a beer, whiskey, or cider alone or among friends. From driving through tobacco country during curing season in September, to tailgating at the football stadium, to winding your way over the Smoky Mountains, to soaking in the last bit of summer sun, there’s a country song ready to soundtrack your falling back in love with cozy season.

Dripping with nostalgia, evocative text painting, a rich and deep connection to nature, and a reverence for community, folkways, and tradition, country music just may be synonymous with fall – and our playlist certainly helps make that case. We hope you enjoy listening and we wanna know: what country songs always get you in an autumnal mood? Did they make the list?

Photo Credit: Album cover,  New Harvest… First Gathering, Dolly Parton.

Classic Country
Is Here to Stay

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

With a new generation boasting unapologetic traditional influence, there’s more classic-sounding country in the mainstream today than in many years before. With his second album, When I Write the Song, Jake Worthington captures one specific aspect of honky-tonk history better than the rest – its sense of humor.

That’s definitely not to say Worthington’s new album is a joke. Far from it. Over 14 songs, the Texas native sinks down into the depths of sorrow and lets his heart believe in miracles all the same. His love of the classic country form is just as authentic as his barrel-chested vocal twang, and with producers Jon Randall and Chuck Ainley joining his team, it gets highlighted with more sincerity than ever. But right from the opening track, Worthington walks in the footsteps of artists like Johnny Paycheck or Jerry Reed; his down-home demeanor is as country as it gets.

Meanwhile, the solo-written title track is almost alarmingly personal and Worthington welcomes Miranda Lambert, Marty Stuart, and Mae Estes as special guests on other tracks. When I Write the Song arrived on September 12 and by touring through the end of the year with both Jon Pardi and Zach Top, Worthington adds even more evidence of an ongoing trad renaissance.

Good Country spoke with Worthington about writing the way he lives and chasing honky-tonk inspiration farther than ever. Plus, he reveals a secret appreciation fans might not suspect.

For fans who don’t necessarily know, you have always been a proud purveyor of the classic country arts. I think that’s pretty fair to say. Are fans going to get more of that on this record or what?

Jake Worthington: Damn right. Yes, sir. I guess that whole narrative don’t ever really change for me. I don’t ever want to make any other kind of music. When somebody listens to a record that I am a part of or put together, I hope they can have a definitive direction to point to and say “That’s what country music sounds like.”

I think that comes across for sure. Now, it’s good timing because there’s kind of a little traditional renaissance going on in the mainstream. Do you agree with that?

Damn right. Absolutely. I’ve never been more inspired in terms of our genre than I am right now. I think a lot of people are writing and singing and recording great country music and I think that folks of all ages are wanting to hear it. Another thing, too, is I don’t think it’s a fad of any sort. I find it interesting – you hear terms like “traditional” or the whole “’90s” deal or whatever. To me, it’s just country music getting made in 2025. I think that’s really exciting, to know that’s the case. It wasn’t like that just a couple years ago.

So you don’t think it’s people cosplaying country?

I know it’s genuine for me. I can’t control what other people do, but hey, if they want to play dress up, that don’t bother me none. I think it’s good for country music. I’m glad that they’re wanting to dress like a grownup.

One thing that I’ve always loved about classic country itself, and something that you do well on this record, is to have a touch of humor. That’s not around as much anymore, but you do that well.

Well, I think it’s funny. I have always struggled with the idea that I never wanted to not be taken serious as a singer or songwriter, but I still like to have fun. I still cut up and it ain’t all rain and storms all the time. I think country music allows room for all of that. There’s definitely a couple songs on this record that is lighthearted, and I guess I was all right with that.

There’s definitely some hardcore heartbreak in here, but the reason I ask is because of the opening track, “It Ain’t the Whiskey.” There are not many songs about getting pulled over and accused of a DUI these days – even fewer that are fun.

Well, some of us write from the research department, I guess. Unfortunately, I was just trying to make light of what was a really shitty situation for me at one point in time in my life. I’ve made some dumb decisions in my adolescence, I guess. That was a good way to look back and laugh at it.

How about “Two First Names”? This one reminds me of a little bit of Joe Diffie and the way he was able to merge classic country and a funny line.

Well, shoot man, thanks. That’s just about a country girl. I’ve got a handful of women I know and love in my life that got two first names and I love that we got away with writing it without ever saying an actual name. … There wasn’t one of us that wrote that song who ain’t from the country, and we’ve all got women we love and know that got two first names. We all love a country girl.

Hell yeah. Now, one thing about this record, you definitely got to work with some big names. You got Jon Randall and Chuck Ainley helping out on production, along with Joey Moi. I wonder with those two guys specifically, Jon and Chuck, did they help you move your sound or your style forward?

Definitely I think. There’s four tracks that I recorded top to bottom with Chuck and Jon … there’s a lot of really awesome things that I got to do through working with Joey. But I think for me, I wasn’t ever totally happy with the way things were ending up sonically. That was my biggest change that I was after, was just kind of where it landed sonically.

Really?

Especially with the vocal. I’m a very imperfect singer. I’m not a perfect singer. I want that to be heard. I don’t want to be masked.

Joey’s amazing, but he definitely comes from a different world sonically, right?

Yeah, and I wanted to work with guys that were making country records that inspired me. But again, I tracked nine of them songs with Joey and man, I love all of it. Chuck wound up mixing the record and Jon come in when we went to track the last four songs and it’s been a dream come true. I get to work with my heroes, man.

You also got to work with Miranda Lambert [plus Marty Stuart and Mae Estes]. Tell me about doing “Hello Shitty Day” with Miranda, it’s a cool broken-hearted waltz. Did you guys get to know each other?

Sure. I mean, I know it sounds a little simple, but she had texted me the song and I asked if I could cut it. She said yes and I said, “Would you sing on it?” And she said, “Hell yes,” so by God, that’s what we did. I don’t know, man. I wasn’t trying to get on the radio with that song. I just thought it was brilliant. I love that song.

One thing I’ve got to ask you, since this is BGS. Do you have any ties to bluegrass, or was that ever a part of what you listened to?

Where I’m from, oddly enough down there in Southeast Texas, we had to go find that stuff. There’s nooks and crannies in East Texas where these cats kinda start out in bluegrass and I think they find it through gospel music and stuff like that. But I wasn’t in the church or nothing – I was baptized in beer and I’m here to testify, you hear me?

Ha!

The great words of Kevin Fowler. But a lot of the stuff I loved the most was coming out of Ohio. When I discovered Dave Evans, that shit knocked me out.

Really?

Oh gosh. There’s something called “99 Years [Is Almost for Life].” One day I’d like to record it, but I understand that bluegrass is just as sacred as country music, so if you’re going to do it, you got to do it right and I think it starts with putting your heart and soul in it.

But I always loved Ralph Stanley. I’ve always loved Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe. I mean, that might sound a little standard, but I love that stuff. Harley Allen’s one of my favorite songwriters and his daddy, Red Allen, I love the records he done. Ronnie Bowman and Lonesome River Band. I like that stuff.

Short answer – yes, sir. Hell yes. I love bluegrass.

That’s amazing. It sounds like you’re deep into it. I mean, maybe it doesn’t show up too much in what you’re doing right now, but maybe one day you ought to do a bluegrass record.

Oh, man. We’ll see, but right now all I want to do is what sounds like country music to me. I think it’s a matter of if you got electrics on it or not. It’s just soul music. It’s gotta come from the heart.

That’s a good segue because I wanted to ask you about the title track, “When I Write the Song,” and writing that solo. You were able to share your pain quite a bit. Where did that come from?

I don’t always wind up writing by myself. I think a lot of us writers sit down and try, and if we could, we would write a lot by ourselves. But that one just kind of fell out. I’d been six, seven years in [to my career] and I don’t know, I think I was a little hurt and kind of angry. I got a whole lot of, “You can’t sing that kind of music. That ain’t never going to work.” Sad songs and waltzes and whatnot. I don’t know why it’s so easy to write about the hard things or the bad things. It seems to be easier than it is to write about the good things sometimes. That’s just kind of where I was at with it.

When I wrote it, I was headed home from some gig and at the time I had been staying at my parents’. They had just got one of them push button door locks to the house with a code on it and I did not remember the damn code. There wasn’t no way I was getting in the house, so I had a guitar and a six pack of beer, a back porch, and plenty of time.

You’re kidding.

That’s what come out of that. I sat on that song for a long time. I was kind of scared of it. I wasn’t sure if it was for anybody. I wasn’t sure if it was any good. But I’m a songwriter and I think that’s just my way of showing it.

That’s real country music to me, so thank you for sharing the story. It’s funny that you got locked out – almost feels meant to be.

I’ve been locked out of a lot of things, hoss.

You’re going to be out on the road with Zach Top and Jon Pardi, right? In their own way, they both definitely inject some classic country into the mainstream, too. Are those tours a good fit for you?

Damn right, man. You tell me anywhere else, you’re going to see three steel guitars and three fiddle players in one stage. … I’m a fan of both of them guys and they know it, and I revere and respect the hell out of them. I’m grateful to get to go work with ‘em. That’s going to be a lot of band, buddy.

All right, Jake, thanks for the time, man. Let me leave you with the big picture. Just tell me what you hope people get from this record.

Well, take away a little piece of my heart while I’m giving it to you. Country music’s here to stay and I don’t think it ever left. I’m just grateful to be a little spoke in the wheels and I hope that when they hear this record, it’s something that they can go to and say, “This is what country music sounds like.”

Photo Credit: Jim Wright

Ashley Monroe’s Patchwork Quilt:
Tennessee Lightning

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“Let me look at your radar,” Ashley Monroe says, pulling out her phone. “I have all kinds of radar apps on here: 24-hour flight radar, storm trackers…” She types in my location. “Yep, it just popped up red,” she says, forebodingly.

We’re speaking over Zoom about her album Tennessee Lightning and, fittingly, a massive storm is rumbling through New York, with loud thunderclaps sending a jolt through our conversation. Monroe is calling from an apartment in West Nashville, which she rents as a creative space in a building shared by fellow musicians and friends Meg McRee, Ben Chapman, and Lukas Nelson. The weather in Nashville is calm for now, but there’s always the chance another tempest could be brewing.

“For a while there I was like, someone’s gotta get me a bunker. ASAP,” she says.

Tennessee Lightning is her sixth studio album (not including the four she’s released as part of supergroup Pistol Annies alongside Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley) and her first since 2021’s Rosegold. The latter found her sloughing off the classic country sounds that defined her early work and embracing trap beats and synthy pop moments. Shortly after the release of Rosegold, Monroe underwent treatment for a rare form of blood cancer, a life-altering experience that she’s still processing. Now in remission, she feels newly awash in creative inspiration, breaking the creative silence that immediately followed her diagnosis.

The resulting album, her second as co-producer with GRAMMY-winning producer and engineer Gena Johnson, is a sprawling, 17-song “patchwork quilt” of songs that range from gritty rockers to moony love songs to bracingly stripped-down piano ballads. It’s less story-song-heavy than her beloved early work, but Monroe says that the album – a mix of new and older originals, along with a few carefully chosen covers – is as personal and revealing as anything she’s ever recorded.

“With every song on this record, I feel and see my own personal story in it,” she says. “Maybe I just didn’t need to put the third parties in this time.”

The release of Tennessee Lightning dovetails with the tenth anniversary of The Blade, Monroe’s GRAMMY-nominated 2015 album, which she recently celebrated with an intimate show at The Basement East and it remains fresh on her mind. She spoke to Good Country about her rootsy new sound, whether it’s safe to call this her Americana turn, and how music helps her weather life’s most painful storms.

I’m curious about the title of the album. It’s interesting, because in many ways, this feels like a homecoming, but then it’s also quite different from your earlier music. How did Tennessee Lightning start coming together?

Ashley Monroe: There’s actually a song called “Tennessee Lightning” that I wrote with Shelby Lynne and Jedd Hughes. It’s awesome, but by the end we had over 25 songs and it wasn’t fitting the album anymore. And at that point, it’s almost like Tennessee Lightning had become me, in a way. It’s just a zap of like, “This is everything. Boom.” Gena Johnson is the co-producer and engineer on this record and a dear friend. The two of us loaded up a ton of gear a couple years ago and rented a cabin in East Tennessee. We went to my dad’s grave, we went to see my Granny and Poppy and drove the back roads in Tazewell, Tennessee. We just immersed ourselves in going back to the roots of it all.

We set up the studio there and she recorded me on the front porch, she recorded me in the yard. We started recording “I’m Gonna Run,” which is a song I wrote in 2004, on the same trip as I wrote “Satisfied” and “Used.” We started with that song, and I was really trying not to overthink anything. I was just letting whatever songs needed to come through, come through. I always say this album is like a patchwork quilt of my life, and that applies to my friends that I’ve asked to play on this record: T Bone Burnett, Butch Walker, Brendan Benson, Marty Stuart, Brittney Spencer, Karen Fairchild. I made a joke the other day, “I’ve called in so many favors, I’m going to have to make new friends to call it more favors.”

I think people may be tempted to call this your Americana record. How do you feel about that?

Great. I’ll take that. Americana has been good to me. A lot of Americana radio stations played “Hands on You” when no one else would, and a lot of other songs. So that’s good company.

Also, I’m from East Tennessee, so no one can really hear my voice and say that I’m not country. It’s just there in the accent and the tenor of it. It’s Appalachia. That’s why I think it’s cool to not do something obvious sometimes, to not cut yourself short or shave the edges off. “I’m Gonna Run” reminds me of when Emmylou did Wrecking Ball, just those weird things she did that I love so much. I’ll take Americana all day.

The sound of this record is quite varied as well.

I guess Tennessee Lightning has different types, but it’s all real musicians, it’s all organic. “Amen Love” I was writing with Ashley Ray and Summer Overstreet, whose dad wrote “Forever and Ever Amen.” We wrote the song for Miley Cyrus, and Ashley’s husband recorded the demo. The song ended up not getting cut, but it just kept haunting me. I always like to do a sexy one, like “Hands on You” and “Wild Love,” so I thought it made sense for the young love part of the record.

Then there’s just me and Marty Stuart and Shelby Lynne on “The Touch,” and that’s as country as anything I’ve done. Gena was really good at getting the raw edges and the breaths and everything. “There You Are” was recorded in one take. It’s just me and the piano. I never did it again in the studio, ever. And then there are other songs that are more polished or have different instrumentation, but Tennessee Lightning to me is like a flash of everything. It’s not just one part; it’s all parts.

I’m wondering if maybe not chasing the country radio thing anymore freed you to explore all these different sounds.

I’m sure it did, even though I will say every label I’ve been on – Columbia, then RCA, then Warner LA and Warner Nashville – I’ve been lucky to have label people who were great at the creative part. My first single was “Satisfied,” which didn’t work, but I love that they chose that. Cris Lacy at Warner was also great at helping me pick songs. I didn’t think anyone would like “Hands on You,” but she heard the work tape and convinced me to record it.

When I got dropped by Warner, I thought to myself, “Now I can do anything.” And it’s been fun to explore. Gena is good about feeling when the spirit is moving through. She knows I like to sing in the dark or with candles. We shut the blinds, and I get to sit in that zone, and she captures it. It’s emotional, it’s raw, and I like recording like that without having to think, “What’s the label gonna say?”

You’ve been called a critical darling pretty much throughout your career. With Rosegold, it seemed like the first time the response was more tentative – warmly received, but not quite as glowing from everyone, particularly the “real country” crowd. Did the response to that record influence your approach to this one?

I really didn’t think about that at all, so that’s interesting. Honestly, though, what I will do next is a honky-tonk record. I know my band, and I know exactly what I’m going to do, which is honky-tonk it to the depths. I haven’t done a live thing like that, and I like switching it up. In my mind, what makes a memorable artist, a true artist, is when everything doesn’t sound exactly the same. Tennessee Lightning just felt like, “What are you feeling? What is it?” It’s cool when art reflects what you’re going through at the time, and for me going back to my roots will always have that earthiness.

I’m thankful for all the great reviews and the “critical darling” thing means a lot, especially as someone who doesn’t win awards or get nominated or included, really, in any circle. I’m okay with that, in a way, because I have a certain confidence — I know I have a gift. I know some people will feel it and some people won’t, but no one can deny I’m doing what I was put on this earth to do. I don’t put too much value on what people think of me, especially now after what I’ve been through. I won’t lose sleep over what a critic thinks.

Another thing that came up with Rosegold was this idea of protecting your joy, of not wanting to feel sadness anymore. Tennessee Lightning has songs that are more cutting – “There You Are” almost feels like it could be on The Blade. It made me wonder if your relationship to your art and this idea of protecting your joy changed between this album and the last one.

You know, when I got pregnant was really the first time I thought, “I’ve got to be careful about what enters here.” That doesn’t mean being delusional or not knowing that things can happen, will happen. Of course, something can always come along and bring you to your knees. But it’s about knowing when everything’s okay and shining a light on it and letting it radiate for a little bit. Rosegold was about hyperfocusing on the good and just letting it beam out for a split second.

I don’t mind if music is sad. I kind of prefer it. With this one, there are some sweet love songs, but also not all these songs are new. “My Favorite Movie” was one Vince [Gill] and I wrote in 2015 around The Blade time. He had it on one of his records, and just never did my version of it. “Hot Rod Pipedream” was written in 2015 or 2016, and “Risen Road” was from around the same time.

Let’s talk about The Blade, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary. You played the album through at a show in Nashville recently. What was it like revisiting those songs?

It was so special because I hadn’t really sung those songs. I’m funny about that – I don’t go back and listen to my old records. It’s not like you forget, but you do move on. Singing those songs, even at rehearsal, I got so emotional.

Did any of the songs in particular hit you differently this time?

I was thinking “I Buried Your Love Alive.” I literally felt thunder. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s a ghost in that one. “Bombshell,” too. At the show I was thinking about how relevant it still is. I still understand the emotion in that song.

In the commentary you recorded at the time, you mentioned that “Bombshell” could be about a few different scenarios. It struck me that you said it could be about a breakup, but it could be about telling someone you have cancer.

I remember that. I forgot until you started to say that, but it’s so true. It’s that feeling of like, “This is big news, and it’s going to blow up life as I know it.” It was definitely a bombshell, and then I had to tell people I had cancer.

I was diagnosed in 2021, and when I came into Tennessee Lightning, I knew that I had to step back and reflect. I had to look back at the whole picture. I had someone ask me in an interview recently why I didn’t sing about cancer on the album. It’s like, I don’t want to think about cancer. Music to me is my holy, sacred place. Even though I sing about painful things and I can keep those emotions with me, I didn’t want to think about it enough to write a song about it. Maybe it’s that cancer has already robbed so much from me. I mean, it killed my dad. It’s already affected me, my family. Maybe I haven’t fully processed it yet. In a way I’m pretending it didn’t happen.

The only place on the record where I did feel the cancer feeling or acknowledgement of my emotions around it was “Jesus, Hold My Hand.” I used to sing that song when I was really young and feeling scared. I really felt it because when I was really sick, with chemo and everything, I felt as close as I ever have to that feeling of handing it over or surrender. It was like I was leaning on the spirit more than ever before.

The hymn is such a stunning moment, in a way that feels different from what you’ve done before. There are a lot of religious references in your songs, but there’s also this thread of religious guilt, particularly on the Pistol Annies songs “Beige” and “Leavers Lullaby.” There’s a lyric in the latter, “It’s as deep as the water that stains me” that comes to mind. Would you say your relationship to your faith has changed?

I can’t speak for the other Annies, but for me the “bite” in those songs is directed toward the people rather than about the pureness of it. The judgment and sending people to hell thing. I grew up with the Bible Belt and I think Jesus has a sense of humor and a lot of church people don’t. With “Risen Road,” it’s like, “You can read the Bible, quote it verse for verse/ You can steal a pain pill out of Mama’s purse.” And when I say “you,” I mean me, because I would do that. I think there’s something to being humble enough to say, “I can believe in God and still be exactly who I am.”

I wanted to ask about that line on “Risen Road,” which of course caught my attention. Between this song, “Best Years of My Life” and of course “Takin’ Pills,” pain pills have become something of a motif in your work. Why is that?

Well, because I was on pain pills for a long, long, long time. My dad died when I was 13, and at the time I was very straitlaced. All my family lived on the same road, we went to church, nobody cussed, nobody drank, nobody smoked. After my dad died, my mom kind of disappeared with a guy. She had a nervous breakdown, really, looking back. He died in February 2000, and she was gone by June.

Looking back, I was flailing. I was devastated, and my mom wasn’t around, and then my brother started having wild, wild parties and I was like, “Hell, I might as well. Give me a Zigma.” Everyone around me had pills and I’d say, “Give me a pill.” I was probably 14 or 15 and my cousin and I would keep a mirror under the front seat and snort oxycontin. Not oxycodone. Oxycontin. It’s a miracle I’m still alive, because I didn’t even know what that was. I just knew that it numbed me out. And, in all fairness, I needed numbing out. I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do, but sometimes, if you can just stay alive – and thank God I did – these things will get you through.

Honestly, though, I don’t think I was ever hooked on them. I’ve never had trouble giving up something when I know I need to. I was on them in my 20s a lot and I was drinking a lot at the time. And then, you know, I OD’d at Saddle Ranch in LA. Like, they thought I was dead. I was like, “Are you crazy? You survive all of that and then let a pill take you out?” So, after that, I quit taking them. But, you know, I took them after my C-section. I took all of them. I just think different people are wired differently and I do think it’s kind of funny now.

“She’s on the highest dose of Prozac a woman can take.” I was.

“She likes to pop her pain pills with every little ache.” I did.

It’s interesting, what you said about wanting to feel numb, because the songs that you wrote during that time had so much pain in them. They really cut.

Well, music’s always been where I let my pain seep out. When my dad died, I remember holding my guitar and sitting at the edge of my waterbed, and it was like the guitar was saving my life. It was keeping me together. And I still use music like that – I pour out pain that I don’t even know is in there sometimes. The pain pills don’t get you all the way numb. They get you numb for about 25 minutes, and I needed those 25 minutes back then.

Photo Credit: Erika Rock

Sunny Sweeney’s Musical Full-Circle Moment

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Self-producing an album wasn’t something that Sunny Sweeney spent much time pondering – until it happened.

Rhinestone Requiem is the pinnacle of her taking charge, hoeing her own bean row, and flexing her self-determining vigor. It’s just the latest from an artist committed to exploring her imaginative energies on her terms.

“I’m happy with what we ended up with on this project,” said Sweeney. “We could just pay ourselves. Plus we only had to have two opinions [hers and co-producer Harley Husbands’] versus more opinions.”

“Our mentality going in was, ‘We know how to do this and we are going to try it and see what happens.’”

Rhinestone Requiem, released August 1, is pure Sweeney, sharing tales of figures who win hearts readily and whose outlaw lifestyles embody freedom from responsibility. There are songs devoted to romantic quests, the forever keeping on and the forever searching, like such richly rendered titles as “Traveling On” and “Diamonds and Divorce Decrees.”

Most of the album’s tracks are the result of Sweeney’s collaborations with several musicians she has been working with for a number of years. There are also two covers, “Find It Where I Can,” popularized by Jerry Lee Lewis, and “Last Hard Bible” by Sweeney’s friend and mentor Kasey Chambers.

Though she once saw the sharing of songwriting duties from a tentative and even negative point of view, Sweeney wholly embraced the notion of teamwork on Rhinestone Requiem.

“Songs were written with the rest of the people that I have known for a long, long time … I know what I’m going to get when I write with those people. They know their strengths and I know my strengths, and that’s why we continue to write together.

“I used to never collaborate,” she continued. “But now I’m co-writing and thinking this is awesome. I was petrified at first. Songwriting with others forces you to put down all of your worries. A lot of people worry about co-writing. But I see it as a double bonus thing. You hang out with friends and you get to work.”

Rhinestone Requiem is a throwback to Sweeney’s upbringing and all of the earliest things that have had a colossal effect on her: Her father’s records, which she had open access to; listening to Jerry Reed; watching The Dukes of Hazzard; processing the initial songs that jiggled her plaster loose.

Sweeney vividly recalls at age 8 hearing Jessi Colter’s “I’m Not Lisa,” a great example of one of her songwriting paradigms of setting mood and meaning.

“I sat and watched the record play,” said Sweeney, “I remember thinking she sounded really sad, but now I know what she’s talking about. I also remember hearing Jerry Reed’s ‘Amos Moses.’ I thought, man, what type of noise is this? I knew I needed to hear more of it in my life. Waylon Jennings’ ‘Good Ol’ Boys’ theme and I loved The Dukes of Hazzard. I told my mom that I wanted a son and was going to name him Bo and Luke Duke. I loved them both, those Duke boys, and I loved that Telecaster sound.”

The whole fictional gang of rural Hazzard County folks, Bo and Luke and Daisy Duke, mechanic Cooter Davenport, accident-prone though incorruptible deputy sheriff Enos Strate, and others, resembled the classmates, pals, and neighbors who Sweeney was raised with in the Texas countryside.

“Those were the kinds of people that existed in my life,” said Sweeney. “Country boys were dressed like that and they’d drive too fast down the street. I saw Daisy Duke and I wanted heels like that. Daisy Duke. Dolly Parton. Grease. Heels and lipstick. I had seen my future!”

Sweeney was born in Houston, but after her father decided that he no longer wanted to work in the family insurance business, he quit the agency and packed everyone and everything up and drove more than 200 miles north to Longview, where he’d grown up.

“I’m grateful for that small town,” said Sweeney. “I don’t know if I would have ended up in the music business if I wasn’t raised there. There were opportunities for small-town people and small-town interactions, which have shaped the way I feel musically.”

Indeed, the move to Longview would play a decisive role in Sweeney’s relationship with music. There was a low-watt country music station in the town of about 60,000 people featuring a succession of howling DJs who routinely tried to break the songs of lesser-known artists, allowed for call-ins, and welcomed conversations. Sweeney started listening in the third grade and calling in to request Conway Twitty.

After her parents’ divorce, Longview was also where her mother met Paul, the person who would become her stepfather – and, in hindsight, her biggest career influence. Paul and one of his brothers liked to twang the guitar. Nurturing and never hardhearted, Paul slowly and caringly taught Sweeney how to play the instrument. The first guitar that he gave to her was a black composite Martin, “a cheap, old, sentimental thing,” she said. She learned that her grandfather was a member of a big band orchestra. He played the trumpet, drank scotch, and chain-smoked cigarettes. She thought that he was the apex of cool. But the notion of becoming a musician as an occupation seemed, in her words, “far-fetched.” She asked Paul what he thought – and he merely grinned.

Years later, Sweeney, thinking about her stepdad’s tenderness, her grandfather’s stark sense of flair, and some of the songs and musical moments that touched her as a child, she re-examined her intentions.

“I had a college degree and I didn’t want to use it. I wanted to work for myself and wear jeans everyday and be my own boss. That was 20 years ago.”

Sweeney, now 48, lived in Austin for approximately 25 years, going through some precariously bony times, financially. She juggled other jobs while making barely enough to cover bills. At one point, strapped for cash, she pawned the original Martin that her stepdad had given to her. The Chaparral Lounge in South Austin was the very first place that Sweeney performed and several months elapsed before she would muster the courage to return to the stage a second time. That second performance took place in August 2004 at the Carousel Lounge on East 51st Street.

“There was a halfway house across the street and I was not that good,” she said. “My mom said that there were two or three minutes in between each song and lots of discussing how we were going to play it.”

Swiftly, however, Sweeney improved. “I threw myself into it 150 percent.”

She began hustling seven nights a week, performing wherever there was the potential of a free meal or the likelihood of even a single pair of listening ears. At grocery stores, perched on hay bales, in the rutted corners of falling apart parking lots. If the spot had electricity, she would play there. And if it didn’t, she would still sing, at any rate.

“Many nights I played outdoors without lights,” said Sweeney. “We had lights on a stick, two canister lights, before LED lights. At Poodle Dog Lounge, which was a staple in Austin – now Aristocrat Lounge – there was no stage. No credit card machine. No dance floor. There were some chairs, and you were three feet in front of that, standing there. I missed one or two Sundays in three years.”

At Poodle Dog Lounge, Sweeney played her set between 8 and 11 p.m., plenty of shuffles and polkas to satisfy the dancers. Her act was mostly covers, with the occasional original thrown in, hoping that the audience was too sauced or too ebullient to even notice.

Her rewards and incentives, she said, were comparatively picayune. “Eating for free was pretty cool. Not having to get up early. Maybe play at a couple of other nearby towns.”

Things were moving along satisfactorily, if not spectacularly, when she received a message on MySpace from a record producer who told her that he liked what he had heard out of her in a club in Austin one night. He was based in Nashville, and once he learned that Sweeney would be performing there, he showed up. Without delay he offered her a recording contract.

Since then, she has won over a sizable group of listeners with a repertoire of songs that are frank, discerning, and occasionally grief-stricken, teasing, provocative, and ultimately convincing.

@sunnysweeney New song from the new record! You ever tried to get away from a relationship that keeps sucking you back in? #sunnysweeney #countrymusic #foryourpage ♬ original sound – Sunny Sweeney

Co-producer Harley Husbands has worked with Sweeney for about 10 years, his guitar licks always craftily and reliably adding richness to their musical portraits. The pair are so joined at the hip that his contributions to Rhinestone Requiem are virtually indistinguishable from Sweeney’s, their palettes bleeding into a single piece of artistry.

“We live together and work and travel and play together,” said Sweeney. “That forces you to work well together in the studio. We’ve got no time to not work well together. Having a bad day? Too bad.”

Sweeney said that the vocals on the record are about as close to the authentic article as she could deliver, done without any polishing or cleansing or much enhancing. She credits Harley with being the ultimate arbiter, the most prized of assayers. He knows her voice better than anyone. If she didn’t sound right at a particular moment, he made sure to tell her so.

“I’d be in the vocal booth running through songs and he would be in the control room, knowing what I do like hearing out of myself… He knows what I like to hear. If he was not hearing me sing that way, he would know it perfectly. It’s as close to me knowing it on my own as possible.”

Her vocals on Rhinestone Requiem are firm, authoritative, and insightful enough to be considered some of her best work.

“It is not smushed down and compressed,” said Sweeney. “It is as close to sounding as they’ve sounded at the show. I don’t like it when you buy a record and put it on the turntable and it doesn’t sound like what you’ve just heard at a show. I like reaching the high end. It can be shrill. Either people love it or hate it. Harley’s job was mixing me and pulling out my significant sound and frequency, but without squishing what people are already used to hearing.”

By the way, a requiem, by definition, is an action or token of remembrance. It is a word that has generated a bit of droll reaction, Sweeney said. “Some guy just wrote on my page that we need to pick a word that we can pronounce. I laughed my ass off out loud. My sister said that we need to get those boys a dictionary!”

Nevertheless, it is a pleasing and easily engaging listen, whether to devotees or casual fans of clear-cut country. Out of the new songs, “Traveling On” and “Diamonds and Divorce Decrees” are receiving the largest number of spins.

“I hate having to pick songs to release as singles,” said Sweeney. “I think we should release all of the songs and let people pick themselves. There are a couple of deeper ones, like ‘Half Lit in 3/4 Time’ that I’m really liking. ‘As Long as There’s a Honky Tonk’ is going over well at gigs and live is getting a really good response.”

Indeed, the formula of Rhinestone Requiem is the same modus operandi of loving labor, mischievous candor, bittersweet humor, and resolute truthfulness. And it seems to be paying Sweeney impressive dividends.

“Years of wearing myself out and gigs and travel,” said Sweeney. “I’ve started to see people now at every single gig. It’s all starting to feel real now. We’ve been living with these songs for a year, and now other people are now hearing them. The excitement is building.”

Photo Credit: Nash Nouveau

Solitary Refinement

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Ever since she was a child in Arizona, Kassi Valazza has battled crippling stage fright. While that fear has lingered in the years that have followed, on her journeys touring, and living in Portland, then New Orleans, and (soon) Nashville, she’s been able to conquer it with intention, introspection, and consistency.

“I need to be alone for at least 10 minutes before I go out [on stage] so I can relax and do my breathing exercises,” Valazza tells Good Country. “More than anything, just getting into the groove of playing shows helps, because eventually your brain does turn it off a little bit. The nerves never fully go away, but at a certain point things just start to become muscle memory and you’re able to tune the other noise or inner thoughts out.”

Those three pillars also make up the foundation of her third album, From Newman Street, released May 2. On it Valazza spins her most personal web of songs yet, her vintage and Emmylou-esque warble taking listeners on a cosmic Americana journey that pulls back the curtain on vulnerability and universal struggle, forging a soundtrack of triumphant growth.

Songs like “Roll On” and “Your Heart’s A Tin Box” are ripe with melancholy, wisdom, and a bit of hindsight – plus bed-ridden humor – all of which is also reflected in the album’s artwork. It depicts a pensive Valazza in a staring contest with a breakfast-in-bed platter captured by friend and longtime photographer, Kait De Angelis.

“I wanted to capture exactly what I was going through when I was writing this album – I was really depressed, I was in bed, and I wasn’t getting up or going out a lot,” explains Valazza. “There’s also a funny and comedic side to that too where depression and anxiety are very real feelings that a lot of people have that I wanted to present in a playful, but still real way.”

Ahead of the release of From Newman Street, Good Country spoke with Valazza about the solitary environment the songs within it were born from, nature’s influence on her work, how she’s poised for a move to Nashville, and more.

Like the previous installments in your catalog, From Newman Street was self-produced. What’s your motivation behind that?

Kassi Valazza: It started out more from necessity, because then – and even now – I don’t have a ton of money, I’ve just been working with friends. I’m also a little bit of a control freak, too, though. Ultimately, I really trust the people I work with and think we’ve been able to make some great stuff without having to bring in an extra person. It’s made just as much sense to do things that way financially as it has from a creative sense.

Maybe not as much a financial decision, but certainly one that benefited on a creative level, was the move to record in Portland despite leaving there for New Orleans a couple years ago. What was it that took you down to the bayou?

I’d just been to New Orleans a lot and had a solid community of people I knew out there. I spent a lot of the summer on tour before I moved and was seeing a lot of those people, which gave me the idea of giving life in New Orleans a go before trying out Nashville. I’ve really enjoyed my time here, but funny enough I’m actually moving to Nashville in November. I had my little moment here and loved every minute of it, but Nashville is where I see myself ending up.

Why is that?

The thing I like about Nashville is that it’s so open genre-wise. There’s not just country, there’s also a ton of indie artists doing everything from psychedelia to jazz. I also have my booking agent and a lot of good friends there. New Orleans has been really fun but I’m just gone all the time, so I needed a home base that’s a bit more calm and easier to wind down in.

There’s also a bunch of nature [around Nashville]. I really love to hike and be outside, but in New Orleans you’re kind of just stuck there – there’s not a lot of space to leave. There’s a lot more diversity in both landscape and music in Nashville. It makes New Orleans feel like an island by comparison.

Speaking of nature, how does it inform your music and creative process?

On [2023’s Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing] nature was a major influence, because when I was living in Portland I was always outside. I even lived out in the country for a while in a yurt house and wrote a lot of songs there. But on this new album a lot of it was written from my bedroom – or at least somewhere inside – and I think it shows in the lyrics. There’s just not a lot of imagery of the outdoors, which is what makes this project stand out against my others. That being said, I miss having nature as a reference, so it’ll be nice to get back to hiking and camping again soon.

You just mentioned From Newman Street being mostly written in isolation, from your bedroom. Does that mean this is a pandemic record or were these songs born more recently than that?

It’s actually not related to that at all. It’s all pretty recent from the past two years. I went through a weird phase where I was a little bit depressed and shut in and wasn’t going out as much, because my mental health had hit a low. These songs are a reflection of where I was physically and mentally during that time.

With that in mind, tell me about the song “Your Heart’s A Tin Box,” which seems to be a rumination on the sacrifices of being a working musician. Was there a specific moment that inspired the song, or rather an accumulation of many?

It’s a mix of both and definitely a wrap up of my last year. The opening line (“Walking through the airport/ With no money I can spend…”) was written in the airport when I was walking around after just getting back from my European tour. There’s this thing that happens when you play overseas where they don’t pay you right away, because they have to go through all the venues and booking agents first. I had been there for almost two months and had no money, not even enough to buy water in the airport after I landed.

It’s one of those things where I don’t know whose fault it is, but it’s not set up to benefit the musicians at all, which has been really hard to cope with. A lot of friends have been dealing with it, too, because in general there’s not many people or organizations out there protecting musicians these days – it’s kind of like the Wild West.

Nobody should have to beg for money they earned. Due to the touring associated with my work I have all kinds of expenses – from plane tickets for my band and I to hotels, gas money, rental cars, and more – that quickly pile up. You end up having to put it all on a credit card hoping you can pay it off when you’re all done and the timing of it just never quite adds up.

 

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The repetitive cycles and costs associated with touring that you touched on there remind me of another song, “Roll On,” which I understand is about repeating patterns, but in the context of a relationship rather than the music business?

Yes! I had been in a relationship that wasn’t working for me, but kept trying and trying to fix it. It felt like I tried 13 times to put a Band-Aid on it, which led to the song coming along very easily almost as soon as I sat down to write it. It was a scenario where I loved the person so much and wanted to make it work before realizing that I just had to let it go.

Listening to it and “Time Is Round” – which directly precedes “Roll On” on the album – I couldn’t help but think of the two as sister songs where you’re trying to chase time only to realize what’s meant for you will come back around eventually?

I’ve never thought about it like that, although they are both about different relationships with people and myself. “Roll On” was about a relationship that wasn’t working and “Time Is Round” is one I wrote at the start of a new relationship and trying to gauge the situation to assess whether I was repeating the same mistakes. Now that you mention it, maybe there is some kind of correlation there.

Glad I could be of service!

One last song I wanted to ask you about was “Birds Fly.” I love everything from the trance-like arrangements on it to the lyrics, which seem to be about sitting around and marinating in your own thoughts as the world moves around you. Is that what you were trying to convey there?

A lot of that song is just me disassociating from my feelings, which is captured in the vibe of the music. It just reflects me laying in bed and avoiding conflict and the various issues in my life.

Erik [Clampitt], who played pedal steel on the album, really leaned into that with the bird sounds he created with the pedal steel. Then you’ve got Sydney Nash playing vibraphone, which is such a calming, comfortable instrument to listen to. Then Tobias [Berblinger] is doing all the synths behind her. I wanted to create a little pad for somebody to lay down on and listen.

Well, mission accomplished! What’s your songwriting process look like – from what I understand you almost exclusively write on your own?

I do, but the process definitely gets changed up a lot. Oftentimes I’ll find something that works and keep doing it until it eventually runs its course before finding something else. Lately it started a lot with the melody first and struggling to find lyrics to put with it. A lot of Knows Nothing – and this record too – came from poems I’d written down in my journal and added a melody on top of. When I hiked a lot they’d sometimes come up at the same time, and other times they’d pop into my head unexpectedly. It’s always different – I’m not capable of relying on one specific process.

Whether it’s sitting with your thoughts in bed, journaling them, or putting them to song, what’s something that music has taught you about yourself?

I have a lot of big feelings and go through waves of depression and anxiety, which can make it hard to know what’s real and focus on the present. The beautiful thing about art and songwriting is that you get to capture a moment that you can look back on later.
Sometimes things aren’t very clear, whether it’s confusing relationships or not being your best self.

I try to write as honestly as I can, even if it makes me look bad. The ability to do that, look back on it, and learn something about yourself so that you can grow is such a huge privilege and something that’s been wildly beneficial to my mental and physical health. If I wasn’t making art I’d be a much unhappier person, that’s for sure.

Photo Credit: Kait De Angelis

Sad Songs & Storytelling

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

As an artist who believes the sad songs of the world could be a little sadder, of course there’s a haunting beauty to the work of Ken Pomeroy.

With her debut album, Cruel Joke, the 22-year-old Oklahoma-born Cherokee Nation member gives fans a gorgeous tribute to inner unease rooted in the wisdom of her own hard times. Pairing a feathery, lilting vocal with an earthy folk sound – plus metaphoric themes filled with animals and the lessons of nature – she looks back on a difficult upbringing, turning tears into sonic transcendence.

Pomeroy’s “Wall of Death” was featured in the 2024 film Twisters, and she’s been on the road with everyone from Lukas Nelson and Iron & Wine to American Aquarium and John Moreland. Good Country even featured the track “Cicadas” back in 2024. But with Cruel Joke, the world finally gets a full look at a “deep feeling” talent on the rise.

Speaking from her home in Tulsa, Pomeroy fills us in on the making of her debut album and an origin story with no punch line.

For folks who don’t know, tell us a little bit about where you’re coming from. You grew up in Oklahoma and you’re part of the Cherokee Nation, right? Does that show up in the tunes?

Ken Pomeroy: Oh, yeah. I never really tried to put it in anywhere. I think it just fits in naturally with how I write music in general. There are a lot of themes of nature and traditional storytelling elements that I include – animals and things of that sort – that I think carry through just naturally. And storytelling is such a huge part of pretty much every tribe, and specifically the Cherokees are huge storytellers. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence I’m writing songs and telling stories.

No, I bet not. I love the way you’re able to use animals. It seems like a great way to talk about yourself or other people, but through metaphor. Does [the use of animals] make that a little bit easier?

Absolutely, yes. I think kind of assigning someone something, it makes it 10 times easier, not so direct.

Like an artful way of saying something that’s hard to say?

Yes, absolutely.

Tell me a little about where your sound comes from. So many moments on Cruel Joke are hushed and haunting. What did you grow up listening to? Where did you pick up music?

Well, honestly, I’ve been playing music and writing for longer than I haven’t been. I really got started from hearing John Denver when I was 6 or 7 years old. That was the start. I wanted to do that and I wanted to make people feel like he made me feel at that moment. It was like a third eye opening about maybe I could do this. And the album, when I sit down and write a song, I am not thinking about production really. I just kind of write the song, me and my guitar, and then that’s the song. My partner, Dakota McDaniel, produced most of the record. It’s such a natural working. … It’s been so easy getting to the right final form of the song with Dakota and I’m really thankful that that worked out. For the record, we were listening to Big Thief and Buck Meek and Jake Xerxes Fussell. Jake was a huge inspiration with the instrumentation we used. It was a very steel-heavy approach.

I can hear that for sure.

It’s called Cruel Joke. What do people need to know about this album from your perspective?

I think from the beginning, with any of my music in general, I just don’t want people to feel alone in anything. I am a real deep feeler, so sometimes I feel like it’s just the tip of the iceberg with sad songs in the mainstream. I feel like they’re not as sad as they could be. I try to make people not feel so alone in those really deep feelings, just because I’ve kind of had to feel that.

Your songs definitely cut pretty deep, emotionally. Have you always been the type of person to root around inside yourself and stir things up?

Oh, yeah. Yes. I grew up very quickly and I had a lot of adult-sized feelings as a kid that I didn’t really know how to deal with. And dealing with these unresolved childhood feelings later on is not for the weak. I feel like everyone goes through it, and I’ve really always tried to stay in touch with just how I’m feeling, or what goes on in my head. Songwriting is how I feel like I do that.

You’ve had some big things happening, like with Twisters and being on the road with John Moreland. How do you feel about today’s appetite for the music you make? Are we ready for another folk revival?

That’s a great question. I really think we are in for a new wave of music, just because I feel like going country is as popular as anything right now. Everybody is going country, which can be a little disheartening. It’s not super genuine on some fronts, but I’m really excited for people to explore the genre and I hope people who explore the genre take a deep dive on where it comes from and who were the pioneers, because it has so much history. I feel like country and bluegrass and folk music have so much history.

I read that you wrote one of these songs at 13, right? Does it still speak to you or still feel true?

Yeah, totally. It’s “Grey Skies.” I remember that being the first song I was ever proud of and I think that’s really special to have still around. Even though I might get tired of it, I have to remember my 13-year-old self was proud of it. But yeah, that was also the first time I feel like I really found “my thing” with writing. I included a lot of imagery with nature and animals and that was the first time I was like, “Maybe this is kind of my vein.”

Tell me about “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothes.” This one is a love song, but which person is the hidden wolf?

Oh, gosh. … Everyone laughs, because I say it’s a love song and then it’s called “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothes.” So it’s kind of like, “Well, is it?” But it definitely is. The person I’m writing to is a protector of some sorts, can see through all of the bullshit in the world that maybe I can’t see sometimes, and has my best interest. Whenever this wolf, whoever or whatever it may be, when the dark parts of life come around, this person can kind of clear through it and say, “You’re just a dog. Just get out of here, shoo.”

That’s interesting. How about “Coyote” with John Moreland? You guys toured together and I love the idea of looking at yourself like a coyote, sort of scared of the world. Why do you feel that?

I actually asked John to be a part of this before we started touring together and it was a huge deal for me, because I’ve been a fan of him for so long. I went out on a limb and texted him like, “Hey, I have this song and totally chill if you don’t want to do it, but I figured I would just stick my arm out and ask if you wanted to be a part of it?” And I think that he just said, “Yeah.” And I was like, “Okay, cool.” So that was a really cool thing.

That song was– so, my mamaw gave me the name [ᎤᏍᏗ ᏀᏯ ᏓᎶᏂᎨ ᎤᏍᏗᎦ], which means Little Wolf, but she called me Coyote. That was a big thing, because coyotes are not the greatest omen at all. They’re kind of like the trickster. So I grew up a little bit and remembered that that was my nickname and I was not happy with myself at that point. I think it was two or three years ago. I was just like, “Man, I need to do something different, because this is not who I want to start being or get on this path. I just don’t feel comfortable in my skin.” So I wrote a song. I wrote the song “Coyote” kind of being all right that I can be the coyote and also be the person I wanted to be.

Did it help?

Yeah, absolutely. I think so.

That’s good. How about “Cicadas.” This is one of the most energetic songs, in my opinion, and it’s got this line in there about the cicadas crying out to you. Why were they crying to you?

“Cicadas” was actually the first song that we recorded when we started the record. We weren’t even sure if we were going to do a record, but after that song, [we knew]. It was such an experience, because the ending of the song, when it kind of goes back and forth, that was a total accident. I did not mean to do that, but beautiful things kept happening in this song just completely by accident, so it was a really great sign of reassurance that we were doing something in the right direction. I was so, so worried. I had been working on my music for a bit, and I was like, “Man, I really hope this is the one.” … I wrote that song as I was about to turn 20 years old, and cicadas were always a constant in my childhood. That was one of the only constants that I just knew 100 percent they were going to be there every summer. And I wanted a reminder of that a little bit, just to maybe prove to myself, that there was something stable.

“Innocent Eyes” is such a beautiful track about, I guess, looking back on life with clarity. When you look back, what does the story look like?

Yeah, so “Innocent Eyes” is totally about taking off the rose-colored glasses. Looking back at some of the things you had gone through growing up, or even looking at your parents in a different way. Growing up, it’s really difficult to just see parents as people. “Innocent Eyes” is when you’re a kid, you think your parents can do no wrong and they’re there for you and that they want everything the best for you. And then you grow up and you realize they’re just people. They’re just people that had a kid. And in my case, I was a complete accident and kind of a product of something very quick, and so I was not necessarily meant to be here. And the two people that brought me here did not love each other whatsoever. And so I looked back at that wondering how that shaped me a little bit. And I think that’s where the song started.

Photo Credit: Kali Spitzer

Zach Top’s TV Debut

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

If it seems like Zach Top has been everywhere lately, it’s because he has. Not only because he and his band are staring down a packed summer full of tour dates all across the country, but he’s also coming off of his first Academy of Country Music Award win – snagging the New Male Artist of the Year trophy while also being nominated for Album of the Year – and then immediately turning around to perform on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The appearance was his late night television debut, after his stunner of a traditional country album, Cold Beer & Country Music, was released to widespread acclaim – from critics and audiences alike – just over a year ago in spring 2024. The project continues to build momentum and gain thousands and thousands of new listeners for the picker-songwriter-upstart.

Top and band performed “I Never Lie” on Fallon, certainly the viral hit sensation of Cold Beer & Country Music. Shortly after his television appearance, the track, which is already RIAA certified Platinum, topped the country charts, becoming the number one country single in the country (and Canada) according to Mediabase. It’s Top’s very first number one.

“I Never Lie” is a classic yet modern take on a well-known country songwriter trope, the “of course I’m not lying” or “opposite day” type of rhetorical device that’s been employed by country artists and songsmiths since the genre began. Top’s spin on this iconic sort of country song setup is almost divine in its execution, as evidenced by his audiences – from humble honky-tonks to packed rodeo arenas – shouting along with the song at the tops of their lungs each and every time it’s performed.

This will surely not be the last television appearance or country award for Top, who leverages his bluegrass family band upbringing and longtime idolization of heroes like Tony Rice and Keith Whitley to craft a style of Good Country that’s forward-looking and timeless at the same time. With a wink, a smile, a first-rate mustache-mullet combo, and a “Zach Top Hop,” this still-fresh country superstar is sure to continue making an impact all across roots music well into the future. From country to bluegrass and back again.

We hope you enjoy Zach Top’s performance of “I Never Lie” on The Tonight Show. Don’t forget to make your plans now to catch Top and his incredible band on their mighty summer tour, too.

Read our 2024 exclusive Good Country interview from with Zach Top here.

BGS 5+5: Olivia Wolf

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Welcome to another 5+5! Hit play, scroll, and get to know artists, creators, and roots musicians of all sorts with five questions and five songs.)

Artist: Olivia Wolf
Hometown: Leipers Fork, Tennessee
Latest Album: Silver Rounds

Which artist has influenced you the most – and how?

Gillian Welch. She has shown me that lyrics can be both beautiful and dark, honest and true. Her instrumentation is brilliantly simple and to see her play live is to transcend to a different plane.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

We played “The Wild” in Seattle, and I asked if anybody had gone fishing that day. A fella had been out that morning and caught three coho salmon. When the song started he closed his eyes and I knew he was back on the ocean in the breeze and the water. I love to see other people getting to escape through my music.

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

Photography, antiquing and home décor design, cooking, and hosting friends.

What is a genre, album, artist, musician, or song that you adore that would surprise people?

I love Daft Punk. Especially their song “Something About Us.” They influenced a lot of the cosmic aspect of my album and I greatly admire their lyrics and musicality.

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

There is nothing I could do instead, I am married to the music.

Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Julie Williams’ Star Rises

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“I like to say my music is mixed, like me,” laughs Julie Williams, a queer, biracial Nashville-based songwriter who happens to be one of the strongest new voices to emerge in country music this decade. “I grew up loving ‘90s country, but before I moved to Nashville I didn’t necessarily think I could make that music. I didn’t think I had a place in the genre. I had so many other influences too – like the Indigo Girls, James Taylor, and other folk music – so I thought that would be more my world. But the song that changed everything for me was ‘Southern Curls.’ I was like, whoa, this is undeniably a country song, and it feels more like me than anything else I’ve ever written.”

Released back in 2021, “Southern Curls” was a breakout single for Williams and continues to inform her subsequent work in a lot of ways. Like many of the best country songs, the track flirts with an existing trope while flipping it entirely on its head, invoking the texture of her own Black hair as a foil to disrupt the traditional image of coiffed ringlets favored by white southern belles. Williams uses her hair as a gateway to discuss the still prevalent differences between how Black and white women are treated in this country, particularly in the South, and opens the conversation with a matter-of-fact account of her personal experience.

It’s a simple, riveting song, intimate and singular, but also broad enough to provide desperately needed representation for a whole diaspora of Black female artists who, like Williams, have had a hard time making space for themselves in the predominantly whitewashed genre of mainstream country. Almost immediately, the track earned the attention of fellow Black country artist and Apple Music host Rissi Palmer, who named Williams to her 2021 Color Me Country cohort, and also caught the ear of the Black Opry, who invited the young artist to join the collective on stage and on tour in 2022.

Following this up with a self-titled EP in 2023, an appearance on a PBS special about Black women in country, and a performance at Newport Folk Festival, Williams joined the CMT Next Women of Country Class of 2023. Now, she’s touring behind another new EP, Tennessee Moon, which includes a new version of the impactful song. Williams is excited about the prospect of expanding her sound – and her writing voice – even further.

“‘Southern Curls’ gave me the bravery to write songs that feel authentic to me,” Williams says. “From there, I’ve been really lucky to work with some incredible people, like my partner Jonathan Smalt, who produced my new EP, Tennessee Moon. This is a big release for me in that it feels like an arrival.”

Another part of that feeling? Williams and “Southern Curls” were featured prominently as part of a new documentary on Hulu, It’s All Country, which features legends like Luke Combs, Wynonna Judd, and Sheryl Crow, plus a never-before-seen performances from Williams herself.

While out on tour behind Tennessee Moon, which released in October, Williams called in to speak with Good Country from the road. She talked about her experience shifting from the world of public policy to the music industry, all things ’90s country, navigating the bounds of folk and other genres in her sound, and those deeply felt, close friendships that might have always been more than… just friends.

What was your relationship to country music like when you were growing up?

Julie Williams: My mom used to play a lot of ‘90s country in the car, artists like The Chicks, Shania Twain, Trisha Yearwood, and Sara Evans – but especially The Chicks. I’ve been thinking a lot about them recently, especially in the last few weeks [since the presidential election]. A huge part of my musical introduction was around the time when The Chicks were kicked off country radio. Their song, “Not Ready To Make Nice,” I remember my mom explaining the lyrics to me. That was really where my love for storytelling and lyrics came from.

I noticed the lyrics in your songs right away, they’re not filler or frivolous, they’re stories.

I always thought people would only want to listen to me if I was playing the songs they already knew and loved. Once I started writing, I realized my stories have value. Growing up in Florida, I’d sing covers of Jimmy Buffett and Tom Petty, whatever songs I thought would get me the tips from the snowbirds. I didn’t go to school for music, I went to Duke University and studied public policy. I wanted to work for a non-profit and become a lawyer. But we had a student record label I was a part of, Small Town Records, and that was the first time I got the chance to start writing my own songs. I started to see the power in my own story.

How did you make the jump from studying public policy back into music?

I wanted the work I did to make somebody’s life just a little bit better, but I didn’t realize I could do that with music too. Some of the things I cared a lot about, too – issues of race, queer issues, and women’s issues – how do you get people to care about them? Part of it is through telling stories that move people. I soon realized I didn’t have to sit behind a desk all day and be a policy analyst. Music can also get me in spaces and in front of people that I wouldn’t be around.

Is there an artist who has a career path that you’d like to follow in the industry?

I’ve always been such a fan of Kacey Musgraves and the way that she’s always stood up for what she believes in. She’s never backed down in that, and she’s always put herself in her songs. Part of it is about love and heartbreak, but it’s also about following your arrow, and being yourself. Even the ways in which she’s created a whole new sound in country and in folk with Golden Hour. I fell in love with that album when it came out. I’ve always looked up to the way she can capture the simplest feelings of being a human in her songs.

How do you feel about your music as country or as folk? There are so many other elements to it, and you have a very layered, textured sound.

I have so many influences that aren’t from country, but pairing all of those things creates that mixed sound that really feels like me. As an artist, I’m constantly thinking about “How am I going to market this?” or “What genre is this going to be in?” and that can sometimes feel limiting. I don’t think my music would fit into a traditional pop-country radio sound, but I don’t think it fully fits into other genres either. I’m just trying to make what feels good for me.

How does Tennessee Moon fit into your current discography? It feels like another level.

It’s definitely a big release for me. That’s a testament to being here in Nashville for a few years and trying things out. Every time I put out music or write a song, I hope there’s going to be better ones that keep coming. “Tennessee Moon” was a really special one for me. It started with a film photo that I took of an ex while we were kayaking at Percy Priest lake at sunset. That relationship didn’t work out, but I took the photo to a co-write with a friend of mine, Melody Walker. I said, “I want to write a song that feels like this picture,” and I knew everything else was going to be around that song.

“Just Friends” is another one of my favorite songs on Tennessee Moon, and it seems like so many people relate to the experience of the blurred line between best friends and something more. How did it feel to address that?

I wrote this one with Melody Walker as well and it’s also one of my favorites. I love women, and I realized that I can love anyone regardless of their gender identity. I came to that realization in my twenties, but now that I know who I am – and who I love – I was looking back at a specific friendship of mine. Retrospectively, I realized I had a crush on this person. I was in love with this person. But getting the chance to create a pretty sapphic music video felt like ripping the band-aid off as far as talking about my queer identity in my songs. I hadn’t done that before. I’m really excited to write and put out music freely now.

Photo Credit: Chase Denton