Lainey Wilson and Thomas Rhett have the big album releases next Friday, just in time for Labor Day Weekend. A week before that pair and following the Olympics fortnight, one album is dominating conversation exactly as it was planned to. It does not belong to Josh Turner, with his first set of original material in seven years, or Morgan Wade, whose second album on her RCA Nashville deal follows a week shy of a year after Psychopath.
Aside from their existing fans, few will notice their release this weekend, because Music Row has granted 29-year-old country newcomer Austin Post his wish to make an album of country music. He joins stars from every decade to advertise country music to an audience used to hearing him sing of sunflowers, circles or rockstars.
I was shocked to learn that the four singles from Post Malone’s last pop album missed the US top 10; indeed, Chemical did better in the UK than the US, reaching number 11. Thus does Postie go country, sharing a track in one place with the man who was marketed as his country equivalent, Jelly Roll.
Losers, the least good track but the one that best sums up the album’s intent, is a misfit anthem which, though it rehashes about a thousand emo anthems and about a dozen Jelly Roll songs, is really about a bar in Nashville. Perhaps tourists will come and sing along to the song, which will surely be played on the hour every hour.
And how convenient that A Bar Song (Tipsy), a rappy country poppy song, is the biggest in the USA when F-1 Trillion topples into streaming services. Come for the Postie, stay for the country.
Of the current batch of superstars, Morgan Wallen got the first single and a number one smash with I Had Some Help, a UK number two for good measure. Luke Combs brought his sensitive vocals to Guy For That, the album’s third pre-release with a cute chorus about how you can’t hire a tradesman to fix a broken heart as easily as you can pump your tyres or resole a shoe, which may or may not be a Red Wing.
In between those two came Pour Me A Drink, where Blake Shelton plays Jimmy Buffett to Postie’s Alan Jackson. The video is basically an advert for Bud Light, whereas It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere was from a more innocent time. (Fun fact: Postie was six years old when Shelton broke through with Austin.) The song was debuted at CMA Fest, while the video to Guy For That was shot on Lower Broadway in Nashville. What’s plusher than a red carpet?
The theme of all three of the songs that trailed the album is collaboration: making someone better, handing them a buzz and, on I Had Some Help, an odd mix of takes two to tango and ‘teamwork makes the dream work’. Country music can unite people from across the aisle, although there are bars on Lower Broadway that would attract certain demographics; would the same person drink in John Rich’s bar then stop off at Miranda Lambert’s?
Might we even get a Post Malone bar some day? Is that the real point of this album, where it points to a lifestyle brand? I hope not.
So, to the album, or rather the 15 tracks that aren’t I Had Some Help, Pour Me a Drink or Guy For That. Someone has been calling the people behind country music’s people in an attempt to represent five decades of stars.
From the 1970s it’s Dolly Parton, with a song with the Dollyest possible title. The writers of Have the Heart (‘to break yours’) include Brad Paisley, Lainey Wilson and Ashley Gorley as well as the two producers and Postie, making this song feel as if it has been concocted in a lab; in fact, most songs are credited to six or seven writers, usually with Ernest somewhere in the credits. What’ll he do next, write songs for a star brought back from the dead by artificial intelligence? He’s running out of world to conquer.
The 1980s and 1990s are represented by Hank Williams Jr and Tim McGraw, who respectively offer the materialism chic Finer Things – diamond rings, 50-foot pontoon and ‘F-1 trillion limousine’ – and the mood-setting album opener Wrong Ones. The latter, which is a classic cautionary tale of a femme fatale, was written with Combs and Ernest in the room, and McGraw boasts of his ‘six pack’ in an on-brand manner while referencing his songs Don’t Take the Girl and Real Good Man.
Into the new millennium and as well as the aforementioned Blake Shelton we get Brad Paisley and Chris Stapleton, more on whom later. And what’s twice as good as one Luke Combs duet? Two of them, thanks to the outstanding Missin’ You Like This, whose diminished chords, blue notes and pedal steel are matched by a lyric full of heartbreak (‘you’re unanswered in my prayers’).
That last song was co-written by Hardy who, like Ernest, has been instrumental in driving the sound of Wallen. The pair also get their own featured vocal: Hardy on the devotional proposal Hide My Gun (‘I’d kill a man for ya!’), Ernest on the toe-tapping meet-cute Devil I’ve Been, which sounds more like a metaphor for Post scooting over and asking country music out for a dance: ‘I’m about tired of living this life of sin,’ sings the man who once sung of White Iversons and released an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys.
Ern’s style makes it seem as if he is the man who has recorded the demos over which Post added his croon, like when Rihanna sang a note-for-note copy of Sia’s guide vocal on Diamonds. Post’s vocals have plenty of character, but his vibrato remains an acquired taste. We might see the album’s songs filleted by other country performers or, more likely, his duet partners; prepare for ‘I’m gonna do a Post Malone song’ or ‘this next one I did with Post Malone’ to become catchphrases for modern country acts.
At Bonnaroo this year Post brought out Billy Strings, the darling of contemporary bluegrass whose star has risen exponentially since the pandemic. The pair performed Cocaine Blues together at a show in California in 2022 and here they duet on the hoedown M-E-X-I-C-O (‘laid up in the shade of a coconut tree’), where Post’s narrator goes from Brooklyn to Vegas to El Paso (nice old-school reference, Postie) while Strings plays semiquaver patterns on his acoustic.
The electric guitar on that track comes from the man who played the intro of Chattahoochee, Brent Mason, who also contributes to Never Love You Again (‘it’s a long lost highway’), a tearjerker of a waltz co-written by Rhett Akins and sung by Post with Sierra Ferrell. It is obviously a good thing that the public at large will hear these undersung talents, who add kudos to the project and, by extension, to Nashville.
There are also three songs that show that he does not need to piggyback off a country star, and thus are sung by Post Malone alone. What Don’t Belong To Me sounds like a hit thanks to its vulnerable protagonist singing of affairs of the heart, while the chorus of Right About You is a pun on how he used to write songs wishing for someone like his darling. He even chucks in a weird chord when he sings of how he can ‘change all the chords’, the sort of musical gag for which I am a sucker.
We’ve already heard the closing track, Yours, a dedication to his daughter in the voice of a loving dad (‘I loved her long before’) which was debuted in his Broadway takeover. I can’t remember hearing a song from a selfish father before; I hope it doesn’t start a trend for Dad Country, though I bet Luke Bryan is taking notes, as he had would have done while listening to the recent Luke Combs album.
It seems unfair that Bryan, a TV talent show judge, does not get a look in; his croon would have been ideal for Missin’ You Like This. Perhaps he was too busy filming Idol at the time. There’s no Miranda Lambert either, but then again there could (there will) be a smattering of bonus tracks that will pop up soon which could contain Miranda, Zach Bryan, Shaboozey or Beyoncé. Or Taylor Swift, to complement the pair’s duet Fortnight. We shall see next week which songs on F-1 Trillion win out when all 18 land on the Billboard Hot 100.
Make that 27: between writing that paragraph and redrafting this piece, Post put out a set of nine songs under the title F-1 Trillion: Long Bed in a move that copies what Taylor Swift did earlier this year. Do we need 27 Post Malone country songs? No, but Spotify does and it all greases the streams so it can remain near the top of the album charts. Plus it means listeners can create their own version of F-1 Trillion, especially if they want more of Postie in their playlist.
The nine are all sung, again, by Post Malone alone, and include plenty of fiddle from Larry Franklin. Perhaps these tracks are a sop to people who hear the original 18 and think, ‘Well it’s good, but where’s the fiddle?’ More likely they are a response to a question in a marketing meeting that raised the question, ‘Well it’s good so far, but where’s the fiddle?’
The poppy Ain’t How It Ends (‘in a country song’) references ‘Waylon, Willie, Jones and Whitley…Hank and Johnny, Strait and Ronnie’ in a meta checklist (‘you gotta have some taillights’) co-written by Ashley Gorley and Ernest, perhaps the two starriest A-Listers in town. There is fiddle here too, and a syncopated ending that reminds me of Where The Green Grass Grows by Tim McGraw.
Fallin’ in Love (‘it’s gonna do what it do’ will appal Grady Smith, whose review will I imagine come quickly and smartly) and Who Needs You (‘when I can break myself in two’) lean into the traditional sound of Alan Jackson and those eight country voices mentioned above. There’s a Paul Franklin steel guitar solo on the latter for good measure; might he finally, after about three dozen nominations, secure the CMA Musician of the Year Award this year?
Two Hearts had Jessie Jo Dillon and her dad Dean in the room, who help create another patented Heartbreak Song, with added child custody arrangements, that have put Dean in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Go To Hell is a twostep that rewrites Two of a Kind by Garth Brooks as a song for bachelorettes with attitude (‘she can serve you humble pie and make you try it’); it turns into a hoedown which makes me wonder where Garth Brooks is on the project. Maybe he’s saving a Post Malone collaboration for his next album.
Elsewhere, Dead At The Honky Tonk makes a murder ballad out of heartbreak (‘there’s a hole in his heart down at the hole in the wall’), Hey Mercedes sounds like a Luke Combs pickup song, and Wallen could have sold the introspective Killed A Man, since that ‘man’ is part of the narrator. Back To Texas is a tourist brochure in song that trots around the USA before settling on the great state which is ‘all belt no buckle, all snake no rattle, all honey no suckle’.
And all nine of those songs were kept off the record proper. I still think he won’t stop at a mere 27 tunes. Wallen stuck 36 on his last album, after all.
Early next week I’ll pop up a piece about how the media at large have covered the album release, but to complete the review I will head to the Opry, where true country stars must pay their dues.
Post made his debut there on Wednesday 14, to maximise headlines and get the city even further on his side (Beyoncé, for one, didn’t get one of these). He wore a white cowboy hat (‘a K Mart George Strait’) and held a red solo cup (‘this is apple juice’) while strumming an acoustic guitar and declaring he wouldn’t cuss: ‘ass is in the Bible, right?’ Incidentally only four of the 18 tracks on the album proper have explicit lyrics.
Chris Stapleton didn’t appear on the night to sing their groovy collaboration California Sober, with The War & Treaty subbing in for him. A funky riff drives a lyric full of whiskey and a melody full of long held notes; Post is channelling the Allman Brothers and other Southern rockers, but the result is something commercial and accessible for the general listener.
Post said he remembered seeing Brad Paisley, who introduced Post to the stage, as a kid. Two decades on, Post was joined by the guitarist and Vince Gill on One More Last Chance. And once you’ve got Music City’s Mayor on your side, you cannot fail. For extra kudos he brought out John Michael Montgomery, whose daughter is a big Post fan, to sing Be My Baby Tonight, a Garthish number one from the year before Post was born.
Paisley, Montgomery and Vince Gill were among the ‘friends’ on the bill, the former introducing him as having ‘a country heart. He immersed himself in the Nashville way.’ Paisley said the Opry circle ‘suits you completely, there is a tattoo of that waiting to happen’. The pair played their collaboration Goes Without Saying (‘that she ain’t coming back…her taillights are doing all the talking’), an album highlight that moves Paisley back into the country music conversation before the release of his own LP.
Since his last one in 2017 Post Malone has become one of the biggest popstars in the USA. At the Opry, ‘heart’ was the word of the evening: Gill loved his heart and Post loved Lainey Wilson’s heart, before they gave their new song Nosedive a world premiere. ‘There’s still beauty in the nooosedive’ is a heck of a hook. After world premieres of three songs, he treated the crowd to The Hits, I Had Some Help and Sunflower, whose chord palette makes it easy to convert into a country song.
‘Welcome to country music! We’re glad to have you!’ was the greeting from Lainey, the face of contemporary country bestowing the industry’s blessing on a man who will bring more casual fans to the genre. The clip will be endlessly repeated in the coming months.
Wouldn’t it make sense for Country2Country to book him as a headliner, although, given that he was due to headline Hyde Park in 2020, perhaps he’ll be part of the summer lineup for 2025.
A Country Way of Life 