A Country Way of Life

There are quite a few key stalwarts of the UK country scene: Gary Quinn, who set up Buckle & Boots; Luke Thomas, reliable guitarist and producer of revue shows; Gasoline & Matches, who bring songwriters to Birmingham every month; and Two Ways Home, who went all over the country with their Round Up night this past spring. Matt Spracklen, MC extraordinaire and sometime performer is another, as is Eddy Smith, who accompanied Matt on keyboards at a gig at the Camden Club last July.

Eddy returned to that venue with his band, who met at Kingston University and rehearsed in room 507, which is how they got their name. Two years behind schedule, Eddy and co. launched their debut album Right Up Til Now in front of a sold-out packed house. I remember watching the band’s 2022 set at Buckle & Boots from the top deck of the repurposed bus and being wowed at the quality of musicianship and Eddy’s measured vocals. I am certain he gained new fans during festival season 2023, which included a stop at The Long Road. That will have been a perfect venue for his band’s gumbo of blues, soul, rock, country and what we must call Americana.

Eddy produced the album himself, sending it off to be mastered in LA. He told me when we spoke over summer that by the time he mixed the tenth song he had to go back and re-mix the first few. He has rolled out the first half of the album track by track over the last two years, allowing fans to familiarise themselves with the songs. These include the mysterious Ballad of Bobby Grey, a song full of pathos and empathy for a girl who mourns her mum; ‘some say they’ve seen her sail on the horizon’ is a vivid line.

The song Love Sick (‘like a baby I’m bawling’) was the fifth impact track and has been by far the most popular, with 350,000 Spotify plays thanks to its hooky melody and swing feel; don’t spend those PRS pennies all at once, Eddie! Album opener The Good Times had been the album’s first single back in June 2021; it hits a new gear in a jubilant final minute which captures their effervescent live sound.

It feels unfair to call Hope Winter a backing vocalist when she deserves a featured credit. You can hear her gentle harmony vocals on Ticket Out of Here – where Eddy’s narrator is ‘moving on to brighter days’ and which Eddy said onstage is the band’s purest country moment – and on album closer Fool. On that track, Eddy offers his complaints as his fingers pick out chords on his keyboard. For extra emphasis, there are stabs of Wurlitzer organ. The gig included Joe Glossop acting as accompanying organist in the same way that the tall rhythm player Ricky O’Donnell supports lead guitarist Ashley Webb, who offers some slide guitar befitting of a bluesy rock band.

Something For Free is a conversation with a taxman with a country feel, on whose studio version Ashley adds flecks of harmonica. Ashley is given a writing credit on that song and on two others: My Time Again, where the instruments and voices assemble to stir the soul; and Rainey Street, a heartbreak tune in a major key where the guitar gently weeps. I hope the packed Camden Club liked the rhyme of ‘Austin/often’ as much as I did; it shows that Eddy can write a lyric as well as sing it.

The wedding song I Don’t Remember Telling You I Loved You (‘but baby that don’t mean that it ain’t true’) has pedal steel guitar from Cristiano Pochesci on the record to enhance its gorgeous feel. Daze uses the homophone ‘I’ve been here for days’ to hook the listener, and Eddy offers a nice ‘woo!’ to introduce some handclaps and cowbell. There’s also a nice bluesy finish to show that they have done their homework.

Before the band came onstage to play Right Up Til Now more or less in its entirety, the audience were treated to songs by The Strokes, Foals, Franz Ferdinand, The Arcade Fire and Tame Impala. All of these acts make rock music, and although the venue may have chosen the songs rather than the band, it did speak volumes that it was this genre rather than anything country or even country-rock that whetted appetites for the band. Special mention also goes to Ed Tattersall, who was a terrific opening act full of vim and very fine vocals.

In a year when the two big stars of country music (Wallen and Combs) sound like rockstars of old, Eddy Smith & The 507 are welcome at country and roots festivals. They have a well-defined sound of their own and the musical chops to back it up; I liked how drummer Josh Davies put up three fingers to denote three quaver beats to end one song. Forget artificial music with programmed sentiments; Eddy and his band have put blood, sweat, toil and tears into this remarkable collection.

The album is available on Bandcamp in CD and vinyl formats. I am certain that a tour will follow, but for now you can catch Eddy supporting Laura Evans at Pizza Express in Holborn on October 23.

Eighteen months ago, reviewing his last album Blue In The Sky, I wrote that Dustin Lynch was ‘a squeaky-clean country star who makes wholesome music for a country radio demographic, a cross between McGraw and Aldean’. He still is, and his new album Killed The Cowboy offers 12 more demonstrations of that description.

His long-time producer Zach Crowell is behind the board again. He is the Dave Cobb to DL’s Chris Stapleton, the man trusted with converting good songs into great recordings. He struck gold with Small Town Boy and Sam Hunt’s Body Like A Back Road: there is a majestic sheen and shimmer to the former and lots of ambient background voices on the latter. Both records pop, to use the technical term, and that extends into the tunes on Killed The Cowboy.

DL gets five credits on the album where he was joined in the writers’ room (or on the tour bus) by top talent who have written songs for Morgan Wallen. Hunter Phelps and Ben Johnson were there for both Honky Tonk Heartbreaker, a spoken-sung meet-cute with a massive chorus that quotes Sweet Caroline in the first verse, and Listen to the Radio. That song panders to DL’s friends in legacy broadcast media who have played his music in between beer commercials for a decade. Indeed, only Body Like A Back Road was played more than Small Town Boy on country radio across 2017. Zach Crowell must have bought a very nice house with the PRS cheques.

Three of the outside writes are from Devin Dawson, whose rocking country is a perfect match for DL’s voice. The title track, which was also composed with indie-country musician Anderson East in the room, has a processed drum loop and arpeggiated guitar part over which DL complains about a girl who broke his heart. Only Girl In This Town is a power ballad that would have fit snugly onto Devin’s album Dark Horse, updated with modern production; ‘whatever the moonlight touches is yours’ is a good line even though it sounds like Mufasa is chatting someone up.

As is common to every major-label release, Ashley Gorley gets his credit on the perky Trouble With This Truck; take a guess at what’s missing from it. In a similar vein DL has also been given three of the many, many other heartbreak songs written on Music Row: If I Stop Drinkin’ (‘I’ll start thinkin’ maybe I’ll hit you up’), Breakin’ Up Down (‘we ain’t got forever figured out’) and Blue Lights (‘can’t put enough miles between you and me in these country lines’).

There’s nothing wrong with the production or the vocals but it’s so hard to find a new angle on small-town heartache. Maybe they should put new words over an existing melody, since it made the writers of She Had Me At Heads Carolina so much money. Tracks like that and DL’s song Chevrolet have such little artistic kudos to them, but if this is how an act can get people to listen to a full album and buy concert tickets, then the strategy might work.

I imagine the writers – Phelps, Chase McGill and Jessi Alexander – swallowed their pride and took the commission, rewriting the words to Dobie Gray’s old song Drift Away. Zach Crowell adds that ambient background chatter and Jelly Roll appears on the second verse. Kyle at Saving Country Music set the song in opposition to acts like Zach Bryan, calling Chevrolet ‘the last dying gasp of Music Row songwriting by committee’ (he’s got a point). But DL can still exist in a world full of full-throated fellas with guitars; he might not sell as many records as Zach does, but there’s an audience for Dustin Lynch which has been created by ten years of radio hits about small town boys who are thinkin’ ‘bout you.

Remember all those songs from 2013-15 about sliding over to your girl in the truck? George Strait Jr. updates that theme for the Wallen era, with DL sat in a Silverado enjoying time together that is ‘getting better by the minute’. He feels like the ‘king of this king cab’ on a great road song which will remind fans of Ridin’ Roads and about 20 Jason Aldean songs.

Far better are two songs near the end of the album. Lone Star is a (literally) brilliant love song with some quirky chords which praise a girl who is ‘one in 100 billion, couldn’t even keep it hidden if you tried’. It’s more McGraw than Aldean and I hope it gets sent to radio. If not that, then Long Way Home, which DL co-wrote and has an effortless melody that recalls his best work. It fits in the pocket of the same Nashville Pop sound that Dan + Shay and Kelsea Ballerini do well: melodic, involving the listener and painting a pretty picture of contentment.

There’s something for everyone on this album, which will be cherrypicked by fans who can choose their own adventure, whether Aldeanish break-up ballads or supremely melodic McGrawish tunes. We all know which song will get the most streams, though, and it’s not one of the 11 original melodies. What a damning indictment of a certain type of modern country music.

Alex Hall – Side Effects of the Heart

I saw Alex Hall standing with his guitar watching a band on the Big Entrance Stage at the 2022 edition of Country2Country. I didn’t want to disturb him but I would have gone up to him and said, ‘I love your track Half Past You!’ That song came out in the middle of 2019 on Monument Records, which is run by the great Shane McAnally who co-wrote Half Past You.

Then, way back in February 2021, Alex put out an EP called Six Strings which was full of collaborations: Vince Gill, Brad from Old Dominion, John Osborne, Brad Paisley and his mates Kassi Ashton and Tenille Townes. Five months ago, the brilliant title track to Alex’s debut album launched the project. Every aspect of the song was perfect: lyric, production, mood, harmony and structure. It’ll place high up on the Festive Fifty in December.

The album is sort of a cross between Old Dominion and Charlie Worsham, and three more tracks followed the title track as a sampler of the full album. Two of them were written with Brandy Clark: she appears on Women and Horses (‘don’t fence in her freedom, leave the gate open’) and adds gravitas to Dad Now, Alex’s autobiographical story of fatherhood that is the album’s most Worshamesque tune. ‘Go from knowing it all to knowing I don’t know much’ is the kind of line that will appeal to anyone about to be a dad in the next few months.

Radio Waves is a reminiscin’ song that namechecks The Boys of Summer and recalls ‘magic cutting through the static’. For The Love is Alex’s spin on Doin’ This by Luke Combs, a musician’s credo with a sensitive musical setting, while I’m Coming Back is another feelgood chugger with some good drum work and strong vocals.

I Know A Guy is another McAnally co-write, which you can guess thanks to its smooth melody and gentle arrangement, as well as how the narrator playing down his own abilities. He gets his girl in the end and can take Denim & Diamonds off her in the song of that name; the listener, helped by the sultry 12/8 time signature, can fill in the gaps.

Easy On A Heart chugs along and gets the toes tapping despite the gloomy prospect of a break-up. It is perhaps a bit too indebted to Don’t Let Our Love Start Slippin’ Away for my liking but it proves Alex has done his homework. It was a lovely surprise to see the name Jillian Jacqueline in the credits; perhaps it’s her on backing vocals too.

Her To Here is another break-up song full of vivid imagery and the sort of chromatically descending chord progression that soothes the soul. Something by George Harrison does much the same, and I hope Alex enjoys the comparison to another guitar-playing singer/songwriter.

Brent Cobb – Southern Star

Dave Cobb’s cousin was apparently persuaded to move to Nashville by Luke Bryan. In 2018 he was opening for Chris Stapleton, a man with taste and a songwriter himself. Brent’s outstanding sixth album is his third with Thirty Tigers, who like Big Loud never put out a dud.

‘On’t Know When (with no D) mixes folk, rock and country much like the music of The Band, so the easiest thing to do is to call Brent an Americana artist. Devil Ain’t Done, which shares a similar arrangement, is an outside write whose narrator has ‘one foot in the graveyard, one on an old barstool’.

I involuntarily went ‘oh!’ when I heard the keyboard that introduces the title track. Brent’s narrator ‘can always count on’ his guiding star even as he drifts about the place, his mind like ‘kudzu vines’. Miss Ater is a delightful and melancholy story song whose protagonists live in a town that ‘God forgot to finish’, while album closer Shade Tree is one of several free, easy songs on the album that, like the TV show Seinfeld, are about nothing.

The others include Livin’ The Dream and Kick The Can, where a harmonica chimes in throughout. It’s A Start is a song of contentment where the mood matches the ‘burning firewood’ in the chorus. Brent wrote it with his dad Patrick and his wife Layne, the latter of who wrote the triple-time ballad Patina which opens with the line ‘I got one hand on the wheel and one on your thigh’.

When Country Came Back To Town is the album’s centrepiece, a five-minute audio essay on independent country musicians, many of whom have been produced by ‘cousin Dave’ Cobb who proved that ‘simple truths and music’ are always hot. I like the line in the second verse about folk sometimes being ‘too cautious to commit’ to country. I’d love to ask Brent what exactly this means!

Brent’s rollcall is impressive: Miranda Lambert (who ‘kept the beat inside the heart’), Jamey Johnson, Sturgill Simpson, Kacey Musgraves, Brandi Carlile, Shooter Jennings, Cody Canada and ‘Chris and Morgane’ Stapleton. All have thrived as Music Row had more or less ‘burned to ash’.

Cobb offers a cheat sheet for indie country newbies, pointing them towards Tyler Childers, Cody Jinks, Margo Price, Whitey Morgan, Adam Hood, Sarah Shook, Elizabeth Cook, Paul Cauthen, Luke Combs, Jason Isbell, Jason Eady, Courtney Patton, Mike and the Moonpies, Turnpike Troubadours, Colter Wall and Charley Crockett, who himself put out a live album the day Southern Star was released.

Go forth and educate yourself, Brent nudges the listener, modestly leaving his own name off the list.

Two young singer/songwriters put EPs out in the middle of September. One of them, Tyler Booth, is signed to Sony Music; the other, Abby Anderson, used to be, via the Black River imprint which has funded Kelsea Ballerini’s career. Indeed, Kelsea co-wrote a song that was on her 2018 EP I’m Good, which I liked but which Abby has more or less disowned for not being right for the artist she wanted to be.

Abby Anderson – First To Hit The Road

You may remember Abby Anderson best from her ballad Make Him Wait, which she wrote with Tom Douglas, a songwriting hero of Stephen Wilson Jr (whose new album is reviewed here). She was also on a cover of the song Shallow with Jimmie Allen and I loved her song Good Lord. She also supported Brett Eldredge and Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20; in fact, when I was in New York City in 2019, I almost booked tickets to see Abby and Rob but chose to see Mean Girls the musical instead. Had it not been for the pandemic, she would have been part of the Introducing Nashville element of C2C 2020.

Having left Black River, Abby returned in 2022 with a nine-track album called Sugar Spice, which she follows up with an EP called First To Hit The Road. Ain’t Gone Yet, a slice of self-reflection where Abby looks back on her wide-eyed younger self, appears in studio and live form with Abby singing over piano chords on the latter.

She can do ballads like that song and Highway Cry, and she can do Tenille Townes-like pop/rock like This Guy, where Abby chastises a lady in a bad relationship (‘why the hell are you with this guy’ is the hook). The title track is a break-up song where Abby ‘couldn’t close the distance even when you were right there’ (great line). The melody and the singer’s voice both soar up for the chorus of The Reason I Stay, with images of lassos and parachutes in the second verse and an arrangement that is full of tambourine.

Heart On Fire In Mexico was the first song from the EP to come out, a story song about a ‘Juarez beauty flirting with a GI Joe off duty’. They conceived a child but the soldier disappeared. Sadness pervades the melody and the lyric, with the image of ‘a wild-eyed senorita becomes a desperate mamacita’. The song, like the rest of the EP, deserves a wide audience.

Tyler Booth – Set It Off

Like Chris Stapleton, (Jason) Tyler Booth comes from the state of Kentucky. He also has major label backing, and after playing this year’s Country2Country he was back in the UK for The Long Road to launch the Keep It Real EP, on a tour which took him from Manchester to London to Glasgow to Omagh in Northern Ireland. He’s yet another chap with a lot of rock influence on his sound, and he’s been out on tour with Big Loud artist Jake Owen.

The EP is produced by Beau Bedford, who is best known for working with Texan outlaw Paul Cauthen, whose voice Tyler reminds me of. It is one of those sonorous deep baritones that have often appeared in commercial country music, like Toby Keith or indeed Jake Owen, although the modern-day voice of Axl Rose is an equally good comparison.

I Got Paid must have been influenced by hanging out with Jake. A beach jam that is led by a mandolin, it includes what must be the first major-label country song with ‘sushi rolls’ in the lyric. Listen out for the line ‘Went from laminate floors to suicide doors’, which I can confirm is a type of car door that opens up from the back which would force the passenger to lean out of the vehicle to close.

Tyler ticks off typical moods and themes on the EP. There’s a fun barroom jam called My Favorite Drink (‘is a lot’), where chunky guitars and an even chunkier blues harmonica solo help the narrator in his quest to get drunk. Real Real Country is a rapid-fire rural checklist: PBR, Johnny Cash, shotguns, ’30 rack on ice’, hard work, dirt, Skoal rings and, of course, ‘the good Lord’.

GOB by the GOG is a heck of a title. It stands for Good Ole Boy by the Grace of God, so we know Tyler is a country musician who ‘ain’t ashamed’ and has ‘dirt on these jeans’. Unlike the alcohol that is namechecked on My Favourite Drink, I can only imagine he had to change ‘Kentucky fried chicken’ to ‘chicken fried chicken’ due to trademark issues, but I bet that was in the original lyric. He also drops his hometown in the line ‘Straight outta Campton’, which every magazine piece ought to use as a headline.

There are two break-up songs on the EP, a pedestrian one called Different Kind of Blue and a career song called Bring on the Neon. Tyler wrote the latter with Jamey Johnson, another possessor of a rich baritone who seems to be a key figure in moving Oliver Anthony from viral video to superstar. It’s a ponderous ballad where our narrator is ‘blinded by the beams…caught up dancing to the beat of my own dreams’. That is a killer of a line and proves that Tyler is better off as a single guy on the road than repeatedly letting down his beloved.

The depth of talent in Nashville is absurd. Even though Wallen and Combs are selling out big arenas here, we still have time for Abby Anderson and Tyler Booth, who offer precision-engineered music delivered by their trained voices.

I was wondering when Big Loud were going to open an office in London. On September 14, three months before Wallen Comes To Town, they announced that Cayleigh Shepherd is to be the point of contact. She moves across from Snakefarm, a subsidiary label of Universal Music that is the home of Brothers Osborne, Caylee Hammack and any number of cool guys. Eric Church, Darius Rucker, Dierks Bentley, Jon Pardi, Jordan Davis, Josh Turner, Kip Moore, Luke Bryan, Marty Stuart, Parker McCollum and Vince Gill are all listed on the website, all of whom have come (or would have come if they hadn’t pulled out of The Long Road) to Britain in the last decade.

At Big Loud Cayleigh now has the best job in UK music. She represents a label who have not just dominated 2023 but have shown that independent music can co-exist with the big three major labels and beat them at their own game. It’s a Big Loud world now.

There was never any doubt that the new albums from Charles Wesley Godwin and Stephen Wilson Jr were going to be any good. Both signed to Big Loud in March, attracted by the success they have had with Morgan Wallen. Charles is from West Virginia, Stephen from Indiana, and both will go out on the road to play to bigger audiences in this album cycle.

Charles will spend next summer opening for Luke Combs in stadiums and fields, while Stephen has had a fun summer supporting first Hailey Whitters then Joss Stone. He launched Søn of Dad by opening for fellow Big Loud act Larry Fleet at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, and he will spend December opening for The Lone Bellow.

Stephen Wilson Jr – Søn of Dad

In this Holler Country feature, Stephen talks about being floored, even ‘teleported’, by Tim McGraw’s modern standard Don’t Take The Girl. Songs like that make the listener both ‘star and director’, and he realised songwriting was ‘a craft…like a table or a house or a tractor’. Incredibly, Stephen’s first hold came from McGraw, although the song didn’t go on to make an album.

Unsurprisingly from how this album sounds, it is a product of Stephen’s love of Poe’s poems and Stephen King’s stories. Soundgarden taught him how to rock, Willie Nelson how to sing, and Craig Wiseman was one of his songwriting gurus. Instead of moving up to middle management as Mars, he is now contracted to Wiseman’s label Big Loud (named after his shirts). They are, indeed, the Mars of independent country music.

It helps to think of Søn of Dad as the kind of project Luke Combs is wont to do. Luke’s second album was preceded and followed by an EP’s worth of tracks, extending the life of the project to match his touring schedule. To that end, we already know seven of the 22 tracks on Stephen’s album from their appearance on his EP Bon Aqua, which came out in April to accompany the announcement of his move to Big Loud. Although they have a rock label as well as a country one, Stephen is signed to the latter.

I particularly liked The Beginning, which ends the album as it ended the EP, as well as the Hailey Whitters co-write American Gothic and the moody penpic Billy.

Some of the new tracks have been written with some of Stephen’s fellow top writers. Travis Meadows and Jeffrey Steele wrote Cuckoo with him, which is good fun thanks to its tongue-twisting lyrics, with Steele also helping out on the itchy, melodic Patches (‘grateful is good’) and Grief is Only Love (‘that’s got no place to go’).  

That last song and Werewolf both remind me of late-period Bruce Springsteen because of the mood and the vocal delivery. I am positive I am not the only listener who has drawn this comparison. Hang In There, by virtue of being a solo acoustic number about persevering, cannot help but make me think of Nebraska, Bruce’s acoustic album.

Elsewhere, Not Letting Go and For What It’s Worth (‘you can’t put a price on this kind of love’) segue nicely into each other. They are two of many tracks where the guitar is tuned down so that there is extra resonance in the bottom E string. Ditto Henry, a song in the vein of Elvie Shane’s My Boy where Stephen’s narrator has paternal pride even if, he sings, ‘it don’t matter what you call me’.

You is a slow ballad in 12/8 which shows Stephen can write a love song, even one with this year’s most popular word in country music: ‘skillet’. Mighty Beast is gnarly (‘I forged my hands in the fire’), Calico Creek reaches to the skies with some mighty shouts of ‘hey!’, and Twisted has the percussive acoustic guitar thrum and upwardly melodic chorus of the Dierks Bentley song Burning Man. In fact, Dierks fans will love this album.

Josh Kerr, who is married to Tae off of Maddie & Tae (and mazaltov to Maddie on her new sprog!), brings his nous to Father’s Søn, on which Stephen sings about his late father over a woozy sonic bed: ‘I left town just to get out of his shadow’ is a good line. Kid is a Lori McKenna co-write, and you can tell it is. With a cello accompanying the lyric, Stephen sings of youthful irresponsibility. The chorus climaxes in ‘who are you trying to kid?’ This is masterful music. And to think we almost lost Stephen to corporate life.

Charles Wesley Godwin – Family Ties

No such problems arose with Charles Wesley Godwin, who has already put out two independent releases. That Wallen money convinced him, or must have convinced him, to partner with the label. The title track opens the album proper, after an overture, and contains a similar sort of chorus, in melody and delivery, to those of Zach Bryan.

It is lazy of me to compare the two but, given that Wallen has also brought in a host of acts who sound like him, it is easy for Big Loud to say to people who haven’t gotten ahead of the game, ‘If you like Zach Bryan, why not try Charles Wesley Godwin?’ This must be what happened in 1964 when Bob Dylan brought the sound of the Greenwich Village folk scene to record players across America. I wonder who will be this generation’s Peter, Paul & Mary.

In fact, rather than comparing Zach Bryan to Kurt Cobain, is he – and is Charles – not Dylan for a new era? It sounds polished yet alternative, mainstream yet rough around the edges. It’s anti-mainstream but creates a new path to follow. This path reaches back to old ones; tunes like Miner Imperfections tackle similar themes to the sort of American music that Dylan was making in his early years.

There’s also the argument that folk are turning back to the simple rural way of life in the face of a confused, addled world whose populace were led by a TV host for four years. I am not suggesting what these Appalachian folk singers are doing is Capital-P Political, but they unite people in a better way than, to pick a name at random, Ted Cruz can.

Charles’ set opener Cue Country Roads closes this third album as part of a segue into his set closer, John Denver’s deathless anthem. His own song has enormous handclap percussion and a strong riff which would segue nicely into Do I Wanna Know by Arctic Monkeys, except that Charles sings of ‘the whine of a fiddle and a banjo ring’. This is Big Loud country music in excelsis. Like Arctic Monkeys, Charles is a sort of corporate rocker now, even though Big Loud are independent of the major labels.

All Again was the big pre-released song from the album, which is wise because it is anchored by a toe-tapping beat and a lyric about hard times for ‘you, me and the babies’. It sounds like a Steinbeck short story set to music, as well as like Mumford & Sons but sung by a guy from West Virginia rather than a guy who dropped out of a Classics course having done his A-Levels at a posh private school in Wimbledon. Without the Mumfs, though, would a general audience have been prepared for Zach and Charles? Hmm.

There’s much to enjoy here: the rich double-stopped fiddle of Gabriel, the hootenanny singalong of That Time Again, the guitar twang of the road song Two Weeks Gone, the meditative nature of Dance in Rain (‘life will carve its lines in you’). Another Leaf ends with a flourish having changed tempo at least three times to literally wrongfoot the listener.

In the spirit of Appalachian songwriters, the narrator of Skyline Blues has ‘a darkness in me’ and is getting his ‘soul back on the mend’. The Flood brings in some tom-tom pounding and plaintive pipe to underscore a bleak narrative which stabs the listener in the chest and asks: ‘What will you do when the Lord comes?’ West of Lonesome (‘North of Insane’) is a more personal cry of anguish as the narrator wants his baby back, while Willing and Able is a love song where he is propelled towards his beloved by ‘something fierce’. In a great verse, he sings of her being ‘a soul-bursting sight…to my weary eyes it’s a feast’.

As with Stephen Wilson Jr’s record, there are plenty of moments which make me think of Bruce Springsteen’s solo acoustic work, so it makes sense that New Jersey and layoffs at its oil refineries are mentioned on 10-38, a song about law enforcement where the chorus leaps out: ‘You’re the reaper of the madness…Don’t you wanna step ‘em all’. Headwaters is a character song about a guy who travelled the world as a Marine and now looks forward to his resting place.

A piano-led version of Charles’ song Soul Like Mine, which was originally a guitar ballad put out by his band Union Sound Treaty, is also well-chosen given that the song is about a rocker ‘pushing towards neon signs with bad sound and small stages’. I get the feeling that Big Loud will give him expert sound engineers and enormous stages as he goes out with Luke Combs next summer.

Whatever Combs has started, Zach Bryan, Stephen Wilson Jr and Charles Wesley Godwin are continuing. This is the Big Loud Era of commercial country music.

Van Plating – Orange Blossom Child

Lainey Wilson has her own genre, Bell Bottom Country, and this month I argued that Morgan Wade and Ashley McBryde are Acceptable Rebels. Van Plating from Florida offers Orange Blossom Country, a mix of bluegrass and outlaw music. She is influenced by songwriters like Jeff Buckley and Tom Petty; the latter makes sense, as he remains Florida’s biggest contribution to rock’n’roll.

Van played fiddle at college and fronted the band Pemberley before going it alone. This third album, whose press release promises a ‘botanical wonderland’ with ‘harmonious alchemy’, ropes in a host of guests who add their voices to the project. Reckless Kelly appear on The Hard Way (‘is the only way that I know’), while Ottoman Turks (whose guitarist is Joshua Ray Walker) are on Joel Called The Ravens, which changes from 6/8 to 4/4 time to match the movement of the birds in the lyrics. Staying on an avian theme, The Heron has an infectious chorus and the vocals of Elizabeth Cook.

‘Good girls have edges that the boys can’t break’ is the key line in the title track which opens the album. The arrangement and guitars look back to the Lilith Fair movement of the 1990s, and the close-mic’d vocals will appeal to fans of Liz Phair and Sheryl Crow. The Sugar Palm Club’s chugging beat immediately recalls Crow’s best work, although the first voice we hear belongs to Shelby Lee Lowe complaining about a late arrival for a Friday night boogie and boasting of ‘a $5 bill in my polyester coat’.

They’re Gonna Kill You Anyway (so ‘fight till you’re dead’) is a rock’n’roll stomp with added bluegrass fiddle, which reappears on the more sedate country-rock of Jesus Saved Me on the Radio. Tom Petty gets a namecheck and Van’s vocals are both restrained and impassioned.

On Big Time Small Shot, Van plays the role of woman scorned and throws a great insult of ‘crooked-walkin’ over a rockabilly arrangement. Hole In My Chest (Big Feelings), meanwhile, is a break-up song led by acoustic guitar, with a gentle accordion piping away in the middle of the song for extra pathos. The melody of Zion is a Woman is mostly at the very top of Van’s range, which she reaches effortlessly with a high fiddle dancing alongside her.

The album ends with Joshua, which is not a Dolly Parton cover but an acoustic number with an open-eyed protagonist and Van’s narrator ‘waist deep in the river…asking for your love’. It rounds off a fully realised project that is the product of several influences which, to coin a phrase, form a harmonious alchemy. Never disbelieve a press release.

Bahamas – Bootcut

Afie Jurvanen is a Canadian who records as Bahamas. He is signed to Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records so he keeps good company, and he won the Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year in 2015. Previous winners include Gordon Lightfoot, Paul Anka, Bryan Adams, kd lang, Alanis Morrisette, Shania Twain, Nelly Furtado, Ron Sexsmith, Feist, Arcade Fire and, strangely not until 2013, Leonard Cohen. Afie was also nominated that year and in 2019, where he lost to Shawn Mendes. The Weeknd has won it for the last four years.

So now we know how good a songwriter Afie is. You can hear his track Done Did Me No Good in the new series of Ted Lasso, which is a useful sync to have and will help him afford some nice presents at Christmas. The recipients will be the girls who are heard ‘bugging’ him in the voice note that opens the album. After that introduction we get 10 tracks which Afie has found time to record in between daddy duties.

Just A Song is the first of these, a meta bit of writing which notes that ‘the radio now is just a tourist trap’. Weirdly it sounds like Jack Johnson singing a Ron Sexsmith song. Into The Unknown is not a cover of the song from the Frozen sequel but another high-quality Sexsmith-type toe-tapper with a small chorus of backing vocalists. The words ‘adolescent brain’ and ‘tongue-tied’ leap out of the lyric sheet. Sports Car (‘life’s better’ with one) is a mysterious reminiscin’ song where Afie runs with the metaphor and makes it melancholy.

The album was trailed by three singles: Somebody Just Like Me, a short and sweet piece of almost lovers’ rock with the line ‘not saying we should break any laws’; Second Time Around, a ballad with a rich palette of chords where Afie resolves to be a better lover; and Working on my Guitar (‘in some nightclub and some bars’), a toe-tapper with some pedal steel and a Vince Gill solo answering Afie’s acoustic guitar line.

Gill is one of three young upstarts guesting on the album. On Gone Girl Gone, Mickey Raphael’s harmonica complements the narrator’s joy in being ‘out of touch’ and ‘still sleeping on a sofa bed’, while The Only One is a love song to Afie’s ‘best friend’ and is framed by Sam Bush’s twinkling mandolin.

The chirpy tune I’m Still has the line ‘I got this hunger to change my number and move Down Under’, which will be impossible with those aforementioned daughters. There is an extended picked guitar outro and some mellotron, which is the instrument that is heard in the intro of Strawberry Fields Forever, giving the song a wistful feel.

A piano introduces closing track Nothing Blows My Mind (‘after being with you’), with its stately melody matching a confident lyric that namechecks Rapunzel and Ringo Starr. I hope one of the legacy country singers picks up on it, as it’s a perfect song for Tim McGraw or Darius Rucker. Even Vince Gill, come to think of it.

With fiendish rain lashing on the windows and the clock tolling ten, Don Amero sung a song that compared being in church to being outdoors, ‘praying with my eyes open’. It was merely one glorious moment among many on the opening night of a tour which brings four MDM Recordings artists to the UK and Ireland.

The double-decker tour bus heads up to Edinburgh, then to Dublin, Manchester and Liverpool. Don will get a week’s holiday with his wife, an early 20^th wedding anniversary gift, after the work is done. He, TJ, Five Roses and Jess will be welcome back here when they aren’t celebrating gold records and number ones. Zach from Five Roses’ dreams of performing in the UK are made real on this tour. He might need to book some more time off from his legal work in the coming years.

Tyler Joe Miller was from a more ‘sketchy Surrey’ than ours, over in the western bit of Canada. He is surely the only performer to have found out he had a number one record while covered in silver paint. The contractor-turned-singer was excited and chatty as he introduced himself to a new audience on his first ever UK visit. Shoulda Known Better, Pillow Talkin’ and Wild As Her – not a Corey Kent cover and don’t you forget it! – were all sung from the throat and the heart. All three come from his album Spillin’ My Truth which came out at the end of August and will get plenty of spins from UK listeners in the next few months.

The voices of Zach and Jade aka Five Roses blended delightfully on Partners In Crime and Might As Well Be Me. On the latter they more than matched the original demo singer Shay Mooney, with a performance perhaps elevated by the presence of Zach’s best man at the back of the room. They also had the confidence to debut a funky new song called What The Liquor Said, which had them outlining a familiar situation where the narrator blames the drink for leading her tongue astray!

Don Amero, who revealed that there was a fantastic concoction called ‘twhiskey’ in his teacup, was part evangelist, part raconteur and part singer. He opened with Wasn’t Your Dress, a song about wanting to take a woman’s clothes off, telling the story of performing it in front of a group of 17-year-olds in pretty dresses! Go Girl and I Hate That Song were both masterfully performed. The latter is about the importance of sharing songs with someone else and the sadness of not being able to do so when you don’t have that other person around.

Although I would hesitate to compare Don Amero to Tim McGraw, I think the adult contemporary nature of those two songs elevated him to great heights. He’s also selling his children’s book These Roots of Love, about trees and acorns, at the merch table. I only note here that McGraw turned Humble and Kind into a kids’ book too.

Jess Moskaluke returns to the UK for a third time this month and she offered some old chestnuts. Guitarist Jeff inadvertently helped to end Knock Off with a bang due to some unscheduled feedback, while she also aired the elegant yet melancholy Take Me Home, the ‘girl goes bro-country’ of Cheap Wine & Cigarettes and the title track of her new album Heartbreaker.

Finally, a treat. Folk across the UK have paid £100 to see Shania Twain sing Man! I Feel Like A Woman! but the Canadians threw it in for free as a final singalong. If you click on the names of the acts you can read my chats with all four. Bigger venues beckon, so catch them while you can still see the whites of their eyes from the back of the room.

I asked Five Roses what I should ask their MDM Recordings labelmate Don Amero. ‘Why did he shave off his locks and get a buzzcut?’ asked Zach. Don chortles, replying that it was because he didn’t want it to get in the way during a weekend camping trip with his wife and three kids.

His successful Through The Fire podcast gives listener tips on how to overcome challenges and, In Don’s own case, not laugh off personal problems like midlife crises. ‘It’s a real grassroots growth,’ he says. ‘We started September last year. I really enjoy the deeper conversations. It’s self-serving but I’m getting a lot more publicists and artists wanting to be on. I love that I’ve got a platform that people want to be on and share their stories.’

His chat with Lindsay Ell, who talked about the abuse she suffered at the hands of men, was illuminating and shocking in equal measure. For Don, music acts as catharsis as well as his career.

‘I’ve gone with the mantra Music Is Medicine,’ he says. ‘I found music at a time in my life when things were very dark. My peers growing up were finding drugs, alcohol, gang life; I found music and the arts. I believe whole-heartedly that that was what pulled me through that hard time. I love knowing what makes other people tick.’

Also on the podcast, Don said a music career is ‘feast or famine’. Will he be able to enjoy the tour and be present in the moment, given that it’s a first musical visit to the UK?

‘I’m so looking forward to being there. I’ve been to Europe; my wife and I backpacked through London, Germany, Spain, Portugal and France about 12 years ago. We won’t be able to slow this one down so much but as a father of three, every time I’m on my road it’s a mini-vacation, a bit of me time. Don’t tell my family that!!’

Don has been making music for 15 years, coming on board with MDM five or six years ago. ‘Doing this for as long as I have, I sometimes feel I have only scratched the surface but also that I’m in too deep. My heart has been that anyone who comes to a Don Amero concert, I want them to feel like the world is a little less heavy than when they came in. That’s my goal.

‘On this tour I’m hoping to move people and affect them in a deep way. It always comes down to a song that I really feel connected to. Sometimes a song might not have high-quality production but it’s about capturing the most honesty in songs, in lyrics. If I can get onstage and tell a really compelling story that moves people and play a song that goes deep, that’s my passion all the time.’

Do his kids have a say too in the songs he picks to record? ‘Often if they’re into it, I feel like I should chase it. They have got some good ears on them. If they can get behind the magic of the music, and see Dad playing it somewhere, it’s cool to see them singing and dancing along.

It is no wonder that Don’s last EP was called Nothing Is Meaningless, which opens with the anthemic You Can’t Always Be 21. His vocal sits in the same range and timbre as Ryan Hurd or Jordan Davis. Newcomers to his music should start with his 2015 album Refined, which by Don’s admission was a great leap from his first few albums. ‘Start there and move forward. I finally made the music I’d been chasing. When I look back, it’s still a highlight record. It’s magic. There’s a bunch of songs on there I still cherish.’

Recent single Go Girl was written by the great Adam Hambrick who also wrote Somebody Else Will and How Not To. It’s a slow break-up song whose chorus has an ascending melody in contrast with its sad lyric: ‘Sometimes things don’t work out like you thought they would but we gave it a good go, girl’.

‘I’ve been so blessed to have a lot of great opportunities. Writers have sent songs our way. As a singer/songwriter, I’ve had to wrap my head around putting songs out that I didn’t write. If I can get my head and my heart around the lyric, then I can share the song. I’ve discovered what an honour it is to be a vessel of some really great songs like Let You and Go Girl. Church is another great song which changed my life, about seven years ago. It has been an iconic song for me.’

Go Girl features on Six, a new EP with a sextet of tracks which was released to the world last Friday in time for the UK visit. What It Was is perfect for a listening room or writer’s round, a reminiscin’ song which begins with the great image, ‘If the writing on the walls could talk we wouldn’t listen to a word they say’. There’s dobro and very light organ to create a suitable mood, and Don hits the very top of his range.

Wheels Off was written with Kelly Archer, who wrote Sleep Without You for Brett Young and brings a very Brett-like melody to a literally middle of the road driving song (‘get found in the freedom’). Can’t Fix This is a lament on which Don says he can’t repair a broken relationship like he can patch up a door or a tyre. The arrangement, guitar solo and vocal delivery all make me think of Brett Young.

Given that Brett is a father like Don, the paternal song to a daughter If I Don’t could also have been cut by him. Ain’t Too Late (‘as long as I’m still awake’) is a chugging power ballad whose second verse doesn’t bore us and gets back to the chorus, probably because Don’s narrator can’t wait to get going either.

I asked Don who inspires him and he reveals an eclectic taste that includes Keith Urban (‘for the energy onstage’), Foy Vance and Patrick Droney, who Don says is a younger version of John Mayer. He is also friends with the great Bros. Landreth, who like him are from Winnipeg and with whom he shares a producer in Murray Pulver (fun fact: a former member of Crash Test Dummies!). Given that Bob Harris has championed the Landreth brothers, I hope he also finds much to enjoy in Don Amero’s catalogue.

Mention of Murray made me think of another act he has produced, Britain’s Katy Hurt. ‘She’s a good pal too,’ Don says. ‘She and I have been talking and we’ve got a plan to swap tours. She’d come here and we’d tour through Canada and I’d go there and tour with her in the UK. I’ve got plans for a Canadian tour in spring 2024 and I’d love to have Katy along with me.’

Don is involved with the Canadian Country Music Association, heading up the Diversity and Inclusion panel in part because he is descended from ‘first peoples’, the indigenous Canadians to whom Justin Trudeau has recently apologised. As well as diversity of skin tone, should country music equally have diversity of thought and experience?

‘It’s a challenging conversation and not everyone wants to engage in it. I’ve often said that what we need to do as artists and industry is inspire the psyche and the hearts of the average person to engage in these kinds of conversation and feel like they have a role in this. Without people taking up their part of the story, it can’t be left to corporations and policies to right this ship; everybody needs to say we’re all in this ship together and work towards the common goal. If the population isn’t engaged in that, it’s like dragging a stone.’

A final word from Don on Mike Denney, the guy behind MDM Records: ‘He’s got a passion for his artists and I have felt that for the five or six years I’ve been with MDM. I’ve had a lot of opportunities that I would never have had without. I count my blessings that I am an MDM artist.’

Don tours the UK and Ireland as part of Apologetically Country along with Five Roses, Jess Moskaluke and Tyler Joe Miller. Find information on the tour here.

Jade and Zach are the duo Five Roses, named after a famous sign in their home city of Montreal. I started my 20-minute chat with them by bringing up something I had spotted in a previous profile with them where they had listed When You’re Gone, the duet between Bryan Adams and Melanie C, as a guilty pleasure.

‘Every time we play it live people really enjoy it,’ says Zach, which makes me think it will go down well at the Apologetically Canadian gig in the UK and Ireland in September. ‘We’re looking for a medley,’ adds Jade. ‘It’s been a dream of mine to go there!’

Their set may well contain songs from their recent EP which are also written by other folk. Our Days Are Numbered is an Ashley Gorley write, while Brett James, Donovan Woods and Tebey are in the EP’s credits too. I ask the pair if they get excited to be presented with songs in the knowledge of who wrote them.

‘Usually it goes through management, who know what we’re looking for,’ says Zach. ‘They’re the point person for all these publishing companies who have songs for Five Roses and who are looking for X, Y, Z. They’ll send us a shortlist of what they liked and we’ll chime in with what we like.

‘We write quite a lot but there are so many great songs out there. Jade and I are very busy so [it’s hard] to get down to Nashville to write or even to write over Zoom here. One of our next goals for the next EP is to have our own cuts on there.’

I am sure their accountant will say the same thing, although the pair get money from the mechanical rights from performing the songs live. Dan + Shay will also benefit from Five Roses playing To The Moon and Back, a song which pushes them in a more organic direction. Jade says the French version of the song went down well in Quebec, which is a bilingual part of Canada. ‘When we go to small towns sometimes we just play it in French.’

The pair fell in love with the demo, which Shay sang, when it was pitched to them: ‘How can we not have this song when it’s so good?!’ Fun fact, which was news to them: Shay used to be a rapper before becoming a Gary LeVox-type singer. I ask Jade and Zach whether they are impressed by the trajectory of the Nashville duo’s career.

‘Those are careers we admire,’ Zach says. ‘It’s cool that it’s slow and steady. I’m a big fan of that. You’re always around and you’re constantly growing. Many artists hit it big very quickly, have a big hit and then just fall off. Our goal is to just stick around!’

UK fans took to both Striking Matches and The Shires, so a boy/girl duo has a precedent for UK fans. I ask whether the dynamic of their duo is happy and strong.

‘We’re both pretty much the same person and we want the same things,’ Jade says, adding that she is ‘open to lots of things’. Zach agrees: ‘She is arguably the most agreeable person I have ever met. She’ll tell me when she doesn’t agree with something but she’ll do it in such a graceful and tactful way that doesn’t create any conflict or ruffle any feathers. I’m definitely the rougher of the two of us!

‘We’re the yin to each other’s yang. We’re not water and oil, we mix very well. I can name several occasions when I was losing my cool and Jade told me to take a deep breath and talk it through.’

I fill the pair in on the UK country scene, which they know nothing about, and how Luke Combs has two O2 Arena shows in October thanks in part to the success of Fast Car (‘what a song!’ sighs Zach). I am keen to discover the acts which inspire them, which gives Jade a chance to wax lyrical about her labelmate Jess Moskaluke.

‘I love Jess and I see myself in her sometimes. I think she’s such a great business girl because she knows what she wants. She’s a good songwriter, a great performer with a great voice. TJ [Tyler Joe] is such a great songwriter and we have great labelmates that we can look at.’

‘Mike is really good at finding people who are outstanding,’ Zach says of his label boss Mike Denney. ‘Some labels will sign people because they’re big on TikTok or have a big social media following. Everyone on our label is just so good. You hear Don Amero sing, you can hear a pin drop because it’s so magical. Being able to watch them go has been so inspiring.

‘I’m going to throw in one of my favourite bands: The 1975,’ Zach adds. ‘Their music is amazing: modern eighties synth-pop infused with funk. A lot of people don’t get it but they have a sound that is unique to them. Matty Healy is a fantastic songwriter and they are one of the only bands out there that consistently put out good albums.

‘Often I find myself disappointed with musicians. Third Eye Blind were one of my favourite bands ever but they veered off course and put out something that didn’t hit with me. Ther 1975 consistently hits. They are one of the last remaining rock bands.’ Jade is less enamoured with them but enjoys some of their music. They are due in Canada in November, pending any problems that have arisen from their adventures in the Far East, which Zach had not heard about when we spoke in late July.

As for Five Roses, they can help define the sound of country music in Canada by having their own unique spin on things. ‘That’s the goal,’ says Zach. ‘When you cut outside songs, they are amazing but you aren’t defining a sound that is your own. It’s very rare and it has to come from them because they have full control.

‘We are finding it now. Initially I was doing the choruses and verse one, Jade was doing verse two; for our recent single Livin’ in a Country Song, Jade sings the whole thing and I back her up. It’s a little bit more rocky, pedal to the metal in terms of guitar.

‘Jade might end up being more the lead, I might end up backing her up. We’re already veering towards more rock country but we love traditional country too, banjo/mando and fiddle, which we want to integrate more into our songs. We’re going to end up something that is more our sound than just playing good songs.’ Jade adds that the pair now know the production that they want to surround their voices.

Knowing where you are going is such an important part of an act’s success. Their introduction to UK audiences will be as part of the showcase put on by MDM Recordings. Find information on the tour here.

I remember hearing Stay A Little Longer by Brothers Osborne back when I was first getting into contemporary country in 2015-16. TJ Osborne’s croon cut through the processed gunk and I loved how he told the story over three chords, holding notes in the verses and speeding up to get to the chorus where he was ‘tearing t-shirts’ off his beloved. It turns out we should have visualised a guy.

All commentary on the duo feels obliged to note for newcomers that TJ is openly gay. In 2021 he came out in a Time magazine profile – as with Maren Morris’ valete from country, which she told to the LA Times, it was not in People Magazine or some Nashville publication – then kissed his partner on TV at the CMA Awards having walked the red carpet with him. For his part, John has become a father and revealed struggles with his mental health. Their friend Shane McAnally wrote Stay A Little Longer with them and they appeared on the track All My Favourite People (‘we love who we love’) with Maren Morris. The clues were there in plain sight!

This fourth album is their first since Skeletons, which came out in a world where they could not go on the road. The two singles from Skeletons, All Night and I’m Not For Everyone, both stalled at radio, respectively at 25 and 33, which isn’t terrific when you’re winning CMA Awards that reward success in this most traditional medium. To potentially reverse this, although I imagine the pair aren’t fussed if radio picks up their songs or not, they have worked with the mighty Mike Elizondo, a Nashville resident since 2018 whose most successful production work has come with Dr Dre. There are drums from Abe Laboriel Jr, whose day job is working on A-listers’ sessions and who is the longtime sideman of Paul McCartney.

The song Younger Me, written with their buddy Kendell Marvel, was the first to deal with TJ’s sexuality. Kendall continues his run of getting songwriting credits on every Brothers Osborne album by helping them with Nobody’s Nobody, the single they sent to radio. It has an affectionate chug and a lyric that is both philosophical and self-affirming: ‘I’m still trying to leave my mark’ is a line in the first verse, while there’s a great image of ‘a pocket knife and an oak tree heart’.

Their discography includes loud rockers like Shoot Me Straight, Down Home and It Ain’t My Fault, the last of which runs to a blistering 16 minutes on their live album. They are also prone to philosophical tunes like While You Still Can and Pushing Up Daisies (Love Alive), as well as songs about nothing like Rum. The album’s opening track Who Says You Can’t Have Everything, written with Casey Beathard, is in the final category: a singalong about nothing much, with TJ drinking and ‘living the dream’. It sounds like a Jake Owen beach jam and I love the drum sound that Abe gets from the snare.

Mike and the brothers have called in some writers who are used to having their cuts appear on the pop charts. Jamie Hartman, who wrote Human with Rag’n’Bone Man and Hold Me While You Wait with Lewis Capaldi, was drafted in for the closing track Rollercoaster (Forever and a Day). It’s a love song about writing a love song ‘for people who don’t always get along’.

Julian Bunetta, best known as the main collaborator for both One Direction and Thomas Rhett, was in the room for Might As Well Be Me, a party-startin’ rocker (with no G) which marries John’s chugging guitars and TJ’s deep baritone to a pop sheen. Sun Ain’t Even Gone Down Yet was written with Corey Crowder, who adds some good time chatter to a mid-section of a song about having a good time with ‘a cold libation’.

Miranda Lambert joined the guys to write and appear uncredited on backing vocals (it’s definitely her) on We Ain’t Good at Breaking Up, which has the sort of production that recalls classic rock from Elizondo’s former home of Los Angeles. It is both rock and country, which is where the money is in country music in the Combs/Wallen Era.

Lee Thomas Miller co-wrote It Ain’t My Fault and appears in the credits for four tracks on the new album: Goodbye’s Kickin’ In has a John Mayer-type blues lick and a rich arrangement to underscore the narrator’s regret; New Bad Habit is a sort of come-on from TJ, who wants to be ‘your pack a day…your 90 proof’ that you ‘can’t rehab’; Back Home is another song where the narrator doesn’t know what he’s got until he’s gone (‘everything I use to hate is everything that makes me miss it’; and Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That is a song which changes key for the second verse to make sure the listener is paying attention to the commandments of the chorus.

The last of these was also written with Jaren Johnston of The Cadillac Three. Jessie Jo Dillon has a credit on Love You Too, another song that combines groove, melody and swagger. TJ calls himself ‘bullshit bulletproof’, which is a bumper sticker if I’ve ever heard one, and he offers a kiss-off to ‘the haters’. To complement TJ’s confidence, John rises to the occasion with a humungous solo. I spend time listening the writers of these songs because Brothers Osborne attract great writers to help sculpt a sound that appeals to thousands.

Many tracks on this album include layered harmonies and vocalised woahs to recreate the arena environment. In October the guys play the open air 6000-capacity Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. The directness of many of these songs will appeal to an audience who will be up for a good time. I would be surprised if TJ and John don’t play high up the Country2Country bill in 2024. They love the UK and the UK loves them back.

A few years ago in one of his brilliant Youtube videos, Grady Smith came up with the concept of the genre known as Nashville Pop. It is at the intersection point of four genres: male vocal harmony groups, country music, contemporary Christian music and the sex jam. At the forefront of this con-genre were, and still are, Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney, or as I call them Daniel and Seamus. They record as Dan + Shay and have weathered many storms over their decade of existence.

I had discovered them in my early fumblings into today’s country in 2015, when their bit of ear candy Nothin’ Like You became their first number one on radio. I caught them on the bill for Country2Country 2017, when they were plugging their second album Obsessed. From The Ground Up was the big ballad, a trite but sweet hymn about love being like a house. ‘Grandma and grandpa’ don’t get much mention in contemporary country music.

Their third album was patchy but contained two enormous ballads: Tequila (‘baby I still see ya’) and Speechless, a naked grab at that year’s Now That’s What I Call Wedding Song throne. Album four, Good Things, ran into the pandemic and tapped into their status as clients of Scooter Braun’s management. Justin Bieber came on board for 10,000 Hours and the pair had a top five hit on the Hot 100 that also went into the UK top 20. As far as I know, Dan + Shay are still tied to Scooter even as many clients – Demi, Ariana, J Balvin – have left their deals.

Dan + Shay have built a sizeable UK following, filling Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 2019 with their Nashville Pop. I reckon they are primed to come back to the UK in 2024 to plug Bigger Houses, although not for Country2Country. The Long Road would be a big win, but that would clash with the money-making live music season at the end of summer.

The album was announced with some worrying words. By the end of 2021 the pair weren’t speaking to each other: Dan wanted to quit and Shay was drinking a lot to overcome his demons. Their reward for patching things up in a prominent TV role on The Voice next year, which will help them shift concert tickets and become the People’s Country Stars alongside their fellow Nashville Pop act Luke Bryan, who does the same thing on American Idol and is also due to start an album cycle.

There is no use saying Dan + Shay aren’t country, or fixating on Shay’s past as a rapper. This is how the genre has always operated: Olivia Newton-John was an Adult Contemporary singer siloed into the country charts, Garth Brooks was a fan of Kiss, Keith Urban is a rockstar with good cheekbones. Deal with it.

The five teasers for Bigger Houses were all impressive. Save Me The Trouble (‘give that heartbreak to somebody else’) has gone to radio: written with Ashley Gorley, it’s an MOR piece of adult contemporary country with a huge chorus where Dan and (as always, mostly) Shay tell their would-be beloved to keep away from their barstool. Perhaps she is the type who puts Heartbreak on the Map, according to a song Dan wrote with Ernest and Jimmy Robbins that trots around the states on the chorus, before modulating up a whole tone for the final passage.

Both songs are supremely melodic and sensitively produced by Dan and Blake Shelton’s long-time cohort Scott Hendricks. The drums are live and there’s pedal steel rather than processed loops, as per current trends towards traditionalism. Always Gonna Be opens with the line ‘paradise is a swing on a porch’, the most rural of images in a song full of them (‘Sundays are for football and church’). Ashley Gorley’s involvement is obvious. The album’s equally sumptuous title track, which closes the album, begins with a passage of mandolin before Shay forsakes ‘keeping up with people named Jones’ because happiness comes with being content with your lot (‘my whole world is sitting right here’). Isn’t that country?

We Should Get Married is a curveball and will certainly be the song that the pair will play on primetime TV to shift some concert tickets. A minute of Gary LeVoxian torch singing gives way to a hoedown that reminded me of The Proclaimers’ song Let’s Get Married. Breakin’ Up with a Broken Heart has the sort of melody Bieber, or indeed Rascal Flatts, would have sung in 2014. The song has the same chord progression as the chorus of 10,000 Hours but it’s itchy and bouncy. I was singing along by the second chorus. Ashley Gorley’s involvement is obvious.

Neon Cowgirl is another Gorley co-write that reset the kind of George Strait honky-tonk meet-cute to an MOR ballad where Shay boosts someone’s ego after a break-up (‘don’t you know you were born to shine’). Like a boyband member, he reaches out to the listener as well. There is a key change.

What Took You So Long is not a cover of Emma Bunton’s debut solo single, but the album’s Wedding Song. With its enormous chorus and syncopated verses from a head-over-heels narrator, it could be a One Direction song; in fact, you could sing the melody of What Makes You Beautiful over the top of it, though I’m not going to give Shay any ideas.

Heaven + Back is another meet-cute about a girl with a ‘halo hanging over her head/ I didn’t know I needed saving’. A big pop chorus plus some Christian themes – you bet Shay ‘saw the light’ while she ‘turned water into wine’ – follows the Nashville Pop formula. For The Both of Us has Shay looking his beloved’s father in the eye and asking for a blessing (‘she’ll always be your baby girl’). This isn’t the first time the subject has been raised in song but it’s certainly the soppiest. It sounds like Westlife and I was mildly disappointed that there was no key change.

Then Again is the type of reminiscin’ song that has also been written before, most notably by the writers of On My Way To You and (sorry to harp on about Rascal Flatts) of Bless The Broken Road. Lori McKenna’s involvement is obvious and the song is pretty and well sung, arranged in a very Nashville Pop way with harmonies, fiddle and even dobro.

Missing Someone is an outside write from, among others, Adam Doleac and Gordie Sampson. It’s a heartbreak song where Shay feels like he is ‘a late night lonely drug’, a rebound who can never be the true partner of the lady who is using him to get over an ex. Kudos to Dan + Shay for picking it off the shelf and adding some sophistication to the album. It is immediately followed by We Should Get Married, presumably so listeners don’t get too down about things.

The album is the sound of Nashville Pop the Dan + Shay way, with more fiddle than before. Bring on arenas.

Jess Moskaluke finally scored a number one in the Canadian country charts in 2019. Tyler Joe Miller rung the bell at his first attempt with his song Pillow Talkin’, then did the same with I Would Be Over Me Too. As of July 2023, all seven of his releases had made the top 10 which led to offers for some huge gigs where he had to play a 75- or 90-minute set.

‘The whole reason why I got into country music was Led Zeppelin, who were my dad’s favourite band,’ says TJ from Vancouver when we speak in advance of his first ever visit to the UK. ‘Jimmy Page was the reason why I picked up a guitar. I bought Mud on the Tires by Brad Paisley and fell in love with country songwriting. That’s the reason I wanted to be a songwriter.’

TJ does not object when I suggested calling him the Canadian Brad Paisley. ‘I always get called the Canadian Luke Combs because of the ginger beard!’ He tells me there’s not a huge local scene in Vancouver, with music fans waiting for acts to pass through. Coldplay will be in town while TJ is in the UK in September, with Beyonce and Ed Sheeran both coming to town this summer.

‘My favourite thing is still writing the songs, and it doesn’t matter if I’m singing it or somebody else. I’ve been lucky enough to be writing a ton down in Nashville with a lot of great publishers and writers, even with some holds for US artists. I wrote two times a day every day. They didn’t end up cutting the song but just getting my name out there is a huge thing.

‘Having your publishing, especially if you’re writing a ton, that’s your livelihood. Playing shows is very seasonal. If you’re a writer for other people, it’s job security too. It’s residual income that you’re making constantly. I was a writer before I was an artist. I love doing the artist thing and it took off pretty quick. My whole career has been playing catch-up the last few years.’

My partner heard Pillow Talkin’ and told me it is one of the most popular shades of a brand of lipstick, something TJ was unaware of. ‘It’s such a common saying but you don’t realise how much branding there is in other industries. There’s clothing brands too!’

Back To Drinkin’ Whiskey is a very contemporary country song, with the poor narrator getting over heartbreak with a ‘moonlit dip’. I ask TJ if a certain type of song came easiest to him when he wrote without a plan for a session.

‘My automatic style of song that I gravitate towards is definitely the heartbreak songs. It always sells, so I’ve been capitalising on my break-ups throughout the years. There’s a lot of clichés but country music is one giant cliché so it kind of makes it acceptable. Country music is supposed to bring people together by relating to stories and songs. I want to see people truly enjoying my music and their time at the show. The last thing I want is division,’ he says, when I bring up the Aldean outrage that dominated the news cycle in the middle of July 2023. ‘I just want people to have a good time. That’s it.’

TJ then talks about a clip he had seen online of Chris Hemsworth saying he admired the boring life of his fellow actor Matt Damon. ‘That’s kind of smart: have fun, be yourself!’ TJ uses his skills in carpentry to help folk around the world, so I ask whether he keeps the music side of his life separate.

‘I started out doing the charity work before I was a musician with a record deal. The Climate Outreach Society has nothing online. We’ve been more focussed on getting work done, our hands dirty, boots in the ground. There’s a lot of people that need help. We want to make it as easy as people to give to a good non-profit that they know is going to make a profitable difference. It’s as easy as doing it on the toilet!’ Swipe to do right, I suppose.

‘I was doing these trips to Guatemala through a church. They are heroes, doing such great work 24/7, 365. The church stopped the partnership so they wanted me to go to Uganda or Greece, but I said no, these people are counting on us. We’d built relationships with these people. We sponsor villages, I sponsor kids there that I get to see grow up. We didn’t want to be the people who swoop in and put a band-aid on the situation, put pictures on a Facebook profile and leave.’

TJ put his philanthropy first when he headed back to Guatemala just before the pandemic, eschewing the chance to film a video for Pillow Talkin’. ‘I had my guitar and I was playing some songs. Some guy heard me from our group named Willie. He came to me in the morning and said, “Hey I didn’t know you were doing country music!” I was just trying to impress that girl! He said I had a great voice and should be doing it full time. Easier said than done!

‘I said I was happy to do the non-profit thing. When we’re down there we build homes, schools, water systems and baby rescue for malnourished kids, and work with kids with special needs. That was my passion; people’s my passion over music. Willie said, “If you build the platform, you can help more people and influence more people to help.” That’s where I threw my name in the hat and started getting hired to be a back-up guy for different country acts in British Columbia.’

He then joined one of those acts for a duet video on Facebook, which Mike Denney at MDM spotted and now he’s preparing for a UK visit. Is part of TJ’s present and future success being on MDM and in control of the direction of his career, rather than being yet another act on Sony or Warner trying to recoup his advance and to not get dropped in the middle of a deal?

‘We’re on an indie label,’ he says, ‘and I get a lot of my own creative direction. I remember going on my first radio tour, before I even had a song out. We had a plan for our first three songs and we were pitching them to radio. There’s a lot of other people they could be adding so why add my song? I said, “I don’t really care if you play my song or not. My paycheck is from construction! If you like the song then play it!” Our radio guy was kicking me under the table.

‘I wasn’t blowing smoke. I was being real, being me. I am able to do that with a label like MDM, which is more like a family. There’s time to breathe and we get second shots. I get to take the bull by its horns.

‘There’s definitely positives to being on a big major, a lot more money. It’s good if you just care about success, or the illusion of success, especially on how things go viral so fast these days. What’s your longevity? What we’re doing is building a career, not hype for the short term. People want to get successful so fast, but any business takes time. A major probably wouldn’t put up with me!

‘There’s times when we have to pitch things to radio and they want pictures from my Guatemala stuff. We want to make it clear it was music for Guatemala, not Guatemala for music. I want to keep the main thing the main thing. The non-profit stuff is the fuel to my fire for the music stuff. As soon as I lose that passion, I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do!

‘I want to start infusing that stuff into what I’m doing with music. I’ve built that platform and it’s about time I start to merge the two and use music to be able to help.’ Jack Johnson might provide a model for this thanks to his work on environmental and ecological issues in Hawaii. In TJ’s view, I conclude, it’s better to see a kid grow up than be nominated for a CCMA Award. ‘Something to go up on a shelf or on a wall is not as worth it as seeing a kid grow up healthy.’

TJ is yet to put out an album but having grown up with Zep, surely he has plans to release one soon. ‘People are putting out four songs or six songs. We just put out a three-song acoustic EP, but we’ve got more coming down the pipeline pretty dang soon. The goal would also be to put out a full-length album that I can tour. You can please the streamers by putting out single by single, but the number one people to please is the fans.’

UK fans will be introduced to Tyler Joe Miller along with Five Roses, Don Amero and Jess Moskaluke in the Apologetically Country gig. Find out more information about the tour here.

Last month I wrapped up my long, long piece for The British Country Music Festival on the 150-year history of country music in the UK. The final part is a ramble towards a possible future path for it, and one of the conclusions I draw is that we should look to Australia and Canada, rather than to Music City, as inspiration.

As part of the section on Canada I spoke to Mike Denney, owner of MDM Records, who is the mastermind behind a gig coming to the UK and Ireland in September. It’s not Shania Twain’s tour, which reaches the O2 Arena over the three nights of September 16-18, but something that costs less than it does to park at the venue, never mind adding in food, hotels and hearing Shania encourage ladies to get going.

What Apologetically Country lacks in sequins and Mutt Lange-produced rockers, it makes up for in heart and soul. Over the course of four pieces I’ll profile all four acts coming over for the tour, which stops off in Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin after an opening night at the wee St Pancras Old Church opposite Euston station in London.

It’s a first visit across the Atlantic for Tyler Joe Miller, Four Roses and Don Amero, and a return for Jess Moskaluke who impressed me at TBCMF 2022. Jess also came over to play at Country2Country 2022, where she played three of the smaller stages to introduce herself to UK crowds. Playing the Empress Ballroom at Blackpool Winter Gardens for the British Country Music Festival, her terrific set included a medley of Shania Twain songs and some uptempo tunes which showcased a fine voice and pop sensibility.

She was incredibly worried, however, that she would miss the train back to London, so when I chatted with her in late July 2023 I asked her if she made her train. She confirmed that she did, ‘by the skin of our teeth! We had a bunch of fans lining up and I want to take all the time in the world for fans. I get yelled at all the time because we’re running late.’

It was odd to hear an artist vocalise her feelings which would usually be hidden by having to work through the show. Fortunately, she will have plenty of time for grippin’ and grinnin’ in the Apologetically Country visit.

Jess has been a top performer in Canada for a decade, so she has probably been asked every permutation of question. I thus asked Don Amero what I should ask her and he suggested I ask how much wine MDM Records owner Mike Denney will drink on the visit to the UK.

‘All of it! That’s probably the only reason Mike is going to come!’ Jess chuckles, adding that she has certainly never been asked that question. She is far more used to being reminded that she won the Female Artist award at the Canadian Country Music Awards in the three years between 2014 and 2016. That category of CCMA Award has been won by Tenille Townes every year since 2019.

Jess also performed Man! I Feel Like A Woman! At the 2018 CCMAs, which Shania hosted and which was televised and captured, and which you can watch here. ‘She’s my idol, my favourite artist of all time in any genre,’ she says. ‘It was crazy and exciting. I remember Shania saying “Just do you. This is my song but sing it how you want to sing it. Put all those little inflections that are Jess.”

‘That’s all I can say to any artist now. It’s no good copying an artist and sound like them. That artist already exists, so you need to bring your own special flavour to country. Your flavour might not be for everybody but it will be for somebody and you just have to find who those people are and make them your family. Work really hard and continue to be yourself.

‘I have loved Tenille for like 15 years. She’s been around so much longer than people give us credit for. It’s so important that there’s a new crop of artists every so often. If Shania won Female Artist every year for the last 20 years it would not be excited, though valid because she’s the queen. We need to acknowledge a change in the music landscape.’

Has she told her fellow MDM artists about UK crowds? ‘We’re still going to play the songs we’re going to play,’ she says, dismissing any suggestion she will do the songs with any less energy than she would back home. ‘It’s more the travel, not because it’s bad but because it’s so different with the trains. Here we fly somewhere and drive from the airport. That’s one of the bits of culture shock, which you have to consider when you’re packing.’

‘This industry has given “family” a different meaning to me. I love my biological family very much but I’m not able to be with them as often as I would like. You naturally create your own “road family”. My band are my brothers. Some days I’m closer to them than my actual brother. Having that support system and feeling protected emotionally or physically is really important.’

Jess’s song Mapdot was written with Liz Rose, a sort of fairy godmother figure to both Jess and Taylor Swift. Rose is now a Songwriters Hall of Fame member, and Jess has written with her for a long time. At her old office, she tells me, Liz used to annoy the massage therapist on the floor below, so she has now moved offices to ‘a beautiful writers’ room’.

Jess’s two recent singles Not What Ya Think and Heartbreaker were written with Emily Shackleton, a backroom gal on Music Row. ‘Emily and I go way back. She is one of the few writers that if I were in Nashville and don’t write with her, I won’t go. We have had so much success and have become so close. She is one of my favourite people.

‘In my experience, what makes her an A-List writer is how she makes you feel in a room. Of course she’s talented: a great player and lyricist, melodies for days, a fantastic singer. She makes you feel like all your ideas are valid even if they suck.

‘If I have a lyric in my head that isn’t any good, I just say it. Emily has a way of saying “That’s not quite it” but she tweaks it a slight bit and you feel like a genius. There are a million talented people in Nashville but there’s only one Emily Shackleton. She is such a delight. Every minute with her is golden.’

Jess has also had success with Corey Crowder, an artist who became the man who produced hit songs for Chris Young and Florida Georgia Line. Jess applauds UK radio stations for daring to play songs with female vocalists back to back, something US and Canadian stations are not inclined to do. Her 2019 single Country Girls, written with Crowder and Shackleton, became her first number one on country radio in Canada.

It was her sixth top ten hit following concert staples Kiss Me Quiet, power ballad Take Me Home, break-up song Save Some of That Whiskey, Drive Me Away and Camouflage, in which Jess puts on a brave face while hurting inside.

Mike told me her career exploded with her platinum single Cheap Wine and Cigarettes, another pillar of her setlist which has a humungous chorus. You can see her CCMA Award performance here. She and Corey ‘stumbled into our producer/artist relationship. I was looking for new production styles. It didn’t feel like me and I wanted a more radio-friendly sound because I liked to listen to it. I wasn’t quite there, in my life and career. Corey and I were writing together all the time. He would do the demos and I thought that was what my stuff should sound like. It was the accurate representation of me.’

I asked Jess if it’s important to have someone who knows what will be commercially successful and thus please ‘the suits’ in Music Row. She tells me that on three separate occasions she let the men in suits dictate the big releases from a new project. ‘And it tanked! I will never do it again. I will only ever make music that makes me happy. I know myself, I know my fans and we are one and the same. If I like the music, then there’s a really good chance that my fans, a community that I have worked really hard to build, will like the song. Then the suits are happy!’

Conversely, the MDM suits will be happy so long as someone pours Mike Denney a glass of rose. The other three acts on the Apologetically Canadian tour – Five Roses, Don Amero and Tyler Joe Miller – will be profiled in the rest of this series. Find out more about the gigs here.

Did you know Pat Boone is still alive and kickin’? He will be 90 next June and he runs his own Gold Label. As I am sure every piece about Pat starts, only Elvis sold more records than him back in the early 1960s, and at one stage he wasn’t off the charts for four years. He must have been the Ed Sheeran of the pre-Beatles era; like the Fabs, he recorded some of hits in German for their market.

Today he is represented by Christy and the team at Aristo Media in Nashville, who sent me an email alerting me to an early single from this bumper 25-track release, Pat’s first album including new material since 2015. The song is called Grits, the ‘country caviar’ which is jokingly announced to have been created by God on the eighth day of creation. It’s hokum, delivered with a grin and a wink.

I’d class Pat as an Easy Listening artist rather than a country singer, and his version of Tennessee Waltz, the heartbreak song of its day, is soaked in the strings that Chet Atkins used for the Nashville Sound. Last Date, Gone and I Feel Like Cryin’ (‘you gave me false affection’) also sound like they have been taken out of storage from some time in the 1950s. Chattanoogie Shoeshine Boy has some delectable and equally era-appropriate clapping percussion.

In 2019 Pat lost Shirley, his wife of 66 years, which makes the duet I’d Do It With You even more touching, given that Pat sings of ‘growing old with you’. He has re-recorded the slow dance You and I with Crystal Gayle, another singer who has lost a loved one recently, in her case her sister Loretta Lynn. Sonically it reminds me of Glen Campbell’s late recordings and I hear a lot of Campbell’s early seventies work on several tracks.

He trots around the United States with some selections, with the pedal steel accompanying Pat on Oklahoma Sunshine, Indiana Girl and Colorado Country Morning. Even more jaunty are two toe-tappers, Alabam and Texas Woman. It is breezy listening as much as easy listening. Gloriously, there is even a dog song called Old Shep, with backing vocalists crooning as Pat remembers his pooch.  

Given his work recording Christian music, it makes sense that he has ended the collection with a gospel song, (There’ll Be) Peace in The Valley (For Me), which Red Foley made a bestseller in the South in 1951. Pat also ropes in The Jordanaires, who backed Elvis on his early recordings, for a country gospel take on Just A Closer Walk with Thee. During his interpretation of Steal Away, which used to be marked as Negro Spiritual in old hymn books, Pat lingers on every syllable of both the melody and his narration.

Back in 1954 Tennessee Saturday Night was the flipside of Boone’s version of Ain’t That A Shame. In the 2023 version that opens Country Jubilee, Pat marries his croon with the soft honkytonk arrangement and some slip-sliding fiddle and pedal steel to evoke the pre-rock era which Bob Stanley has written about in his book Let’s Do It.

Pat brings together some easy listening classics. Perry Como took Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes into the charts in 1952. Paper Roses first hit the charts in 1960 before 14-year-old(!) Marie Osmond made it hers (she’s still alive too, by the way). Wolverton Mountain is the old tale of Clifton Clowers, protector of his daughter, which made the charts for Claude King in 1963. Bobby Bare recorded Cowboys and Daddies in 1971.

Hank Williams is represented too, with Take These Chains from My Heart and his posthumous hit Kaw-Liga, a vivid Indian love story. Pat’s version has some sweet female backing vocals and some Bacharach trumpets tootling. Burt, incidentally, has the number one song in America thanks to Doja Cat sampling Walk On By on her latest smash. Will someone sample Pat Boone or Hank Williams in 2024? I am sure Hank would have become a millionaire several times over if he had lived to hear his standards like Cold Cold Heart be taken into the charts by crooners like Pat; indeed, Norah Jones stuck a version on her diamond album Come Away With Me.

Since Pat Boone first had hits in the 1950s, we have had rock’n’roll, psychedelia, disco, synthpop, heavy metal and the modern form of computerised pop music. What a joy to sit for an hour and listen to a man take us way back to the postwar era where people just wanted to curl up and listen to a velvety voice soothe their anxieties and transport them elsewhere.

Country music is like the prongs of a fork, and three September 8 releases represented three of these prongs. It might seem odd to take them as a whole, given the discrete audiences imagined by those tasked with selling the artists, but I take the Baylen Leonard approach: there’s a pew for everyone. Fun fact: Baylen, who hosts The Front Porch on Absolute Radio Country, founded the Holler.country platform and is Musical Director of The Long Road, was christened Bruce. But ‘HeyBruce’ would be a less effective social media handle.

Allison Russell – The Returner

Indeed, it was at The Long Road last year that I enjoyed the genre-agnostic music of Allison Russell, a Canadian singer and a victim of some horrible abuse as a child which has informed her music. She was touring her debut album Outside Child, which a few weeks afterwards won the Album of the Year award at the Americana Music Association Awards in Nashville. Allison is also affiliated with the Black Opry collective and with Our Native Daughters, a quartet of black singers.

I think everyone who saw the set will remember the way she played guitar, banjo and clarinet (not at the same time) as well as singing clearly and filling the tent with her voice. Newcomers and returning fans will adore this album. The opening line of its first track Springtime (‘was my present tense’) borrows from So Long, Farewell, with Allison’s vocals answered by a small group of singers. Halfway through the song, it explodes into life having lulled the listener into security. Some lines are delivered in French.

The title track has a folk/rock feel, with a small string section and both the affirmatory lyrics and the layers of vocals reminding me of Brandi Carlile’s work. Rag Child sounds like a children’s song (‘child in rags…child in red’) but again with a group singalong in block harmonies.

All Without Within has stabs of ‘freeze!’ to hook the listener and a funky groove to match the lyric. Demons takes that song’s stabs (‘demons!!’) and the chord shifts of Springtime to show that Allison is working within her own musical idiom. The fantastic Snake Life uses the colour blue to paint an impressionistic picture: ‘blue Botswana jewels’, ‘purple moons’ and ‘indigo sky’. It ends with the line ‘Black is beautiful and good’. It is a sonic journey and I hope it gets heard widely.

Eve Was Black mixes in a host of American music styles like folk, jazz, blues, roots and gospel, over which Allison asks: ‘Is that why you hate my black skin so?’ I just read a book about Kendrick Lamar, the rapper who seems to have given musicians the confidence to address issues arising from their identity. Allison would likely have explored this avenue without permission.

The album’s second side begins with Stay Right Here, a swinging tune with some jazzy piano chords and guitar stabs. I can hear a lot of Yola’s work in this song, which has a defiant chorus which is apt for a song  with that title. Given that Yola recorded a song about her house being on fire, the link is made clear on Allison’s song Shadowlands, which opens with a similar image. A really dynamic string part occurs mid-song and the vocalist mutters about demons and shadows, again in French.

The album ends with a lullaby called Requiem. ‘Hope is a prairie fire,’ sings the narrator before switching into French again in a passage that can be summed up as: ‘Be brave, sing louder, the time for miracles is here, love is everlasting’. Like Joni Mitchell before her, Allison seems to be in her own genre and this is why Americana exists as a very broad umbrella term to catch such singular acts.

Tyler Childers – Rustin’ In The Rain

Tyler Childers once said ‘Americana ain’t no part of nothin’ while accepting his own AMA Award for Emerging Artist in 2018. After his last album contained three different arrangements of eight tracks, this is a mini-album rather than an opus: a seven-song set. He has distribution from RCA Records, and the major-label affiliation has helped his booking agent sort a London show in February at, incredibly, the Hammersmith Apollo. Allison Russell is opening up for his Baltimore show in May.

Allegedly the seven songs are all imagined pitches to Elvis Presley, but Tyler knows exactly how to play the media game so this could just be bluff and bluster. In any case, he does cover Help Me Make It Through The Night, which has been a standard for 50 years and will still be sung in 50 years’ time. He also covers Space and Time, a modern standard which SG Goodman put out in 2020: ‘You make me happy when we share this space and time’ is direct and heart-piercing.

Along with his band The Food Stamps, Tyler continues to plough his furrow and pull people to his interpretation of country music. The opening line of the title track, which opens the album, ends with ‘a tizzy’, which is fun. As on the entire set Tyler’s delivery, with its shaky vibrato, almost matches that of Zach Bryan, but the arrangements are punchier, with the instruments clear and sharp in the recording. Phone Calls and Emails is a slow honky-tonk ballad where Tyler’s narrator is stuck in (to quote the title of his first album) purgatory, unable to know why his beloved is incommunicado.

The album’s big single was In Your Love, a lyrically passionate yet musically understated love song which compares Tyler’s durability to ‘a team of mules pulling hell off from its hinges’. The song was accompanied by a video made for thinkpieces that proves again that Tyler knows what he is doing. Percheron Mules adds a piping accordion, a strong mandolin part and a shuffle beat to Tyler’s lyric, where the band become The Jordanaires thanks to their cute backing vocals that emphasise how big the mules are (’16 hands!’).

Tyler intones three Bibles verses, Luke 2:8-10, which comprise an appearance of the Angel of the Lord. There then begins an apocalyptic waltz that starts ‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane?’ Fun fact: that’s Margo Price as the Angel, a good casting and one whose appearance commends Tyler to fans of what I suppose we must still call alternative country.

Jon Langston – Heart On Ice

This album is what Tyler and Margo are alternative to. Jon Langston is a creature of the Music Row finishing school, which has created good ole boys since the time Chet Atkins was creating the Nashville Sound six decades ago. Georgia boy Langston is signed to 32 Bridge, an offshoot of EMI Nashville and the pet label of good ole boy Luke Bryan. The album follows three independent EPs and a fourth on 32 Bridge to test the water in 2019.

Langston’s voice is deep and strong, perfect for projecting over a raucous crowd in Middle America. Over 45 minutes its effect palls a little, since he can’t ungruff it, and he suffers from being similar to many other faces and voices in the marketplace, such as Jordan Davis, Dylan Scott and Dustin Lynch. This might account for how 32 Bridge have held off on a full-length release, although Luke Bryan’s second career as a TV talent show judge might also have affected it.

The singer wrote all but three of the album’s 14 tracks. One is the title track that begins the album, with a digital drum loop, a stuttering guitar part and a melodic chorus full of neon lights, old flames and feelings. Where’s That Girl was written by Jessi Alexander and Ben Hayslip, who like Langston was a teenage football player from Georgia. The ballad paints a picture of an angel in ‘tore-up Levis’ who has deserted Langston and has left him blue and lonesome.

Another outside write, and another heartbreak song, is Never Left Me, which clocks in at an astonishing 4 minutes 40, an eternity in the streaming era. The drums percuss, the vocalist yowls and the song peters out. Travis Denning pops up to join Langston on I Ain’t Country, a list of rural clichés wrapped in power chords with a shoutout for the troops in the second verse. The worst thing about it is that Florida Georgia Line used the song’s hook (‘can’t say I ain’t country’) as the title of one of their albums. Recycling and repetition is perfectly fine for an industry which has just nominated a remix of a reversion of Heads Carolina Tails California for a CMA Award.

Four of Langston’s 11 compositions are about break-ups: Better Off, If You Ever Leave Atlanta (filler compared to Never Left Me) and the sozzled pair of Whiskey Does and Wrong Side of the Bottle. There are meet-cutes (Beer In A Bar), love songs (Dirt Roads & Diamonds, Ain’t No Cowboy), a memorial to a family member (Granddaddy’s Watch) and a party song called Day In The 90’s, which gives Langston an excuse to wang in some 90s country songtitles while the temperature is ‘above 89 degrees’.

The best track on the album is the closing one, a version of Country Roads called May Magnolia, which is sensitively produced and features a fine chorus. I hope Langston gets the chance to do another album, but the streaming figures will always force the label’s hand.

‘It says no Homers. We’re allowed to have one!’

Remember the Stonecutter Club episode of The Simpsons, where Homer wants to join a sort of Freemasons club but they won’t let him in because they already have someone called Homer in it? That’s how I feel about certain country acts.

Eric Church is allowed to do a 20-minute medley of several hits at CMA Fest, storm off a Rascal Flatts tour and release his Mr Misunderstood album to his Church Choir before the rest of the world can hear it. And that’s just three examples. He is the Acceptable Rebel, an outlaw who stands opposed to the rest of Music Row and yet can also headline Country2Country and CMA Fest.

In many ways Miranda Lambert is another Acceptable Rebel, given that two early hits namechecked either Kerosene, Gunpowder or Lead. It seems weird today that whereas her ex-husband Blake Shelton took a job in primetime TV, Miranda started up her Mutt Nation charity and is now a free agent looking for a new deal. I think she’ll go independent, perhaps to Big Loud given that she co-wrote Morgan Wallen’s Thought You Should Know.

Either side of Labor Day 2023, two other Acceptable Rebels put out new music, helped by the system which allowed Waylon Jennings to be repackaged as an ‘outlaw’. In fact, it’s not two but three Rebels, if you count Waylon’s fellow outlaw Willie Nelson who puts out an album of bluegrass interpretations of his catalogue in September. The two I’m more concerned with here are Morgan Wade and Ashley McBryde.

Morgan Wade – Psychopath

Morgan Wade follows her excellent debut Reckless with Psychopath, produced by Jason Isbell’s lieutenant Sadler Vaden, which she launched on the day of release in Oxford, Mississippi. She’s back in Europe this September having been to the UK in May when she played an acoustic set at the Royal Albert Hall for Highways festival, headlined by Kip Moore. He’s a rebel who used to be Acceptable before he gave Nashville too much trouble.

Born in Floyd, Virginia (population in 2010: 425, spread over 1200 square metres of land), Wade was given the honour of a Jon Caramanica profile in the New York Times as part of the promotion for Psychopath. This must be a benefit of her now being on Sony, a major, rather than one of the big indies, Thirty Tigers; she also drafted in one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to be in the music video to Fall In Love With Me. They kiss, and they did so with the label’s blessing. The song itself is poppy and namechecks Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the gossip website Insider.

‘I’ve Googled how to deal with the beginning stages of fame,’ Morgan sighs, used to being ‘a private person…kind of quiet’. She’s training for an ultramarathon in November and will also lose both her breasts so as not to run the risk of having breast cancer.

Along with the title track, on which Morgan’s love-crazed narrator asks if there was ‘life before there was us’, 80’s Movie was the big impact track from the album. It’s a sweet tale of teenage romance with cassettes, Corvettes and namechecks of several movies in the chorus (‘you drove me crazy like Baby and Swayze’ is a fantastic lyric). It’s also on brand for an Acceptable Rebel, because all those John Hughes movies were about outsiders and Breakfast Club misfits.

Notable on the album is the predominance of 100%-ers with music and lyrics by Morgan alone. They include downbeat closing track 27 Club, whose lyrics include ‘the Molly’, the Chateau Marmont, and the self-referential ‘all my wilder days are behind me’. Losers Look Like Me opens with a steady bass part and some spiky guitar chords, opening up into a majestic chorus at odds with the lyric (‘I wish I was still 16 and I didn’t know the world was so damn mean’).

Outrun Me is also given a magical melody and twinkling production to emphasise the strength Morgan feels at playing on the mind of an ex and lurking in the ‘silhouette’, which is always a great word to use in a song. Acceptable Rebels need sugar along with the spice, and a choir of Morgans harmonise at the end of the song.

Aside from the vocal range Morgan works in, there are other direct links to Miranda Lambert. Opening track Domino, written with both Ashley Monroe and super-producer Butch Walker, is a slice of heartland rock where Morgan’s ‘pills are blue’, while Ashley and fellow Pistol Annie Angaleena Presley wrote Want, which is led by piano and reminds of the Lady Gaga song You & I. ‘I know what I want and baby it’s you’ is the chorus – which I’ve just realised is also a line from Dreams by Gabrielle(!) – with Morgan’s ‘hard-headed’ narrator ready for love, even if it’s just for one night. ‘Don’t hold back, I crave the pain,’ she sings, sexual as well as sensual. I can’t imagine Carly Pearce or Carrie Underwood demanding ‘Push me up against the wall!’ but that’s because they aren’t rebels.

Regular Miranda collaborator Natalie Hemby was in the room for two tracks. Guns and Roses is a piano ballad which hires a string section to underline the ‘dangerous’ nature of the antagonist, while Alanis has sympathy with the singer whose ‘anger was a medicine’. The song ends with some blasts of harmonica in homage to Ms Morissette, with the memorable rhetorical question ‘How did you ever keep your sanity?’ This makes me think of the New York Times piece in which Morgan knows she’s going to have attention heaped upon her private life.

Julia Michaels helped out on Phantom Feelings, which is evident in the skipping delivery of the chorus. It’s a heartbreak song where the narrator’s meet-cute involves ‘quoting Sylvia Plath’ and unrequited love. The power ballad Roman Candle and Meet Somebody, an homage to 90s indie-rock, will appeal to fans of Phoebe Bridgers and even Olivia Rodrigo who, incidentally, has put a song written with Julia Michaels on her new album. Go and listen to GUTS and see if Olivia isn’t being positioned in places as an Acceptable Rebel.

Ashley McBryde – The Devil I Know

The UK country community adores Ashley McBryde. A year after her first visit in 2018, she was playing The O2 as part of Country2Country, and in 2020 she was set to tour her second album Never Will. Four years on, she finally gets the chance having put out two sets in the meantime including this new one and last year’s Lindeville.

The Devil I Know is once again produced by Jay Joyce, who made his name with Eric Church, and there’s a lot of that Acceptable Rebel in the sonic beds on this album, on top of which Ashley sings songs which mix regret with affirmation.

The album begins with the barroom chugger Made For This, written with the now sober Travis Meadows (who wrote Riser for Dierks Bentley) and is essentially Ashley’s version of Luke Combs’ Doin’ This. ‘Most days you’re stuck in a truck’ but you’re signing autographs and shaking hands with fans so it’s not all bad.

Ashley sent Light On In The Kitchen to radio, which is in the same key and timbre as Record Year by Eric Church. Hers is a song of friendship and wisdom which mimics Humble and Kind. It was written with Connie Harrington and Jessi Alexander, who wrote I Drive Your Truck for Lee Brice, and will help hundreds of listeners with self-esteem issues. Aunt Ashley might be a little older than some other gals in town but that makes her a little wiser too.

She’s an equal opportunity songwriter, using both hops and grain in her songtitles. Women Ain’t Whiskey, which I played again immediately, also sounds like an Eric Church song as sung by Wynonna, with a confident narrator saying her sex is ‘intoxicatin’ but not for messing around. Whiskey and Country Music is a kiss-off written with John Osborne and Lee Thomas Miller; the first verse has a ‘meditations/medications’ rhyme, Patsy Cline is ‘on vinyl’ in the chorus and our narrator hopes to get ‘drunk as a possum’. Because Ashley is an Acceptable Rebel, the track closes with a vinyl player being switched off and the record slowing to a stop.

Cool Little Bars was written with Lainey Wilson and Trick Savage, who previewed the song at Buckle and Boots. It’s almost an alternative theme tune to Cheers, the TV show set in a bar, with imagery running throughout the song; props for getting ‘pickle jar’ into the first verse, and for singing about gentrification because the ‘holy ground’ of this bar stands in opposition to the town’s ‘cookie-cutter corporate’ buildings. I can foresee Lainey and Ashley duetting on this, or indeed licensing it to Yellowstone.

Ditto Blackout Betty, a character song which could only have been written with Nicolette Hayford, possibly at the Lindeville sessions but given its moment on this record. ‘Circles on your eyes, bruises on your thighs’ is a great line, and I am sure plenty of listeners will find kinship with Betty, who sounds like she might hang out with the lady who killed Martha Divine. If country music is a refuge for lapsed rock’n’rollers, then the middle part of this track will appease plenty of them, as will the title track.

There, Ashley’s narrator sets the scene, drinking bourbon at a bar, ‘learning how to love and learning how to fight’. The song clatters into life then breaks down into handclaps for the first chorus, where she defies her parents’ wishes to go to church or to work. Aside from her man, ‘most folks can’t see my soul through the smoke’ and the rock arrangement comes to her aid.

Coldest Beer In Town chugs along at odds with the mood of heartache (‘every love don’t last forever’). The line ‘That happy hour sign is just another neon lie’ is worthy of Harlan Howard. There’s more melancholy on Single at the Same Time, which Ashley sings in the high part of her range. She regrets that she and her drinking buddy did not get together before they found their own separate partners (‘someone to get back home to’). Any idea of cheating is dismissed in the first verse: ‘We both laugh about the fact that we’ve never crossed that line.’ It seems odd to be sad about being happy and content, and it completely goes against the grain of country music.

Learned To Lie, which got a push before the album came out, is a terrific and probably autobiographical ballad full of character, where the narrator explains her personality through her upbringing: ‘I learned to pray silently inside a house where the Devil prayed’. Our rebel doesn’t always tell the truth in spite of herself (‘I learned to say things I don’t mean’), making her annoyed at her own talent. There is a minute-long wig-out to end the track.

Closing track 6^th of October was written with another B&B visitor, Blue Foley. It opens with the narrator throwing up, with whiskey ‘from the last fool that kissed me’ on her mouth, and her song is for ‘reckless hearts’ propping up (cool little) barstools. What sounds like a dulcimer solo cuts through the middle of the song, which concludes with some more homespun philosophy: ‘Live in the rhythm and the rhymes when you get ’em.’

I can bet you with some confidence that somebody is going to show Ashley a tattoo of that line etched in their skin by the time she comes to the UK next year. Such is the power of the Acceptable Rebel.

Big Loud do big albums. The latest is from Larry Fleet, a chap from Tennessee whose origin story involves Jake Owen spotting him at a wedding. Handily, Jake is on Big Loud too, as is Morgan Wallen, for whom Larry is opening at The O2 in December. Wallen’s producer Joey Moi once again adds his contemporary classic country feel to the sonics, prioritising live instruments like fiddle and pedal steel to surround Fleet’s tenor voice.

Eight of the 21 tracks from Earned It have been drooled out in advance of the album. In the Country Way of Life style, here are some playlist suggestions based on the most common types of contemporary country song.

Earned It: ‘Small Town Checklist’ where the narrator is ‘satisfied with the simple life’

Lucky Dog: ‘Written by Hardy’, on which Larry is jealous that his ex’s dog gets to be around her and he can’t

Ain’t Mad At Jesus: ‘Breakups Make Me Miserable’. Interestingly, Jesus was the reason Larry’s ex left him because ‘she had to save herself’

Try Texas: ‘Red Dirt’, with the chorus running through the pros of other states (Virginia, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan) before settling on the charms of TX. The tourist board will love it, and I wonder if this is a way to get Larry onto Texas regional radio.

Layaway: ‘Country Wedding Song’, the most popular impact track which is a celebration of buying things on credit, including a wedding ring, a dollhouse and a fishing rod

Much To Talk About: ‘Breakups Make Me Miserable’. Written by Big Loud big cheese Craig Wiseman, our narrator ends up drinking in a bar mourning the ex that he met in the bar. Unsurprisingly from Wiseman, the songwriter’s songwriter, this is effortless and Larry is lucky to end up with it

Daddy Don’t Drink: ‘Hallelujah Amen’. A philosophical song written by Luke Laird where the narrator finds salvation in his daughter, who keeps him sober. I bet the idea for the song was how kids take their first steps and sobriety starts with 12 of them

Young Buck: ‘Country Pursuits’, a song about hunting with daddy, co-written by Devin Dawson and which ties a bow on the album with a long rock outro

The other 13 tracks have been saved for release day, taking the album up to 74 minutes, the length of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony.

25-8: ‘Reminiscin’, in which the narrator wishes that he had more time, written by Casey Beathard and Nicolette Hayford aka Pillbox Patti

Things I Take For Granted: ‘Small Town Checklist’ but a more philosophical one with the line ‘Webster definition of what a lucky man is’

Lord Willing: ‘Small Town Checklist’, the type of gorgeous Southern Boy love song Tim McGraw has been knocking out for years

Two Beer Plan: ‘Meet-Cute’ with a lush bit of pedal steel after the second chorus. This could be a Luke Combs song

Taking The Long Way: ‘Country Sex Jam’ which is basically Mud on the Tires if it were recorded by Travis Tritt

Something He’d Say: ‘Sorry Baby’. I think the narrator is apologising for conversations he doesn’t remember because he was drunk

Beer Needs A Beer: ‘Small Town Checklist’, which sounds like a Jon Pardi honky-tonker on purpose. There is a key change!

There’s a Waylon: ‘Small Town Checklist’, this time with a honky-tonkin’ title for a song co-written by Steve Moakler. You bet there’s a Willie too

Angels Were Gone: ‘Hallelujah Amen’, a song of salvation written by Rodney Clawson and Jessi Jo Dillon

Tennessee On You: ‘Meet-Cute’ set at Stagecoach(!) festival in California with the narrator trying to coax her back to his home state. You can tell from the melody that it was written by Ashley Gorley, and despite its obvious debt to Wallen’s sound and HOLY by FGL, this is an addictive track

Muddy Water: ‘Hallelujah Amen’, a country gospel song full of churchy chords that also hymns sittin’ on the riverbank. There’s a George Harrison effect on the guitar solo too

Devil Music: ‘The Power of Rock’n’Roll’. This is the perfect Big Loud track, right in the intersection point of rock and country. How many more people, though, will couple Highway to Hell and Stairway to Heaven before it becomes cliché.

Grow: ‘Songwriting Exercise’ because the song writes to the title, with every phrase leading to the message of the song that ‘we all got room to grow’

Over the course of an album, the songs blend into one, which is why I am treating it as 21 separate tracks to be picked out like items on a buffet cart. The Big Loud sound has already brought success to Wallen, Ernest, Ashley Cooke, Bailey Zimmerman, Hardy and two men called Jake, Worthington and Owen, with Charles Wesley Godwin coming up soon.

Larry Fleet missed out on the country top 40 with any track from his last album, and you still just about need a radio smash to make a splash in the US and beyond. I do applaud those picking songs for Earned It. They have avoided too many break-up songs, and I don’t spot any drinking songs at all, or at least predominantly about going to the bar and having a hoedown. Given that Larry broke with a song called Where I Find God, there’s unsurprisingly a few Hallelujah, Amen tunes. His brand is more mature than Wallen’s and he will win plenty of admirers out of the superstar’s UK fans.

But still, 21 tracks? Is there any point in complaining?