A Country Way of Life

LeAnn Rimes played the O2 Arena this week. If you were there, can you let me know if my hypothesis was correct: LeAnn could sell 20,000 tickets because she only needed 4,000 brides or grooms to take four friends each so they could all yell along to How Do I Live and Can’t Fight the Moonlight.

LeAnn became very famous at a very young age, following in the steps of Brenda Lee, Wanda Jackson, Tanya Tucker and manifold Osmonds and Jacksons. Billy Gilman, Taylor Swift and Mason Ramsey all followed LeAnn to stardom on the country side, and it remains to see how Mason will move on from being the Yodelling Boy. Taylor was many things but she was never a viral superstar; like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, she was incubated by the system, rather than signed to a label to capitalise on the eyeballs.

Then we come to the American Idol factory. Scotty McCreery had the Syco money behind him after winning the 2011 series, capturing the hearts of the TV show’s audience of kids his age, mums who wanted their kids to be like him or marry him, and Simon Cowell seeing star potential in a guy with a deep, resonant voice about which Louis Walsh would surely have marvelled: ‘Scotty! You’re only sixteen!!’

Today Scotty is a husband, father and, importantly, an independent country artist. After getting a winner’s album out of the way, his first album targeted at country radio did brilliantly, thanks to singles like Feelin’ It and See You Tonight. The first single from his prospective second album, Southern Belle, tanked because the people running his career were idiots. Why not lean into the traditional sound and zag while everyone else zigs? By zigging, it just meant Scotty was losing his USP, and his second album never came out.

Fortunately he retreated from the spotlight and returned in 2018 with Five More Minutes, a brilliant song about life and stuff which, despite being released outside the major-label system, gained traction and put Scotty back within the conversation. This Is It, a hymn to his wife Gabi (pronounced ‘guh-BEE’), and fun tunes like In Between continued his streak at radio.

The 2021 album Same Truck followed 2018’s Seasons Change, and we now have the third album of the McCreerynaissance. As Dierks Bentley did before him, Scotty has headed to the mountains to seek inspiration for his music, and this is a very Carolinian album that makes concessions to Music Row. Cab In A Solo – where ‘cab’ is also short for Cabernet – was the single sent to radio, which continued the retro feel of Damn Strait and is part of the swing back to pre-bro music. (Is that a term? It is now.)

It was followed by five tracks trickled out in the interim: Can’t Pass the Bar, a party track which has a sensational banjo/ganjo solo whose picker I wish I could credit; Red Letter Blueprint, a dobro-assisted self-help ballad with a King James bible for a kicker; Slow Dance, whose choruses variously namecheck Conway Twitty and Keith Whitley; and Love Like This, which begins as a list of things Scotty likes and climaxes with an on-brand adoration for his wife and child. ‘I never slept so little but never felt so much’ is a bumper sticker of a line.

I don’t much like that Lonely has seven writers and three producers for what is a bog-standard honky-tonk-tear-in-beer tune – it may be because the whole band contributed – but it makes sure everybody gets some points, as they are known. Hey Rose (‘who put thorns around your heart?’) is a you’ve-got-a-friend song with a downbeat tenor, and the album’s only outside write.  

Drinkin’ song And Countin’ and album opener Little More Gone are, like a lot of Drake Milligan’s music, well-chiselled homages to an entire period in country music that is, remember the term, pre-bro. Fans of Clint Black will find much to enjoy, especially in the nice nod to Nothin’ but the Taillights, probably to stave off a lawsuit. Fall of Summer (good title) is a breezy reminiscin’ song about a summer romance that would segue nicely on Bob Harris’s show into or out of 21 Summer by Brothers Osborne who, like Scotty, are frequent UK visitors.

No Country for Old Men should start some debates: beginning with a chime from a pedal steel, it settles into a shuffle beat; our narrator meets a drinker in a bar, who reels off the sort of names and songtitles and topics that used to frequent country songs. Good news, bloke in that song: country’s like it was pre-bro again!!

That chap should listen to Stuck Behind a Tractor, where our narrator forsakes the city for life back in the sticks. It was written, naturally, by Rhett Akins, who has been writing this type of song for three decades and is still finding new ways to evoke rural life. Closing track Porch was written with Greylan James and Heather Morgan, and it’s the best summation of what Scotty does: warm, hearth-ready country music that is absolutely inoffensive and lightly Christian.

He might not be the 16-year-old cutie pie, but he’s a fine young man who is now a member of the Opry, keeping the flame burning for the traditional style that might not always in fashion but remains just so. The old style, with organic instrumentation and grown-up lyrics, tootles along to remind label executives that once in a while people want to hear the old songs sung well by a great singer.

A few hours before Charley Crockett played the second of three nights in East London as part of his tour to promote his magnificent new album $10 Cowboy, he was named one of five nominees for the Americana Music Association Artist of the Year.  

Noah Kahan might have had the smash hit of the year so far, while Tyler Childers, Allison Russell and Sierra Ferrell may be critical darlings, but none of those four could boast the kind of stories, real and fictitious, that Charley has in his locker. Having been nominated in 2023, maybe 2024 will be his year, although I don’t think he will mind if he doesn’t triumph.

After two hours of scene-setting from DJ Texas Joe, who literally spun the records and advertised the joint he runs down in London Bridge, Charley came onstage in his white multi-gallon hat and sat on his stool. I suppose living in Texas means that a hot East London venue was, ironically, no sweat, especially as he wore the kind of brown leather jacket a villain in a Western would wear.

Several cherries from his catalogue were left unpicked over the next 90 minutes, although there is every chance he may have played a crowd member’s favourite song on either of the other nights. The audience, by the way, included both infants and codgers, which was delightful to see.

Last year Charley, who turned 40 just before Easter, released a live album from the Ryman in Nashville, which gives an indication of which of his dozens of tunes were bankers. They included Name on a Billboard, a mordant satire from his Man from Waco album about going to LA to sign a publishing deal; Charley annotated the song with a lament that of his $75,000 advance, half went to the producer and the other half to the publisher.

Since then, Charley has done things his own way and on his own dime (with the help of the indie label Thirty Tigers, who invited me to the show): at least two albums a year, regular trips to the UK and pretty much universal critical approval. I am sure a promoter would advise him not to include two murder ballads in his opening three numbers, but Charley is the kind of performer who would turn down that advice.

Cowboy Candy, with its hootin’ and hollerin’, came near the end of a set which included songs written by Gram Parsons, Townes van Zandt and Bob Dylan. I marvelled at how Charley remembered all the words, but I suppose busking on Louisiana street corners helps keep all the verses in his head. In one of his between-song dialogues, he referred to those early days where he found it hard to keep in time with a band, but the job has improved him; there were whoops whenever he hit a groovy instrumental passage, and respectful listening to the picaresque stories he told.

He could also write a tune, many of which are on the new album: the tremendous Ain’t Done Losing Yet, with roulette wheels and regret, and America (‘we can be hard to understand’), where his thumb acted as the bass note and his little finger was extended to play the melodic licks. As he himself admitted, without the troupe who joined him at Shepherd’s Bush Empire last year, he was a one-man band tonight.

The narrator of older cut (from 2021’s Music City USA!!) Are We Lonesome Yet seems to have cracked the code about why companies get us addicted to things that are bad for us. I think he played his AMA-nominated Song of the Year I’m Just a Clown, but so many high-quality three-minute movies came and went that I remain unsure.  

A new song detailed how he had ‘always loved a game I can’t win’ but carries on regardless; I wonder if it will come out on an album later this year or if he will wait until 2025 to release it. He’s in control, of his material and of his audience, and it was particularly impressive when he chastised us for having a go at a heckler; some performers who have to stick to a setlist of hits aren’t allowed to be themselves, he said sagely.

Charley might be lacking any hits, but he sure showcases the best of himself and American(a) music.

A final word for the owners of the Blacksmiths Lounge in Derby, who were sat beside me and were delighted to see Charley in the flesh. They’ll still be humming his songs on the replacement coach journey back up the M1 today.

Come early, come often. Following the example set by Kip Moore and Brothers Osborne, Tenille Arts has built a tremendously loyal UK fanbase who early in 2023 packed out the Omeara venue as she promoted her Girl to Girl project. Later in the year she returned to play The Long Road and co-headline a trio of shows with Caylee Hammack, and she would be an easy booking if Country2Country want to invite her back after she came here in 2022.

I am not a close follower of Tenille’s personal life but she has put it into these 14 songs. She wrote on Instagram that 2023 was ‘the hardest and messiest year’ of her life and that To Be Honest is ‘the breakup album I didn’t know I was writing’. It is unabashedly a pop album sold to country fans, like a Lady A album or the first two Carly Pearce albums; there’s nothing wrong with that given that Tenille has once again independently released her music on her Dreamcatcher imprint and is reaching for the biggest possible audience.

Right after that February 2023 visit, Tenille put out a blah montage-friendly carpe-diem duet with Maddie & Tae called Last Time Last. It kicked off the run of songs which have been sprinkled on to streaming services well before release day of her fourth album. Mama’s Eyes was released to coincide with Mother’s Day, while the torch song Jealous of Myself appears in its duet version with LeAnn Rimes, who is herself over in the UK a few days after Tenille’s album comes out.

Wonder Woman is a confident radio-ready song which was written with Alex Kline and Allison Veltz Cruz, the pair who helped Tenille on her smash Somebody Like That. Next Best Thing (‘you already had a queen in your California King’) is a poppy Ross Copperman production where our narrator wishes her ex well as he looks for someone almost as good as she is/was.

So Do I is another torch song that Demi Lovato and Sasha Sloan stuck on a shelf. It’s the sort of sad song Twinnie has made her name with, and it breaks down the fourth wall in how Tenille wants to be told she is ‘not alone’ in being unable to scream because she can’t breathe.

Sloan, herself an artist who has just put out a track with Ryan Hurd and might well shift from pop to country soon, joined Tenille to write the meditative acoustic track How Do You Sleep which is the type of song Kelsea Ballerini could have put on her divorce album. It’s a lazy but justified comparison, thanks to lines where the difference between Tenille and her ex is that ‘you don’t need a pill to turn it off’.

Want Her Back has Tenille mourning a lost part of herself to liquid guitar lines reminiscent of John Mayer, while Call Me When You Get Home Friends is full of love, comradeship and melody. It is also sprinkled with the type of synth sound that was found in music from the 1980s, a time before Tenille was born.

As with her previous records, the songs will comfort her fanbase of young women who flocked to that Omeara show. The wistful ballad Summer Don’t Go (‘breaking my heart’) has also been given the Ross Copperman pop-country sheen, and Copperman was in the room with Tenille for the title track that opens the album with an unhappy sigh: she lays out the foibles that come with breaking up, as the couple try not to wreck each other’s lives.

The song benefits from the Emily Weisband touch, as does People Change, which uses the banjo plugin to give a sound that acts in opposition to the heartache our narrator feels. I am sure she will perform it solo on piano at writer’s rounds, where the pain will be more stark; on record it just sounds breezy, although a lot of successful pop music marries sad words to happy tunes.

Tenille enlisted Jesse Frasure and Jessie Jo Dillon to help her write the terrific pair of Dying To Be Pretty, whose harsh message is sweetened by a massive pop drum sound, and Something I Can Cry To, a Swiftish breakup song about breakup songs which is the size of a stadium. I wonder if it will feature in her slot opening for Luke Bryan this year, where people will listen politely or talk throughout her set.

Tenille will be warmly received when she returns to these shores later this year with five shows in six days starting in Glasgow and working her way down the UK. Alongside shows in Manchester and Birmingham, there’s a Friday night show at the Lafayette in Kings Cross and a Saturday night in Bristol alongside Kezia Gill. Come early, come often.

Is there any point being a country musician in 2024? Besides the potential to play in front of people rather than in a rehearsal room and, if you are in a band, the camaraderie of traipsing up and down motorways in a van, the rewards have never been lower.

I’m in a local orchestra which is pay-to-play. For £40 per concert, there’s a professional conductor, detailed parts in special folders, dedicated rehearsals for string players and wind & brass and, at the end of it all, a chance for family, friends and the wider community to hear pieces written a century or two ago. Beethoven’s Third Symphony was written in the early 1800s, but it sounds brilliant in 2024 and it was a thrill to play it.

The orchestra is made up of professionals, teachers and those who became accomplished players while teenagers. Once a week, in a semi-relaxed setting, we play tough pieces in the classical repertoire and mostly keep in time and in tune. We aim to enrich the community with our music, and we have applied for the status of a non-profit to ensure some necessary funding.

If you are making contemporary music for profit, it is hard to capture the attention of those outside your immediate circle. There are networks of festivals, radio stations and small venues to deliver your music to the consumer, and then there are atomised social media pages that are at the mercy of the algorithm. Unless you’re a dead cert, a big label will be unlikely to sink thousands of pounds into you; even then, you will have to tailor your art to the market to ensure it blends in on radio or playlists.

Have you noticed how much new music sounds like Taylor Swift or Drake or Lewis Capaldi or Ed Sheeran? That’s because the market leaders dictate the rest of the market. It happens in books too: Bella Mackie and Richard Osman have both made genres popular where respectively women kill their family and old folk try to solve a murder. The rise of romance-fantasy, with the moniker ‘romantsy’, also proves my point.

Sometimes talent is precocious. Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter were both on the Disney Channel before the Hot 100, while Billie Eilish made her best song Ocean Eyes at 14. Lorde, Britney Spears, LeAnn Rimes and Taylor Swift all became teenage stars, while Tate McRae has quietly become a superstar and played two dates at Hammersmith Apollo to a total of 10,000 people just last week.

The Amy Winehouse biopic makes clear that a girl barely out of school could revive soul music for an audience who were invested in her story. Robbie Williams, who was 16 when he got into Take That, has his own biopic over the next Christmas holidays, having already starred in a four-part misery doc in 2023. Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, Liam Gallagher, Sheryl Crow and Lewis Capaldi have all had brand expansion docs made about them, as has Taylor Swift. There has never been more product for a fan to consume, and that isn’t counting concert videos.

But what about the new bands or artists who have been so inspired by those acts that they want to enter the industry? Last Thursday saw the launch in London of Black Deer Live, where Morganway headlined a bill that included Hannah Rogers and Gina Larner. The events promote Americana music in the UK, with dates in Liverpool, York, Brighton and Manchester either side of the jamboree in June in Kent.

Adam Brucass will not be there, but he has just released the title track of his forthcoming album Right Now. It is a well-sung power ballad with a fat guitar solo in the middle of it. ‘I dread to think how much this album’s cost me so far,’ he tells me just before announcing the project. ‘To be honest, I don’t even know at this point!’

Based as he is in Kings Lynn in Norfolk, the centres of the UK scene are all a little too far from him. ‘It’s starting to take off a bit in Colchester with some new events and clubs,’ Adam tells me, ‘but nothing like it is up North.’ Buckle and Boots caters to fans around Manchester and Liverpool, while Paul Taylor is building something at the Brickhouse Tavern in the equidistant town of St Helens.

Adam adds that there is ‘incidental monopolising’ of the scene, where certain acts are preferred. ‘It’s hard to cut into that circle without being regularly involved with everything they do, and that’s difficult when you’re 200 miles away.’

Also unhelpful are gig bookers who ask them to play a show, lay out a deal and go cold turkey on them. I won’t name the festival so as not to bring them into disrepute, but Adam, who hires his band and is recording as a solo artist, says they have announced the lineup and he is not on it.

‘I much prefer playing with a band. It keeps me grounded in my roots. I was always better with a band, but democracy doesn’t always work in a band setting. It took me 10 years to realise I need to be doing my own thing.

‘The price for that is [having] a band that I have to pay. Really it’s more like a band of guys doing me a favour, with a promise that it won’t cost them any money at least.

‘Bands are easy: you’ve got four or five guys, each with their income and their own network of friends and family for support. Even a trio or duo has it better than a solo artist.

‘I think the biggest issue holding me back sometimes is that gigs just don’t pay well enough for them to be worth it. Believe it or not I am all for playing for exposure as long as it’s good exposure and it doesn’t cost me money, but I’ve had to turn down shows this year at decent festivals because they want to pay me £500. That’s fine for a solo artist, but to get a five-piece band to travel six hours each way in a minimum of three cars, it’s just not practical.

‘Again if we were a band we would all be paying our own way, but when it’s my name on the poster I’m responsible for these guys – entirely by choice – and I have to make sure they get paid. I don’t want these guys who are doing me a favour to have to pay for my ambition, so I usually walk away without a penny having soured the organisers by having to ask for another £100 just to break even on costs and bug them for extra parking passes.’

I saw Adam and his band at Buckle and Boots in 2023, where his voice was in good nick and, as he told the crowd, his ambitions were clear: the Paddock Stage was fine but he really saw himself on the Main Stage. The circumstances leading up the performance may have had an impact on his patter.

‘Buckle and Boots nearly killed us! We left at 7am in three different cars, got there about 12pm, hung around all day, played the set at 7ish, then headed off about half eight and got back about 2am. We had all just about started to hallucinate around 11pm, but we made it!

‘We don’t commit to anything that can’t at least pay enough to cover the band’s fuel, but generally I make sure I’m the last person to get paid if at all.’

Wouldn’t it be easier if it was just him and his guitar, with a saving of hundreds of pounds? This, after all, is why Ed Sheeran’s success has ushered in a raft of solo superstars like Lewis Capaldi and Tom Walker. Adam quashes my argument via musical and economic reasons: ‘Firstly, it wouldn’t showcase the songs properly, but they also pay a lot less so there’s still not really any money to be made. For me, it’s more about getting out in front of the right audiences at this stage.’

Adam has ordered the album’s tracks, he tells me, in the order he would play them at Wembley.

‘It been a bit of a journey. It was a combined effort between a number of different producers that changed hands and dropped out over the course of two years.

‘The older tracks were done by Arthur Walwin, either before or as I started the solo thing, then a few were produced remotely by Ariel Delgado in Argentina. Some of them were then mastered in Nashville by Jeff Stauffer.

‘The bulk of it was produced by Stef Judd at The Stable Studio, previously of Flatland Kings, who also mixed a couple of the tracks that were produced in Argentina. Then they were mastered by Sam Procter at Lismore Mastering. The whole thing is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of different producers.’

Not to mention someone who cost Adam a four-figure sum and whose work had to be redone from scratch. Eddy Smith, Lewis Fowler of Two Ways Home and Rob Gulford of Holloway Road are all adept at producing their own music, so why could Adam not take charge himself?

‘If I had any clue what I was talking about when it came to mixing I would have had plenty of control,’ he says, ‘but I’m smart enough to know I don’t know everything so I prefer to leave it to people who do. I had some input but for the most part I left it to the pros.

‘Basically after one of the producers I was working with early on dropped out because of time constraints, I put word out that I was after a new producer. This guy got in touch, he wasn’t a country producer but he was up for giving it a go. The price was right and he had some good contacts in publishing, so that was enough for me and I let him loose on it.

‘When it came to delivering the first mix, it needed some work, and as I say I’m not an expert in production, so I took it to someone who was for some advice, a friend of mine called Adam Fiasco. He’s a very accomplished country producer who I could never afford to work with but who very kindly gave me some feedback and a list of suggestions to improve the mix.

‘Unfortunately those efforts were misconstrued and it led to some disagreements with the producer, who ultimately dropped out of the project. I paid him for the work he had done and we cut ties, and then it was back to finding someone else to pick it up. Thankfully Stef Judd was that someone and it’s thanks to him that the album got made.

‘Unfortunately 90% of what the last guy had recorded was totally unusable and we ended up having to re-record pretty much all of it, which meant the money I’d paid him was wasted and it was now going to cost me even more to get it finished. 

‘I didn’t want to argue because I figured if he went and complained to his friends at this publishing company about me, or even mentioned it in passing, that’s me potentially blacklisted from a huge label, so I just closed the book. By that time he had blocked me on all his socials despite a very clean break so there was nothing i could do.’

Adam adds that this money had been given to him by family members so that precluded him for asking for more to replace the wasted four-figure sum. ‘I have had to fund it all myself over the last year on a self-employed income, hence why it took so long.’

And remember the guy with ‘good contacts in publishing’? It turns out that he didn’t really have much influence after all. ‘It was all a waste of time worrying about it, but it’s just the business,’ Adam says stoically. ‘Not only do you have to make friends, you have to avoid making enemies.’

Drake Milligan has told interviewers about the advice he received from Gene Simmons of KISS when he was deliberating over whether to go on America’s Got Talent. Either he patiently built his fanbase over a number of years, or did it in front of millions of eyeballs in one go. Unlike Carrie Underwood or Scotty McCreery, he was ready for primetime and was a fully formed star. It is no surprise that he is set to head to the UK for a third time in 18 months this summer.

That choice is the same for young artists like Adam Brucass. ‘Years of one-to-one fan-building by playing great shows constantly to the right people, or you sign a half-decent record deal and get funding behind mass exposure. I’m setting my sights on record labels.’

Even then, it isn’t sustainable if an act is not developed in the right way and ‘they all screw it up and the label moves on.

‘It hardly seems worth trying to make it in the UK anyway. It would seem there definitely is a ceiling here, and there always will be as long as UK fans are more interested in US artists. So I think I’m better off trying to make contacts and get some traction in Nashville.’

Or else, there are two magic words that accelerate the rise of a new act: American Idol.

‘You’d be amazed how often self-made artists have that in their résumé,’ Adam says. ‘I maintain it’s nearly impossible to become popular through social media alone, even TikTok: in 99% of cases there is always a history of American Idol or the Voice. They launched with up to a few thousand followers, then the platforms’ algorithms push them up the list.’

Then there are international songwriter contests which Adam says are won every year by ‘someone with some kind of prior mass exposure on TV’. He goes so far as to say it’s a con, one he wants no part in. It attracts ‘desperate, naive, independent artists with barely any money to begin with and no sense of what to do with it, and they end up paying for the success of a pretty much pre-decided winner who doesn’t need to win it.

‘These competitions charge something like $25 per song, per submission, and in their own words they get over 100,000 artists submitting every year. They can submit as many tracks as they like, so these people rake in a minimum of $250,000, probably closer to a million [dollars] every year assuming most artists submit more than one song, and they only give away about $20,000 in prizes.

‘It’s effectively like a rigged lottery, It’s a great business model, and if they were honest about what it was I’d have no problem with it, but it’s the taking advantage of desperate artists I can’t get with. I think it could be a great idea, if you charge for submissions, openly and honestly. It could be a good way to fund new events and support the scene, that something I’d be happy to be involved in.’

Amid all of this pessimism, I was struck by a Facebook post from Jeremy McComb, who is fast becoming an Honorary Brit thanks to his frequent visits to this part of the world. He will be a kind of Jools Holland figure at this year’s Buckle and Boots, taking over the role of MC over the weekend.

‘Everything in my world comes down to you,’ he wrote on the day his song Granite Stone was released. A reminiscin’ song which sounds true to Jeremy’s life, it has an anthemic feel and vivid lyrics: smoking on a back porch, going off to war, wondering who runs their old hometown and, as per the title, a gravestone.

‘I don’t do this for the industry,’ continued Jeremy. ‘I’m not interested in being part of anybody’s club. I want to connect with you. I want to write songs that touch you and embed themselves in your story.

‘The next step in being more vulnerable and honest comes with a new song from my next record. Whether people hear it or not is up to you: sharing it, playlisting it, downloading it, streaming it.

‘This entire project is: no Label, no promotion staff, no marketing team and no marketing budget. I hope you find yourself in this song and I hope it hits you enough that you share it with all your people.’

Other musicians commented on a piece last week in the Guardian which laid bare the problems even modestly successful acts have. Laura Evans, a brilliant artist from Wales, asked her Facebook followers if they ever ‘wonder why I’m working nonstop all year round on cruises?…Being an independent artist is a grind like no other.’

Pete Briley, who is both a solo artist and guitar player in festival regulars The Outlaw Orchestra, thinks that the cost of living has impacted what people can spend on seeing live music: ‘I don’t think it’s that people don’t want to invest in new music. Times are tough.’

The last word on the matter goes to Adam Brucass. ‘At least a couple times a day I have to ask myself why I do it, because the horrid truth is that there really isn’t much about it that I enjoy. Even gigging is mostly to crowds that don’t know me, and I spend the whole time worried about screwing it up.

‘But the thought that one day if I do things right, I could be playing stadiums with 100,000 people singing my songs back to me. That would make it worth it.’

Right Now, the new single from Adam Brucass, is out now.

In 2016 I headed to the inaugural Buckle and Boots festival with next to no knowledge of the UK scene. By the end of the weekend I was familiar with an eclectic range of country acts: Gary Quinn, The Rising, Katy Hurt, Ward Thomas, Two Ways Home, Holloway Road, Jess and the Bandits, Laura Oakes and, headlining on Friday night, Raintown.

Paul and Claire were invited to play the first three C2C festivals, and in 2014 they won the BCMA Entertainer of the Year award. Their full-band sound was a mix of rock’n’roll, country and Celtic soul, which befitted their Glasgow background. I was fond of the narrative song Nineteen Again with its chorus full of pangs for home, and I loved the power ballad If This Was a Love Song too, which also came from the 2015 album Writing on the Wall.

Since then they have put out two songs, Play It Loud and Run with the Night, and then the pandemic scuppered any chance of a follow-up album. Having had daughter Alba Rosa, whom Claire was visibly pregnant with at Buckle and Boots, they did have a follow-up child who is now a toddler, and in April 2024 they are at long, long last ready to unleash their third album Acoustic Heart.

‘We’re taking the “glass half full” approach,’ Paul says, with his bairn burbling behind him. ‘It’s here now, mate.’ The pair recorded 16 songs, meaning some of them did not make the cut. In their own words they are ‘back at the start’ on the country scene even though they are an established act.

‘We’re fully aware of where we are. We’ve always been pretty grounded,’ says Claire. Since 2015, the UK scene has changed inexorably, with more festivals, dozens more performers and much more regular visits from acts originating in the US, Canada and even Australia. On August 31 Raintown join Kristian Bush and Flatland Cavalry on the bill for the Mill Town Music Festival in Paisley, having already played the November 2023 iteration of Country In The Afternoon.

‘It’s all grassroots that created this,’ says Paul. ‘It was already there and it has allowed the foundation to be built upon. The very first C2C was a watershed, but people have forgotten what it was like pre-C2C. There are now complaints every year about the lineup.

‘Ultimately people need to remember, five, six, seven years ago these people weren’t coming to the UK at all. You were lucky to get Keith Urban playing a small O2 [Academy] venue somewhere or Brad Paisley doing one gig in London. That’s changed forever now, because there is a scene here.

‘The idea of C2C wasn’t always about the Americans coming to the UK. It was to be this groundswell of people in the UK performing their own version of country music, and that would grow with the Americans coming over. That’s not quite happened.

‘The business head on me understands it: if I’m a label and spending tens of thousands of dollars bringing over a band, I want to bring over my up-and-coming bands as well.

‘At some point we need to take control of our own industry over here. For the “country music family”, like any family, some people won’t fit in and they are black sheep. There are those who get particularly helpful hands up, and those who have to work hard to get those opportunities.’

Raintown reckon they fall into the latter category, so when Gavin Chittick, who puts on both Country In The Afternoon and Mill Town, gave them the opportunity to come to London, they did. It was, surprisingly, the only one or the ‘six or seven festivals’ they played that had a country theme, and there, the pair showed they had not lost their spark or ability to please a crowd.

They were joined by Stevie Lawrence, the album’s producer and ideas man, and fiddler Fiona, who provides one of a palette of sounds on the album including dobro, pipes, whistle, accordion, cello, sax and trumpet.

‘We’ve always had it in our roots, being from Scotland, having those Celtic influences,’ Claire says. ‘The album wasn’t supposed to be the album that it is: it very organically grew into something over the Covid break when we had over a year where a lot of places were closed.

‘We feel our vocals are at the heart of everything, which makes us Raintown, so we were going to record a basic album with three people in the room, us going in and capturing our songs acoustically with Stevie playing guitar and bouzouki. All of a sudden, Stevie had a lot of these visions.’

‘We did have some interesting conversations!’ adds Paul, who mentions the ‘Transatlantic’ sound pioneered by Aly Bain, Phil Cunningham and Jerry Douglas. The trio began to put on Transatlantic Sessions at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. I used to live round the back of the venue, so I used to see posters with their names and faces on it, although I never went to any gigs. In 2024 the event returned to Celtic Connections with Carlene Carter on the bill.

Paul tells me that the project came into being on ‘many long journeys up and down the M74/M6, at late nights at Stevie’s over coffee after rehearsals: [marrying] the American country music and the Celtic instrumentation, which is ultimately the same thing. Country music came from the Irish and Scots immigrants going over to America and it was called ‘Old Country’ because they were singing songs about the old country. Those foundations are always there: that’s why they’ve got fiddle and why there are a lot of reels.

‘Today it’s tied up in production so the reels aren’t instantly recognisable but they are there. Stevie always said we could have something authentically Raintown by bringing this instrumentation together. We were still writing for this new project that was in the wind at the time, and that grew into Stevie saying, “Why don’t we add this?”’ to which Claire interjects ‘a brass band!!’

‘He had created a vision that we bought into,’ Paul says, ‘strip everything back, look at the arrangements and then build upon them with your vocal sound. It’s still a Raintown album, there’s still power in it.’

This extends to ballads like My Whole World, a devastating song which opens with a woman selling her wedding dress having lost her fiancé before her wedding day. It invokes the Ernest Hemingway short story formed of only six words: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’

‘It was stripped back to guitars, a cello and Claire’s voice. We had these really lofty ideas of where we wanted to take it, and it was Stevie that wanted it to be about the song, the story, the message behind the song. It didn’t need the gospel choir!

‘It wasn’t deliberately influenced by our life changes. It was much more about creating something that was authentically Raintown and present that onstage. At our heart, we want to be a live act. We thrive and we love the interaction. When things aren’t maybe going right but you’ve got that fight to try and win people over, that’s a positive challenge for us. We played Killin, which is predominantly a trad music festival. It was off the wall, incredible!’

‘People were just so open,’ says Claire. ‘We spoke to a lot of the audience afterwards. We expressed that we had a bit of fear because it was traditional, roots-type music. Most people said they were here for connection with us and with good music.’

‘The introduction that we were getting was as a country act, and people were readjusting,’ says Paul. ‘They were expecting Dolly Parton or dare I say Beyoncé-esque sounds. We’re a bit rockier than that, and it’s not a couple onstage looking lovingly, or glaringly, into each other’s eyes!’

The new album contains reworkings of four classics from the Raintown catalogue: Light The Fuse Up and Writing on the Wall arrive on the album in the kind of style the duo are accustomed to playing them live; Run With The Night and Play It Loud are set in a ‘more countryfied’ version than the studio versions, which were produced with John McLaughlin who has worked with pop acts like Five, Busted and Westlife.

Forever Isn’t Long Enough, whose recorded version fitted in with the rockier feel of its parent album Writing on the Wall, had been one of ‘the pillars’ of the intended album but didn’t make the tracklist, although it might come out soon enough. ‘It was pitched for a movie set in Shetland, so it had a Celtic feel in the demo,’ says Claire.

New songs include the brilliant Day In The Sun, which employs the same sort of message as You’ll Never Walk Alone thanks to its imagery of storms and breaking out of them. My Drum My Beat is partly sung a cappella over a snare drum military beat, while These Tears Tonight is like those ABBA songs that have sad words and a happy major key tune.

‘Stevie had the music for it,’ says Paul. ‘We had witnessed something in the life of a friend of ours. It kicked off the idea of whether it is better to be right or better to be heard in a relationship. Watching people on the precipice of throwing everything away, could they fight for it enough?

‘That’s why you have the build, the hope in there. The lyrics are probably a bit more dark, but the music gives you a slightly different feel. We considered making it more ballad-y but I like the mid-tempo feel.’

The pair also put their spin on other people’s songs, adding a horn section to a Brian Hughes song called Red Dress to give it a mix of the Celtic Soul of Dexys or the mariachi rock of The Mavericks. Paul says this will be another of the band’s Marmite songs, like Shut The Front Door, which Claire adds is ‘perfect for playing live. The energy is so much higher. People connect to them and it’s a lot different on CD.’

‘Brass was on a couple of other songs but we took it off because it didn’t suit the song,’ says Paul. ‘Stevie deserves huge, huge credit for his overall vision of the album.’

Then there’s their cover of One Love by Blue, another act John McLaughlin has worked with. The pair first worked on the cover for Cornbury festival and recorded a version for Bob Harris’s Youtube channel Under The Apple Tree. They reckon the band heard it at the time. ‘We stripped it right back to the guitar and vocals,’ Paul says, ‘and over time that opened up to having an accordion and bongos!’

‘It’s gotten great reaction when we’ve been performing it, millennials and above, always looking like they know it!’ Claire says, chiming with my own experience when I recognised it halfway through the first verse.

Thankful For It All is another song that Stevie suggested they cover, with the great bumper sticker line ‘getting it wrong is getting is right’. From the ‘prog rock’ track of the original, the duo transformed it into a lullaby which offers genuine thanks to their loyal fanbase. I ask whether the owner of the voice who sings the final line, Alba Rose, gets PRS money, or just earned a session fee.

‘I think it was LOL dolls!!’ Claire says. ‘She’s absolutely thrilled. She walks about like she’s Beyoncé!’ The Bain kids constantly request the album in the car, and even the younger one is singing along. For Claire, who is dealing with a daughter who thinks her mum is ‘cringe’, it makes her happy that she is still somewhat cool. ‘I’m not sure it’s always gonna be like that!’

Both parents concur warmly when I point out that these songs will be carried by their kids for eternity. They will also, according to Paul, be able to follow the ‘interesting journey’ in the Raintown catalogue: ‘They’ll be able to look back and hear where we were, a move to a much more live sound and knowing that’s where mummy and daddy really come alive.’

In many ways, Acoustic Heart is the kind of album parents of two under-10s would make: sophisticated and smooth, rather than brash and big. Paul and Claire both think the new album has ‘more maturity’ in its arrangements, and fans can hear it live at a hometown show at the marvellous Oran Mor in Glasgow on May 17, which ought to be a rowdy Friday night in front of between 200 and 250 people.

Then there’s a show in London at the Water Rats in Kings Cross on July 3, the week that country comes to Hyde Park via shows by Morgan Wallen and Shania Twain. Paul always recognises that it’s tough to attract people to gigs if you announce them so close to when C2C tickets go on sale for the following spring, ‘but if it’s ten people in London, they’ll get an intimate show!

‘We got the CDs back last week and there are still layers of instrumentation in the tapestry of the whole thing that I’m only hearing now,’ says Paul. ‘Our goal is to produce more music and less time in between. We were thinking about releasing something every few months and cataloguing it all together, but we lose the opportunity to have great albums and great moments if all we’re doing is putting out singles all the time.

‘Maggie May wasn’t supposed to be a single, it was a B-side! Bohemian Rhapsody was played by John Peel, though Queen were told it would never make it as a single. Great moments will be lost because people are afraid to give fans an album, a project, in their desire to be the right sound at the right moment.’ Have we, he adds, been denied magnificent songs by Prince or Michael Jackson because they remain locked in a vault on account of being too avant garde?

‘We made the album that we wanted to make,’ says Claire, with no thought to making a single that works at radio and runs to a certain length. ‘It is scary, because people might like it or hate it, but so far we’ve had great feedback.’

‘The scene has changed radically though certain aspects haven’t,’ concludes Paul. ‘Some people have an opportunity and they’ve run with it. The support mechanism is there. Others are championed by a certain area of the scene, which is great for those artists.

‘We’re up for the fight to get back into the scene in a bigger way. We never really left. We were just a bit quiet, and now it’s time to come back and show people what Raintown is all about.’

With The Shires touring their catalogue in an acoustic form this summer, Acoustic Heart is a similarly timeless set of songs that deserve a wide audience.

Acoustic Heart is out on April 26. Visit raintownmusic.com for more information

‘It all begins with a song’ is how country music often gets described, usually a song with ‘three chords and the truth’. But country music was best summarised by Marty Stuart: it’s a metaphorical man ‘with a briefcase in one hand and a guitar case in the other’.

In other words, it’s the music business, where art and commerce collide. For the last century, since Ralph Peer set up a microphone in front of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, country music has been about making money from hillbillies, capturing the sounds of rural life on record, and then going out and performing it in person.

When Toby Keith died earlier this year, it was clear that country music had lost a capital-S Star. Ditto when Naomi Judd ended her life two years ago this month, or when Merle Haggard passed away eight years ago this month, or when George Jones did 11 years ago this month. All four had become hugely successful icons of country music, with vast fanbases and with their music owned by people across America.

They all became rich from country music, and country music became rich off them. Their metaphorical guitar cases were full of songs, their briefcases full of record deals, touring contracts and public appearances. Toby Keith was a multi-millionaire from his business deals, which sprang from his fame as a live performer.

It used to be that stars dominated the market, the conversation and all the media that went with it. Turn on the radio in the 1990s and you would hear Reba and Tim and Garth and Shania; in the 2000s Carrie and Brad and Kenny and Miranda would be the voices in between the truck commercials, while hopeful pups like Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean would be hitting radio stations for months to introduce themselves to the listener. Magazines and websites would run interviews, and Bob Harris would give them a nudge so that UK fans knew who these new guys were.

When I started properly listening to country in 2015, I knew who Taylor Swift was from Our Song and You Belong With Me, and why Sam Hunt was the man of the moment, even if he was basically the Nashville version of Drake. Attending Country2Country in 2016, I heard Kacey Musgraves, Chris Stapleton and Eric Church on the very same day and was impressed by the songwriting and performance. They all reminded me of familiar rockstars and popstars, and I followed their careers and bought physical product to add to my collection.

As I started reading more literature about the genre, I learned all about the superstars, the B-listers and the forgotten names. I enjoyed putting on an hour-long show about Garth Brooks, listening to his career output and finding out how he lassoed TV, radio and live concerts to become the megastar of his age. I also saw how country depended on the outlaw as a concept, with the Texas scene existing independently of Nashville and loaning them stars like Cody Johnson, Parker McCollum and even George Strait.

And so to 2024, and Lainey Wilson’s sold-out tour of the UK and Europe. Why is she the star of the moment? Because her face fits the format: she has wanted to be a country performer since she was a young girl, so has the guts and determination to hang in there through all the ‘no thanks’ and ‘we don’t play women’; plus she has the right team behind her, including the mercurial producer Jay Joyce, who is best known for his work with Church.

Voters for the CMA Awards surprised me beyond measure by making Lainey Entertainer of the Year (I thought Carrie was a shoo-in), and thousands of people are this week heading to a venue near them to hear that accent and see the women from Yellowstone in person. Her setlist will include chart-topping ballads Watermelon Moonshine and Things a Man Oughta Know, but it’s mostly rock’n’roll songs in the Jay Joyce vein from her Bell Bottom Country album: Wildflowers and Wild Horses, Grease, Hillbilly Hippie and set opener Hold My Halo.

Lainey sells the heck out of the songs, and many encourage crowd singalongs. There’s also Save Me, her duet with ex-con and ex-rapper Jelly Roll, and WWDD, a hymn to Dolly Parton that every artist seems to have done, although Carly Pearce chose to hymn Miss Loretta.

Other stars of the moment include the aforementioned Stapleton, who would have been a superstar with varying degrees of success in 1974 or 1994 too. In 2014, he was still a jobbing songwriter – Crash and Burn by Thomas Rhett is one of his, as is Never Wanted Nothing More by Kenny Chesney – and in 2024 he is preparing a tour of arenas and stadiums, either headlining himself or opening up for George Strait.

The opener for his own O2 Arena show in October is, charmingly, the figure quoted in the opening paragraph of this piece: professional sideman Marty Stuart, who takes centre stage with his band of Fabulous Superlatives. He will never be a superstar, and is probably content with being a kind of country version of a National Treasure, much like Bill Anderson or Lauren Alaina. Perhaps there are actually two kinds of country star: an Opry regular like them, and the unit-shifter like Stapleton or Lainey.

Once you have a big platform, what do you do with it? For Lainey, it’s to use her award speeches to encourage young girls to make music like she does. For Luke Combs, it’s inviting his fellow artists to the party, crafting tours with opening acts including Lainey, Cody Johnson, 49 Winchester, The Avett Brothers and Flatland Cavalry.

Others take the philanthropic route: Miranda Lambert started a pet charity called Mutt Nation, while Randy Owen of the band Alabama has raised almost $1bn thanks to his patronage of St Jude’s Hospital in Nashville, their version of Great Ormond Street in how it looks after sick kids. Brad Paisley can explain his gap between albums, which stretches back seven years now, more or less to his status as a full-time philanthropist, opening The Store with his wife Kimberley as a sort of food bank in March 2020, which is either brilliant or rotten timing.

I can imagine it was an easy business decision for Jason Aldean to lean into his status as cipher for the working man, given how well it worked for Toby Keith before him, but I wish his songs were better. As for Willie Nelson, age cannot wither him.

Some stars end up in Vegas as professional entertainers: Reba McEntire did it, Carrie Underwood currently does it and you can bet Garth Brooks would accept an engagement from now until the end of time if he didn’t like travelling around the US too. Garth, the Taylor Swift of his day, is a heritage act who will always attract an audience, like Jimmy Buffett or George Jones or Johnny Cash, although Cash was on the cabaret circuit until he teamed up with Rick Rubin to rejuvenate his recording career.

By the time he passed away Cash was a legend, a figure on a t-shirt or a poster on a bedsit wall. Some stars will always have that mystique, the kind that means people still listen to Hank Williams seven decades after he died. The excellent podcast series Cocaine & Rhinestones has done a great job contextualising country musicians including an entire series on George Jones and Tammy Wynette. I don’t think, however, that the show’s creator Tyler Mahan Coe will be repeating this with Luke or Lainey or Morgan.

Every era has its hot young things, its ‘automatics’ on radio and festival headliners. The true superstars, like Jones, Garth and Dolly, transcend their moment and their genre, embodying country music and being able to cross beyond it. Brooks & Dunn, Alabama and George Strait were less able to, and so are more parochial stars.

Can you imagine George Strait duetting with, say, Destiny’s Child at an awards show? No, but Beyoncé could team up with the Dixie Chicks, who could also cover songs by Fleetwood Mac and record songs written with Neil Finn from Crowded House. At some point, the Chicks will be given their proper due, and someone will write the definite story of how the debacle foretold an entire cultural climate, one in which Taylor Swift has been smart to steer clear of.

And yes, Florida Georgia Line and Dan + Shay respectively recorded songs with Bebe Rexha (Meant To Be) and Justin Bieber (10,000 Hours) but these were pop songs, and both duos were, or are, really boybands in disguise. Country had welcomed John Denver, Glen Campbell and Olivia Newton-John into the fold, and they have shared award show time with Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn.

If such co-opted popstars ensure that people from outside the genre work their way into country, so much the better, but the real stars need to come from within. Witness the success of the pair of kids from Tennessee, Kenny Chesney and Morgan Wallen, and the pair from Louisiana, Tim McGraw and (hopefully I haven’t gone round the houses too much) Lainey Wilson.

You can grow a country superstar and put them through training: radio tours, support slots, TV adverts, magazine interviews, award show hosting, Entertainer of the Year awards, Hot 100 smashes. Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen have been germinated from seeds planted in Nashville, while Zach Bryan has come from Oklahoma and is a proponent of what I call Red Rocks Country, which is descended from rock’n’rollers like the Allman Brothers or even Bruce Springsteen.

Zach will remain outside the Nashville system, defined in opposition to it as Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers were before him. Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell were both very much in but then became very much not, with guidance from their shared mentor Guy Clark. Young troubadours like Zach need Music City to improve their own brand, boasting how unlike people like Wallen they are, although it was interesting that Jason Isbell took the writing royalties (then donated them to good causes) after Wallen recorded a version of his standard Cover Me Up.

Lainey Wilson, for her part, has been fashioned on Music Row, and like Carrie Underwood before her is a country music superstar of her times. When Country2Country was launching in the UK in 2013, its first two headliners were Carrie and Tim McGraw; in 2024, Kane Brown and Old Dominion were elevated to slots that had been vacated through the proliferation of country music tours throughout the year.

Wallen is now big enough, despite only having one UK hit, to headline Hyde Park. Lainey Wilson hasn’t even had one hit here yet and she can do two dates at the Kentish Town Forum, thanks to success via streaming and the latent demand for country music in the UK. It’s to the credit of country music itself that it can keep growing and incubating stars, but it’s up to them if they want to turn the superstars of today, who make millions of dollars from and for the genre and the city, into the legends of tomorrow.

How much longer, for instance, do Luke Bryan, Tyler Hubbard and Thomas Rhett want to play the game? Sam Hunt might still be having hits at radio, but he has more or less stymied his own career, by accident or design, to prevent becoming a force of change or importance.

It’s unfair to ask this of Lainey, who is touring only her second major-label release, or Wallen, who is touring his third. But it pays to think about the future so these performers can perpetuate their success and, like Miranda and Carrie and Brad, elevate themselves beyond their initial moment in the sun.

It is not odd to see Beyoncé on top of the pop charts, but to top the Americana/Folk and Country Album lists?! I wonder if Taylor Swift will be eligible too, with her 31-track Anthology of what’s been on her mind since she put out Midnights in 2022. In a few months’ time Wallen and Combs – and former rappers Jelly Roll and Ernest – will be joined by Post Malone and Lana Del Rey, and probably dozens more. So long as Nashville-incubated acts can thrive too, everybody wins.

This week’s big releases from Music Row artists are Damascus by Elvie Shane, who is signed to the Broken Bow subsidiary Wheelhouse, and Rebel by Anne Wilson, who is on Capitol Nashville. Country music needs new blood to give the old timers a rest and so the genre doesn’t go stale.

Elvie Shane – Damascus

Elvie, who came to the UK in 2022 for Country Music Week, had a smash with a song for stepdads called My Boy. He could also be heard wailing through a cover of Sympathy for the Devil on the country music tribute to the Rolling Stones, and his second album, which is once again produced by Oscar Charles, has been trailed by six songs.

These are: Forgotten Man, the sort of working man’s anthem that has been written many, many times before but always sounds excellent; Baptized, which is ‘temptin’, tryin’, tantalizin’ proof’ that the country is a fun place to be; Jonesin’, an outlaw anthem where Elvie is ‘racing and chasing some feeling I’m craving’; Pill, a brilliant and very personal song about addiction (‘rollin’ up dollars, livin’ on dimes’); What Do I Know, a series of affirmations such as how outlaws like Waylon are ‘gone forever’; and the uplifting closing track Does Heaven Have A Creek which will go down well live.

What with Jelly Roll banging on about Jesus, Elvie can win over some of Jelly’s fans too; interestingly, it seems he had to win over his label with some of the more personal songs, something I would like to hear more about. Outside Dog starts things off with spoken-sung verses that reintroduce us to our narrator who ‘ain’t need to be fed, wanna be free’. It’s immediate and fun and pulls the listener in. Ditto Fan on High, a nice slice of vocally double-tracked country-rock, complete with a very pacey barroom piano solo, about sitting in your birthday suit that Elvie wrote with Hayes Carll and Eric Church’s guitar player Driver Williams.

As for First Place, a jaunty three-chord drinking song, it’s perfect for Little Big Town to add their four-part harmonies to. Winning Horse is a love song for Elvie’s wife that he’ll be playing for the rest of his life. Unlike those last two, some songs are not commercial unit-shifters. They instead describe the gritty Kentucky life that Elvie uses as lyrical inspiration.

Miranda Lambert put out a track called Old Shit once; perhaps that made the blues-funk of Chicken Shit possible, although it is also responsible for giving the album a Parental Advisory sticker. Appalachian Alchemy (good title) opens with a fat bass riff, over which Elvie begins scatting about crystal meth and Sudafed. It sounds authentic and believable, and I hope it gets a guitar wigout in the live version. 215634, meanwhile, is a slow-burning narrative about a friend who went to jail for murder but also about how people are stuck in lives they ought not to be living.

It may have taken him three years to follow up his debut album, but with Eric Church 20 years into his career and running a bar on Lower Broadway, in Elvie Shane we have a readymade replacement.

Anne Wilson – Rebel

Talking of acts with one foot in Christianity and one in country, Anne Wilson pivots to the latter on her new album Rebel. As with both Chris Stapleton and Elvie Shane, Anne is from Kentucky, right in the Appalachian hills. If Elvie Shane is doing an Eric Church act, then Anne is Carrie reincarnate with a drop of Lainey there too; Bell Bottom Carrie, let’s call her, although my partner heard a lot of Miley Cyrus in her quiver (in both senses of the word, vocal and arsenal).

CMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Lainey-Wilson co-wrote and appears on the choir-assisted Praying Woman, a song for mama. Without Lainey blazing the trail, Anne would find it far harder to slide into country music: effectively the pair are making the same product, although Lainey dials down the God stuff. Indeed, on God & Country, the line ‘I’m Friday Night Lights and Sunday morning choir’ sounds like a slogan on a whiteboard in a marketing meeting.

On both that track and the title track, either of which would make a fine set opener, Anne lets her twang emerge. But what’s a good Christian girl doing singing about being a rebel? Well, it was good enough for Carrie Underwood, and she could also have sold Strong (‘even when I’m weak’), one of those songs where the narrator gets on her knees and cries for Jesus.

To appease her existing fanbase there is a strong slew of contemporary Christian tunes: 3:16 (why is it always the same Bible verse?!), Sinner’s Prayer (which has a choir woahing and a guitar soloing) and The Cross. The last of these is a duet with Chris Tomlin, whose career path Anne is following and who (fun fact) used to employ Russell Dickerson as a guitar tech.

Russell has downplayed his faith in his career and has built such a following in the UK that he is due to headline The Long Road. Jordan Davis has been more spiritual than religious on songs like Buy Dirt, and he is a good guest for the radio-friendly Country Gold. Songs About Whiskey is a bait-and-switch on which Anne eschews ‘neon and nicotine’ and gives Billy Graham a namecheck.

Her voice and the songs are excellent throughout. Anne adopts a Jade Helliwell-like vibrato on Rain in the Rearview, but keep listening for the money note before the final chorus. Jaren Johnston was in the room for that one and there are a smattering of other A-list writers helping Anne out. Casey Beathard co-wrote the Laineyish Red Flag (‘run away fast!’), while Emily Weisband was there for both the heartstring-tugging My Father’s Daughter (‘Sunday morning third row pew takes me back to watching you’) and the hosannah-filled Out of the Bluegrass (‘turns out I ain’t my bigger believer’). That song ends the album with a coda full of fiddle, dobro and authenticity from the state where bluegrass was born.

The last track was one of three songs where Nicolle Galyon was in the room: the others are the meditative pair Dirt Roads In Heaven, which mourns a lost friend and on which she sings ‘I’ll be riding shotgun next to you’, and Milestones, the best song on the album. It gets inside the head of a musician who achieves success but feels like she is ‘skipping milestones’ when she is away from family members and church on key dates of the year. It’s full of melancholy and will chime with several high-achieving stars in whatever field, music or otherwise. I hope it takes off for Anne and becomes her career song; well done to her for keeping it back for album release day.

Given that Morgan Wallen can be pop, country, rock and hiphop all at the same time, it makes sense that acts like Anne can be secular and religious, crying for Jesus and warning of red flags. If she comes to the UK, she can sprinkle in some Jesus and get a hallelujah amen, as on the celebratory track Southern Gospel. In her main market of the USA, where she is set to play a mix of festivals and worship nights and also a headline set at the Ryman Auditorium in September, I can see Capitol getting a huge return on their investment.

As ever, I hope she isn’t pushed into the ‘featuring Anne Wilson’ lane in order to give her name recognition. As with Lainey, who needed nobody else on her magnificent Bell Bottom Country, Anne’s talents deserve to stand alone, or at least without any human intervention.

This week in 1980, for the first time ever, the girl singer was queen. Yes we had Kitty and Patsy and Dolly and Loretta and Tammy and Barbara and Crystal, but to have women sing all five of the top five country songs was worth celebrating.

I think that in the last 20 years there have been five or six women total who have had any durability. Two of them, Brandi Carlile and Brandy Clark, have existed in the Americana sphere with no chart presence at all on radio, although Clark has written several modern standards for Kacey Musgraves, who now inhabits her own bit of the country firmament. The other three women have locked down the post-Dixie Chicks years: Carrie, Miranda and Taylor.

Let us consider the CMA Female Vocalist of the Year winners since 2004. That was the year Martina McBride won it for a fourth time, defeating Terri Clark, Sara Evans, Alison Krauss and Reba McEntire. She had previously beaten Faith Hill and Shania Twain in 1999, Lee Ann Womack and Trisha Yearwood in 2002 and both Patty Loveless and Dolly Parton in 2003.

When Gretchen Wilson branded herself the Redneck Woman, the prize was hers if she wanted it for many years after she won it in 2005. But then came the All-American Girl from Oklahoma who was moulded into a superstar. Simon Cowell was really making a TV show but to gain legitimacy within the music business he needed to unearth some gems so they could make some money too.

Leona Lewis and Kelly Clarkson, who was incidentally twice nominated for the CMA Female Vocalist award in 2012 and 2013, had the big pop hits, but after her winner’s song landed at the top of the Hot 100, Carrie Underwood was the girl singer perfect for country radio domination. She has said nothing controversial in 20 years and will have a Vegas residency for the rest of her life, should she want it.

Miranda Lambert didn’t want to play by the rules and was allowed, much like Eric Church, to become an outlaw within the tent. It helped that her husband had a lucrative sideline as Adam Levine’s sidekick on The Voice. Miranda has been nominated for Female Vocalist every year since 2007, winning seven times, and is now a label executive working with the next generation of stars at Big Loud Texas.

The stories and wisdom she can dispense will be invaluable, and there is no need for her to release any of her own music, even though it will end her run of consecutive CMA Female Vocalist nominations. Interestingly, Reba McEntire (Female Vocalist 1984-87, with 14 other nominations) did something similar when she and her husband set up the Starstruck group.

As for Taylor Swift (Female Vocalist 2009, with six other nominations), nobody knows what happened to her, although she seems to have a new album scheduled for this Friday. Good for her, still plugging away as an independent artist and restless creative soul, which is incidentally the same career path as Gretchen Wilson, who is touring with Big & Rich this summer.

Despite eschewing the system and doing things her way, Kacey Musgraves was nominated seven times, winning once in 2019; Kelsea Ballerini (six nominations, no win) and Maren Morris (three with a win in 2020) are popstars in country clothing, even though they came up through the traditional method of open mic nights and writers’ rooms in Music City. Kelsea is following Taylor’s career pattern of movies and heartbreak, while Maren has decamped to LA to raise her son and start a new life away from Nashville.

Then, of course, comes CMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Lainey-Wilson, the ‘see, we’ve got a woman’ of contemporary country music. Since she was a teenager, Lainey has been itching to succeed, armed with her Louisiana twang and excellent songwriting which has now given her an impressive seven top 10 hits on radio. She performs in session for Bob Harris on April 25, the night after her second sold-out date at the Kentish Town Forum. She follows Carrie, Brandi, Brandy, Miranda, Taylor, Kacey, Maren and Kelsea and, indeed, the two acts she pipped to Female Vocalist of the Year in 2022 and 2023.

Ashley McBryde is arguably more famous in the UK than in the US, as she showed by playing ‘Barras’, the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, in January. She also had a cameo in the movie Wild Rose, whose protagonist puts the struggles of her life into her country music. Carly Pearce, who is about to release an album called Hummingbird that puts the struggles of her etc etc, will return to the UK next February having played Country2Country for a second time in 2024. She won Female Vocalist in 2021, delivering an emotional acceptance speech.

All of this is to contextualise two new releases this month from acts who have benefitted from being within the system and then outside it. Connie Smith is one of the empresses of country music, still recording after all these years. Her new album is produced by her husband, the great Marty Stuart, and the pair launched it at the Opry this week to coincide with the unveiling of a mural in Philadelphia, Mississippi that was painted in association with Stuart’s Congress of Country Music.

Love, Prison, Wisdom and Heartaches sounds like one of those Ronseal titles that describe themselves, which I have just learned is called a palindromic title, like the crossword clue for ‘eggs’: ‘gegs (9,4)’. It features songs which she is ‘singing on behalf of my friends, hoping to share them while passing along their songs’.

Connie gives a reading of the Skeeter Davis hit End of the World and the Loretta Lynn deep cut World of Forgotten People. Both songs will never be trendy and will always evoke that era of country music between 1960 and 1969. Marty’s Fabulous Superlatives are present and correct too, while the piano part that pokes through the arrangement of Beneath Still Waters, which George Jones cut in 1968, is played by the late Pig Robbins, who passed away in 2022. Find more information on Pig here.

Plenty of songs reflect the sonic mood of the 1960s, before a time even when Marty was picking as a teenage sideman to Johnny Cash and when Connie was a lady in her twenties having hits. Now 82, her voice is in outrageously good nick. I think Seattle, with its string quartet and delightful vocals, is magnificent, while the arrangement of Drifting and Dreaming maps perfectly on to its lyric.

I didn’t know anything about Connie’s upbringing: one of thirteen kids, her dad was abusive and she married young after having a nervous breakdown. Bill Anderson took her under his esteemed wing and wrote Once A Day, still her career song, which Chet Atkins produced. Her voice was perfect for sad songs, although she and her third husband proselytised for the Lord and Connie moved away from secular music.

The Big Book of Country Music does note that Connie grew tired ‘with the marketing of female country stars, who were paraded at conventions before audiences of usually all-male deejays and music executives for their “enjoyment”’. Since 1997, she has been married to Stuart, who rather charmingly refers to his wife as ‘Miss Connie Smith’.

Connie would perform weekly at the Opry and on Marty’s TV show, but aside from the odd album has mostly let her hits define her. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012, to add to her Opry induction in 1965 as member 131. Only Anderson, Leroy Van Dyke, Willie Nelson and Norma Jean (who retired from performance in the 1970s) have been there longer.

I expect Ivy and Sophie Walker, who record as Walker County, have met Connie. Their new album Painted Ponies is effectively a post-major label sigh of contentment. A lot of the songs had stayed on the shelf for years because their label Warner wanted them to cut outside songs like Bits & Pieces, which I just found out was written by top pop writer Jon Bellion.

In this interview with James Daykin for Entertainment Focus, they talked about having to deal first with the pandemic and then the way TikTok forces acts to follow metrics. I have often said that the hot genre of today is Girl Country, thanks to the way fans are forcing the hands of radio who has explicitly treated them as ‘tomatoes in the salad’. Try telling that to Brandi Carlile, who is Joni Mitchell incarnate, or Brandy Clark, who has become the songwriter’s songwriter and co-wrote the score for Broadway musical Shucked.

The girls’ heroine Miranda could have cut Double-Wide World or 20%, a hoedown on which they sing of not being ‘your little waitress!’ I couldn’t possibly say if this is a comment on their relationship with Warner, but I bet it is. It is hard not to think of that other female duo Maddie & Tae on both Skeletons and Small Pond (‘you only get so big’), because of the poppy arrangements and intervals between the high and low harmonies.

Having been told people don’t want to hear too many ballads, they stick three in the first four tracks: The Thing About Fences is a songwriters’ round-type tune about freeing ‘the wild horse within’; Hits Home is a song whose sentiment Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz would agree with; and Settling’s For Dust (‘kicked up by the Oklahoma wind’) is lush and cinematic.

What You Don’t Get is a kiss-off that someone like Jade Helliwell would have a lot of fun with, while Two Birds is a sad/happy song where a breezy melody masks the sadness of a breakup. Handwritten has fiddle and dobro that perfectly sets a song about the power of epistolary affection, ie letters. Kudos to the girls’ producer and collaborator Paul Sikes too.

The girls first worked on the title track that rounds off the album in 2015. It’s a proper country song with a real string section to tug on the heart even more than the lyrics already do: ‘I want off this carousel’. They could do no worse than sign to Fat Possum, the label which puts out Connie Smith’s music.

Unlike in the 1960s, today the artist can be their own independent entity, a sort of musical Etsy vendor, and the girls will likely find more happiness now they are in charge of their own career without various balance sheets to contemplate. As for the major labels, now that Girl Country is making money, they’re on the lookout for some new sirens.

In a reverse to how Odysseus ignored the song of the siren, perhaps these young ladies should pay no heed to labels looking to coopt them and sell them the world, although it would enable them to play the type of venues Carly and Ashley and Kacey can perform at; Kacey, for instance, has two dates next month (May 14 and 15) at the Roundhouse in Camden.

The world led by major labels and radio, in which Connie Smith found success six decades ago, and which led to five women holding the top five songs in country music this week in 1980, has gone. It has been replaced by an ability to get music directly to fans, then book venues that can attract a sellout crowd. I hope Walker County, like their fellow recently independent acts Hannah Dasher and Abbey Cone, can start a movement in the next few years, because the audience is definitely there for them.

Sean Stemaly – 4 Wheel High

Ernest put out a 26-track album last week, which is far too long to sit through in one sitting. That’s the whole point, and it is led by the market: if nobody listens to albums and prefers individual tracks, why not serve people a collection of them on a platter and let them be guided by their own instincts?

The EP is the other way of doing things, a short burst of five or six tracks which showcase every aspect of an act’s sound without any filler. In any case, if such an act has a support slot to a main act, they only need eight songs tops, and some of them are covers.

Sean Stemaly’s new EP 4 Wheel High has five tracks on it, produced by the fantastically named Lex Lipsitz who signed Sean to his Lex Music Group label. The title track is an Aldeanish power-chord-driven rocker with some fine assonance: ‘Camo hat on the dash, hammered down on the gas/ Chrome stacks blowing that black smoke’. The dad of the song’s co-writer Brad Clawson wrote Take a Little Ride for Aldean, which is basically a Chevy commercial.

Message In A Bottle is not a cover of the Police classic but a Breakups Make Me Miserable tune with a pedal steel wailing as our narrator, ‘a double shot desperado’, drinks his pain away. Bryan Martin pops up on Country Ain’t Going Nowhere, another one of those songs about being proud of your roots. There’s even some gang vocals yelling ‘NOWHERE!!’ in the chorus.

I’ll Be Damned is a Wallen pastiche with digital drum loops and a story that begins with the narrator hearing things ‘on the county line grapevine’. Camo Jacket was co-written with Dan Isbell who is often found in the credits of Luke Combs’s songs; it is what is known as ekphrasis, a description of an object that conjures up memories and emotions. The song is driven by a kickdrum and has a brilliant chorus, and it has no danger of being lost in the shuffle, as it might if Ernest had cut it.

Chase Bryant – Ashland City

Chase Bryant’s self-produced new project Ashland City is also 21 songs shorter than Ernest’s album. The confident quintet of songs are sung in a believable, tuneful manner. Wild Than Tame is an ‘I’m a little bit this, a little bit that’ song with chaingang percussion, a ferocious coda and a namecheck for La Grange by ZZ Top. Heart Ain’t A Hotel is a great way to tell people not to use them, even though it reminds me of how my mum used to say I treated her house like a hotel once I moved back home (she loves me really!).

Double Wide Dreamin’ is an imagery rich slice of small-time life, with the melancholic line ‘talk about leavin’ but you never get out’. Never Got Around To That also has a great chorus and a self-lacerating lyric; Blake Shelton could have cut this for his post-divorce album. Ditto Tequila on the Rocks, another ballad full of heart and hurt where our narrator is deciding whether he should get up and go.

It is also worth remembering that Chase was suicidally depressed at one point and tried to end his own life. As I wrote when listening to his album Upbringing, I am glad he didn’t.

Alex Miller – My Daddy’s Dad

Alex Miller’s beaming face often accosts me from the Billboard Country Update on one of his many, many promotional appearances at radio stations. Before listening to his new EP, which is another one that is 21 tracks shorter than Ernest’s album, I couldn’t hum any of his songs.

The EP’s sound is reassuringly retro, somewhere between 1990 and 1996. Ain’t Ever Saying Never is a love song crooned in the same ballpark that Scotty McCreery operates in, somewhere between Tracy Lawrence and George Strait. She Makes Dirt Look Good begins with four bars of fiddle before Alex comes in with some self-deprecating lyrics (‘never did stand out’). To continue the Blake Shelton references, it’s a rewrite of his song A Guy With A Girl in which, as with Blake, Alex is content to stand beside his beloved and bask in her reflected glow.

Jerry Salley co-wrote It Takes a Woman with Chris Stapleton, a highlight of his last album, and Salley was in the room for three songs on the EP, which he also produced. Oh Odessa is a finely sung Breakups Make Me Miserable song, while I won’t bother pointing out the Blake reference in The Last House in God’s Country, even though the song is a celebration of the house that built Alex.

The title track is also a Miller/Salley cut, telling the story of Alex’s grandpa, a Kentucky-raised cattle farmer who bought him his first guitar and was ‘the biggest fan I’ll ever have’. What a credit Alex is to his grandpa, and I hope he can come to the UK sometime soon.

On the sixth gig of their 22-date UK tour, newlyweds SaraBeth and Glen Mitchell returned to a venue I’d seen them play on their 2019 visit. Now a duo rather than a trio, they provided over 90 minutes of nonstop entertainment which showcased their command of both their eclectic material and a crowd.

For this London show, Alan Finlan came up from Lee-on-the-Solent near Portsmouth to play a generous helping of country. Covers of Hurricane by Luke Combs and Come Over by Kenny Chesney, written by and sung more like Sam Hunt, came among originals which varied from the high-octane Passenger Seat, Cowboy Truth and No Money By Monday to the wistful Whiskey Eyes and This Drink Is Like Having You Home. He plays Country on the Coast in front of a home crowd this weekend, and is becoming a pivotal part of the UK scene. The between-song banter is top notch too.

As for Royal South, they head to Manchester and Liverpool for gigs seven and eight of the tour, and will be trying to shift more of the dozens of t-shirts piled at the back of the venue. At the end of the month they will be in Essex, where Glen came of age before he went to Nashville and enjoyed what he calls a very lucky life. His words of wisdom included anecdotes about record company treatment, radio tours and his preference for Key West over Nashville.

Last year the duo’s London show fell on Easter Sunday when I couldn’t get into town. On a Thursday night, Water Rats deserved to be far more full than it was, especially because there was so much talent and love in the pair’s performance. Much of their original material is excellent, even though some has not been recorded yet. As per SaraBeth’s request, the sooner we can hear Holy Guacamole the better!

Feet reminded me of the proverb ‘Don’t let the sun go down on your anger’, and I loved the melancholic tunefulness of You Weren’t Made For Me. Shh (Don’t Say A Thing) was written by RaeLynn and was performed with panache by SaraBeth, who gave good shaker throughout the evening. Glen, an accomplished picker who has played with some big Nashville names, limited himself to one scintillating solo on his acoustic guitar but seemed more keen to showcase his wife’s talent; maybe that was in the wedding contract.

Alongside a tender reading of One Man Band by Old Dominion, four other covers gave people some evergreens to sing along with: I’m Alright, Friends in Low Places (ft. Alan Finlan), Jackson and a final song I won’t spoil but if you have ever been at a country gig the chances are you will have heard it. It rounded off a memorable evening which, like the best gigs, felt like a salon or house concert.

Indeed, SaraBeth was taking names on the door, welcoming folk to the show. Performing, manning the merch table, checking the tickets: this is what country music should be, without barriers and welcoming everyone into the fold.

For a full list of tour dates, head here

Zach Top – Cold Beer & Country Music

Jake Owen thinks Zach Top will ‘change the entire format in the greatest way since 1989’. In March Zach landed an interview with Country Music People, a magazine which exists to promote music that clings to the traditional sound, and came across as someone who will win over fans one artist at a time.

When I first heard Sounds Like The Radio, which is gaining traction on country radio in a way that seems calculated but clever, I agreed. On it, Zach calls the old sound (and thus his own) ‘a little bit of fiddle and a whole lot of country gold’. Its very first line includes the word Chattahoochee, which seems calculated but clever.

The sort of music Zach makes, with acoustic instruments and allusions to the old-time music of the pre-rock era, has been a background hum in mainstream country music. While FGL and Luke and Aldean and Sam and Morgan cranked up the guitars and synthetic drums, potential stars like Mo Pitney, William Michael Morgan and Charlie Worsham have been reduced to niche concerns.

Even a fake country band called Midland that was basically a country version of The Archies or Blue Mink had more success than those three with a honky-tonk sound! It wasn’t financially prudent to launch someone trad into this environment, unless they were called Chris Stapleton, who will headline The O2 this autumn having already played there twice as part of Country2Country. In any case, his sound is far more rock’n’roll than country gold.

And so, a decade after Stapleton came through, five years after Luke Combs started playing arenas, three years after Drake Milligan and Randall King brought back the neo-traditional sound, and at a time when Beyoncé has the biggest song in the world, comes Cold Beer & Country Music.

The sound of the album has been created with Carson Chamberlain, who has been a steel guitar player, songwriter, tour manager and artist development officer. Using four decades of experience with Keith Whitley and the Class of 89-ers Clint Black and Alan Jackson who took Whitley’s place on the radio, Chamberlain crafts 40 minutes of music that, as with Jake Worthington’s album, self-consciously looks back to a simpler time.

There’s The Sun (‘there’s the moon, and there’s you), for instance, could have been released in 1995, and I am annoyed it took me 18 months to hear it since it was first released. Paul Overstreet, who wrote Forever and Ever Amen with Don Schlitz, was in the room for two songs: Dirt Turns To Gold, a piece of father-to-son advice with a toe-tapping beat and the innocence of Check Yes or No; and Ain’t That A Heartbreak, which has a Garth-y arrangement and a set of lyrics (‘a world turned upside down’) that Zach fair shrugs at, as if misfortune is part of life and all its wonders.

He offers both types of country song: happy and sad. The former include the title track (‘I don’t need to talk! I don’t need no shrink!!’), the funky line-dance-ready romp The Kinda Woman I Like and Things To Do, where Zach’s narrator asks when his lady can stop fussin’ and cussin’ and let him get on with fishin’ and drinkin’.

The weepies include: the troubadourin’ Cowboys Like Me Do, which is the politest romantic rejection I’ve heard for a while; Lonely For Long, in which our hero offers himself as a fella should the opportunity arise; Bad Luck, a woe-is-me ballad which goes heavy on the dobro; and Use Me, which could be a Vince Gill song, on which Zach begs to be loved and then reveals his own intentions that I will not spoil.

There’s even a lyrical masterclass on I Never Lie, written with the great Tim Nichols (who wrote Live Like You Were Dying), where Zach piles up a list of statements but can’t admit to getting over his ex. I believe every word, mainly because Zach has learned from the best about how to express emotion through singing.

A happy result for Zach would be for him to exist in the same country firmament as Kane Brown, Carly Pearce and Chris Stapleton; there’s plenty of country to go around.

Oliver Anthony Music – Hymnal of a Troubled Man’s Mind

If you come from nowhere and have a Hot 100 number one smash, you had better surround yourself with people who know what they are doing. With support from Jamey Johnson and production from Dave Cobb, the man born Christopher Lunsford has definitely done that.

There are ten original songs, none of which are Rich Men North of Richmond, interspersed with eight pieces of scripture. This was apt given that the album was released on Easter Sunday, which gives it a sort of concert-as-sermon feel. Early adopters will know the material, but it acts as a sort of clearing of the throat before he moves to the next stage of his career. I imagine he will have been put into rooms with Johnson and other A-Listers, who will help guide his talent into a more commercial, but no less hearty, direction.

Cobb uses similar production techniques to those he used with Sturgill Simpson, keeping the sound organic and, as ever, starting with the vocal and working out from there. Lunsford’s holler is perfect for the holler, and Cobb gives it a bit of echo for extra oomph. A fiddle plays in concert with his guitar on Doggonit, a working man’s blues that rhymes ‘democrat/bureaucrat’, while his resonator echoes naturally on the lonely pair of I’ve Got to Get Sober and I Want to Go Home.

He accompanies himself on VCR Kid, where he seems to be giving himself a pep talk based on the child he used to be: ‘I bet you a dollar when you look down in that holler, you’ll be smilin’ like that damned VCR kid.’ There are thrashes of electric guitar in Cobwebs and Cocaine, which reminded me of The House of the Rising Sun, and a stomp to Hell on Earth (‘put my ashes in the creek and let me float on by’).

For all his pain, there are shards of light: on one track he is Feeling Purdy Good and on another he says to his beloved that he will Always Love You Like A Good Old Dog, where he rhymes ‘boy named Sue/ making them stew’. I love the opening simile: ‘Honey you’re like the crack of dawn in the dead of spring’.

Without Zach Bryan to kick the door down, Lunsford’s project would likely have stayed a niche concern, but the music industry is more about luck and timing than talent. It’s up to Lunsford to decide whether or not he wants to follow the rest of the blokes who do full-throated Appalachian Country to fame, fortune and festivals. I don’t think anyone would object if he wants to follow up this set with another mix of scripture and soul.

Songs of friendship, green-eyed girls, cold hard cash, folk daemons, lemonade, sad sisters called Arabella and family members no longer with us filled the disco-balled Bedford in South London. Notionally it was to raise money for Dementia UK, but it really showcased the power of live amplified music in front of an audience.

It may seem that superstars like Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift are the only acts earning money from the music industry, and that’s because it’s true. The day before this fifth edition of Live In The Living Room Gives Back, a piece titled ‘There has never been more music, but most artists go hungry’ ran in The Times. In it, a stat sourced from Spotify laid bare that in the years between 2017 and 2022, there were roughly 3,500 acts who earned over $500,000 through streaming, 40 (forty) artists of whom were at the top of the tree in the $10m+ bracket. You can add about just over 400,000 who earn over $1000 and under $500,000. There cannot be too many who come from Britain.

Unless they are physically in the same room as you, streaming is the key way to reach an audience today thanks to the cratering of the market for physical music. It used to be that the tour sold the record, but today it’s the other way round. Acts like Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift got famous through radio play and support slots for bigger artists, and they needed to recoup an advance of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Every one of the 22 acts – and two performing comperes Kirstie Kraus and Linda Conway – lacks the financial backing to hit the sort of stages Dua and Taylor do. They are all entrepreneurs and do things off their own back, and this is particularly true of visiting American artists.

Kirstie is in the middle of a five-week visit to the UK and has already played Country2Country and sat on the BBC Breakfast sofa; she does Country on the Coast next week, where she will play one, two or all three of the songs she played at The Bedford. New Sin City is the best, taking the theme of Nash Vegas and running with it, although her two recent singles Dab A Dolly and Beaches Be Crazy (sic) are good fun too. There is a lot of Lauren Alaina in her patter and delivery, and I reckon Kirstie will return for 2025.

She was the most authentically country performer on the day, although Andrew Jones uses his 15 years of experience as frontman of bands like Journey Home to add commercial country appeal to delightful love song Back to the Start. Wood Burnt Red are quietly becoming one of the scene’s most reliable bands, and performed four songs as part of the closing round including All I Need Is You and Redneck.

Also on that final round were Eddy Smith and Nick Edwards, whose mix of soul, country and roots is a perfect advert for what we call country in the UK. Eddy was without his band The 507, with whom he announced he would be playing an October date at London’s Jazz Café. Sitting at a Yamaha keyboard, he vamped along with Wood Burnt Red and Nick. As part of his own quartet of songs he threw in a new one with the hook ‘how can this be wrong’ which sounds like a future staple in a live set. The other three are already fan favourites: Middle of Nowhere, Love Sick and The Ballad of Bobby Grey.

They silenced a crowd which was not always quiet – the drummer from AKA Chris and Tony in particular – but which was never rowdy. Nick Edwards brought his full band to showcase his own tunes like Daddy’s Little Girls, a new song about having ‘a devil on my shoulder’ and Trouble, which he quite rightly said may well be a single. Just this past week he put out Troubadour Soul Sinner, which is his life in a song and will be on the album he is in the middle of finishing. Kudos to Nick for having the funds to pay for studio time, a band and a producer, and I await the tour to promote the album.

Many of the acts are Live In The Living Room old-timers by now. Tu-Kay and Ryan, respectively the male and female halves of the duo, brought songs of friendship and companionship which Rebecca performed with her trademark hand dances, while The Old Mule followed his 2023 performance with a reprise of Here With You, which was dedicated to his grandma, and two new songs, one of which is a self-titled theme song.

James Dunne also reappeared, offering his satire on the UK country scene called It’s Alright, which has the line ‘I sell my soul just to open up a door’, and a tribute to his uncle Austin. Ben Selleck sang Soul Food, a song about his family who rather cutely were watching on from the balcony, as well as the power-poppy Back To You and the divorce-themed new one 50-50 City.

Owen Morgan runs Live Country LDN and picked three London-based acts for the 1pm round: Cat Rose Smith from California has a pure voice and songs about staying in bed and the springtime; Jo Girdleston grew up in Oklahoma and poured memories of a road trip through the ‘cactus and rattlesnakes’ of Arizona before offering an imaginary folk tale of a daemon who effectively conned her into a one-night stand (and even gave her a ring!); Rhiannon Page showed promise at her first ever writers’ round and had the same mix of charm and vulnerability as former Living Room performer Louise Parker, the former on the song Lemonade and the latter on a song with the line ‘I don’t know where I belong’.

A few hours later Owen performed alongside Andrew Jones and James Dunne. He managed to get through a song dedicated to his late mum, which he offered in between anthemic singalongs Green Eyed Girl and Last Train Choir. All three shared a lot of humanity and hookiness, and it was lovely to catch up with him after his set.

Andy Hewitt came down from Glastonbury to sing three devastating songs about heartbreak, bereavement and dementia. I also liked the sweet high alto of Isobel Thatcher and two ladies called Zoe and Jasmine who perform as Roswell. They had a winning mix of anger and tenderness, the former on the ferocious Can’t Take My Soul, the latter on a song about Jasmine’s sister Arabella.

Both this afternoon and in general. there is much overlap between folk, roots, country and UK Americana. I am glad that the duo Southbound and the folky trio The Lost Notes lit up the 3pm round, each with a hat-trick of magnificent pieces of music. Southbound dared to say they were suffering from imposter syndrome to which I say pshaw! They set the chords from Closing Time by Semisonic to a song in praise of Cold Hard Cash (which is available on Spotify) while they declared their independence on Savannah Soul.

As for The Lost Notes, my discovery of the day, I say they ought to bring their three-part harmonies and tight musicianship down from Birmingham more often. Their three songs included recent single Don’t Try It On Me and two that featured running, one of which was written in response to a request from Oli to bandmate Ben to add more incident to his songs.

Fin Pearson watched on in admiration during that 3pm round. He had been one of many standby names to be called up to replace acts who were waylaid between the initial announcement and the show itself. With a voice that reminded me of a young Paul Heaton, he played I Can Do and Devils For Witches, which included the coda ‘greener pastures come with bluer skies’, which is good writing.

Buckle and Boots beckons for Fin, as it does for Wood Burnt Red and Nick Edwards. All three are down in Southsea next weekend for Country on the Coast, as are James Dunne and Nicole Shortland. Nicole was part of the first round at 12pm, playing poppy tunes Blow, Easy and World On Fire accompanying herself on guitar after being let down last minute. Like Fin, Nicole is a country newcomer who has written that she is finally ‘free enough to create what my hearts want’. The more the merrier, I say!

Steve Young had his name stuck on his guitar for better branding, and his voice also had a touch of the Paul Heatons about it. He and violinist Jade tore through The Devil Went Down To Georgia, which Living Room head honcho James Vince had always wanted to hear at the event. Before reading a tribute to his dad and grandma, who were both afflicted by dementia, James promised another Living Room event in November which rather neatly ties in with his 40^th birthday.

You can donate to the Just Giving page here, while the whole show is available as a livestream on the Facebook page of The Bedford here.

Chayce Beckham – Bad For Me

I think it’s quite quaint that TV is still producing country stars. Twenty years after Chris Young and Miranda Lambert, and a decade after Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris, Chapel Hart and Drake Milligan burst into people’s homes and into their hearts via America’s Got Talent. It is no coincidence whatsoever that those last two acts are verging on cult heroes in the UK, having visited for Country2Country and due back here over in summer.

Chayce Beckham won the rebooted American Idol in 2021 and will open up for Idol judge Luke Bryan this summer. He signed a joint deal with 19 Recordings, who scoop up anyone who passes through the Idol brand, and Wheelhouse, the Broken Bow imprint that also holds the contracts of HunterGirl, Dylan Schneider, Elvie Shane and Blanco Brown (see below).

Born in Southern California, Chayce knows where the money is and has been busy thanking digital platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music for getting the word out. Country radio has also thrown its support around his poppy song 23, which spent 60 (sixty!!) weeks and 14 (fourteen!!!) months scaling the chart and, as per the plan, topped the radio chart over Easter weekend. Fun fact: only six of the last 327 number one songs on radio have been 100%-ers; 23 and Greatest Love Story by LANCO are the only two of those six to be sung by the writer too.

This slooooow rise is part of the marketing strategy to break a new act; an album isn’t necessary but it’s lovely that Chayce is allowed to put one out. If you wished that Matt Stell would go trad, this is the album for you. There is fiddle, a semiquaverous guitar solo and salvation on Devil I’ve Been (‘I’m a wanted man’), while Waylon in ’75 is a Breakups Make Me Miserable song (see below) written by four superstars: Jon Randall, Brett James, Parker McCollum and Lee Thomas Miller.

Both the title track and If I Had A Week have verses in that fun 3/4 + 4/4 structure, which helps the songs zip along: on the former our narrator wants to ‘wreck this heart of mine’ via a one-night stand, while on the latter he wants a week ‘with nothing to do’ so he can go fishing and stuff. I would suggest that week would be perfect for several one-night stands.

The outside write Glitter (‘but it was never gold’) is a summary of much of the album: pretty but functional. Far too much of it is in triple-time, which enforces a gloomy uniformity. Most tracks, including Something Worth Holding On To, turn up the fiddle and pedal steel, because trad is in fashion again. Even a key change would brighten things up, but most songs dwell in Grady Smith’s legendary Valley of Blah.

As with Wallen’s music, drinking appears in several places: Addicted and Clean, which he sings of ’12-step heartache’ with maximum gruffness; Drink You Off My Mind, a tempo tune of the sort that Backwoods Creek do a lot better; Smokin’ Weed and Drinkin’ Whiskey, which sounds like Midland; and Whiskey Country, a ballad with a John Mayer guitar line.

As with Wallen’s Thought You Should Know, Chayce’s song Mama, for which he alone wrote words and music, is addressed to his own, though the line ‘a woman shouldn’t have to carry anyone’ goes against thousands of years of human biology. Everything I Need is a song Tim McGraw has done over and over again (!) in his career and we don’t particularly need any more of them. ‘I’m alive and here breathing’ is a very low bar for being happy, in any case. It’s just senseless and shows a lack of care in the lyric sheet.

Chayce’s yarl won’t get him all the way when the songs are so perfunctory.

Blanco Brown – Heartache & Lemonade EP

The Git Up. A car accident. The most played song on the radio in 2022 with Parmalee.

Those are the only three things I know about Blanco Brown. In live shows he has covered Tennessee Whiskey, A Change Is Gonna Come and Take Me Home Country Roads, and he now delivers four new songs on an EP which is out on the same day as his labelmate Chayce. This seems like bad scheduling.

I remain concerned that Blanco has to put in a homage to The Git Up on Sunshine Shine, a suitably optimistic ditty which was the impact track from the EP. Energy, which is over before it begins, rhymes ‘whiskey/Whitley’ in the opening verse and has our narrator apologising for his alcohol-assisted actions.

Having done so well with Just The Way, it is no surprise that someone in a marketing meeting has suggested more of that sort of thing. Tailgating In The Sun opens with a piano part that sounds like most of the Magic Radio playlist and will sound great on festival stages thanks to its smooth and easy feel.

Ditto Good As It Gets, a lovely love song where Blanco namechecks Abercrombie and Fitch before hitting his falsetto range in the chorus. In the middle of the song he goes all Michael Trotter from The War & Treaty, holding a long note before intoning a few lines about being ‘shy just about up until about 21’. It’s stylistically all over the place, but then so are Jelly Roll and Morgan Wallen.

It’s still odd hearing black voices over country instrumentation, but for the genre to evolve we need more Brelands and Blancos, not to mention Brittneys and Beyoncés (and you can forget Nelly and Jimmie Allen).

Nate Smith – Through The Smoke EP

Nate Smith is one of the hot young things in commercial country music. He’s the one that looks like Jelly Roll who had that song ‘Ain’t gonna waste another drop of whiskey on you’, which I really liked.

Nate has been too busy touring his primary market (the USA) with Thomas Rhett to come back to the UK after his launch over here at Country2Country 2023. This was documented in a video that is now on the CMA Youtube channel, which Inception-ally opens with someone filming the person filming Nate’s walk on to the Country2Country stage. He also marvels at a can of Tango.

I found his debut album far, FAR too long and his act far, FAR too anonymous. Everything sounded clinical, and there were too many songs where he was miserable because of a breakup. His weeks-long chart-topper World On Fire was a Country Sex Jam, and his next trick is not to pick another single from the 26-track album (twenty-six track album!!!) but put out a seven-track EP.

Building on his backstory which included the destruction of his hometown of Paradise, California, it’s called Through The Smoke. The lead single is called Bulletproof, which is country radio-ready and possesses a spiky guitar line and a Wallenish lyric full of alcoholic poisons that (why won’t he learn??) cannot prevent his breakup being miserable.

The blahsome Wish I Never Felt is about an ‘angel’ who dragged him ‘through hell’. Breakups, you see, have made him miserable. For this reason Nate would Rather Be Lonely, ‘me, myself and Jack’. I admire his dedication to the message, and I am both relieved and disappointed that he changes the record on track four to another banal one.

Here’s To Hometowns feels like a title written down in a marketing meeting, as do its lyrics: roads, ‘towns you can’t pronounce’, college football, politeness, strawberry wine, handshakes and hard work. And, obviously, Brooks & Dunn, who I am certain get a cut of the copyright every time they are mentioned. What do Kix and Ronnie know that country radio doesn’t want us to find out?? Maybe they know where Garth Brooks buried the bodies.

As an aside, I wish a country star would just chuck every Donald Trump quote into a song, call it Stable Genius and tell the truth about the USA. So what if it gets them blacklisted on country radio? It’s a moribund medium and we have Spotify now. As seems obligatory, The War & Treaty are dragged into proceedings, this time on the power ballad Make It With You. I’ve never heard Michael Trotter half-rap his lyrics, and his vocal meshes smoothly with Nate’s even though the song says very little.

There’s also a karaoke cover of Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana, perhaps because the EP comes out 30 years to the week that the song’s writer Kurt Cobain shot himself. As with the entirety of Hardy’s oeuvre, this meshing of rock and country is the correct way to help much of the genre survive, and it is of a piece with Nate’s own original compositions even though it is absolutely unnecessary. Perhaps his label have let him include it after World On Fire was a 10-week (TEN-week!!) number one.

Hollywood trots through destinations – Santa Barbara, Colorado, Arizona, New York City – before Nate concludes that nobody makes him feel as good as being with his beloved. Oh-woah. In the second verse he adds that not even tattoos or church can compare. Oh-woah. He should prepare himself to be disappointed, though, so he can return to his breakup songs and make him and his label a lot more money.

Sierra Ferrell – Trail of Flowers

Sierra Ferrell is a superstar in the making. Her new album Trail of Flowers follows 2021’s Long Time Coming, which I thought was excellent. On it, her voice hits similar tones and notes to Joni Mitchell and Brandi Carlile. The critic Marissa Moss has a story about someone being converted to Brandi in real time, with his cries of ‘Hot damn’ getting louder with every song she played. I think many listeners will have their own Hot Damn moment with Sierra Ferrell.

In an Americana field full of blokes like Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson and Billy Strings, she is essentially what Lainey Wilson is to Nashville: the ‘see, we’ve got a woman too’. Sierra was the vocalist on the song Holy Roller, which became a top 40 hit on the Hot 100 for Zach Bryan, and she was also on the last album by Old Crow Medicine Show.

Suitably for a lady from West Virginia, this is very American music, which incorporates bluegrass, folk and roots. It is not just Americana but Joniana. The opening track American Dreaming has pedal steel washes, a chorus of ‘woah-woahs’ and a lyric full of troubadourin’ (‘I never seem to get no rest’).

I can imagine Zach Bryan writing a song like this, especially with its meditative coda; unsurprisingly Eddie Spear, the man who produced Zach’s album American Heartbreak, is behind the boards alongside her regular producer Gary Paczosa, whose role must have included microphone placement to make the songs as effective as possible.

Sierra covers a tune written in 1936 by Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith (does the comedian know about his namesake?) called Chittlin’ Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County (with no G), which proves she knows her heritage. As all current folkies do, she adds to the canon with her folk ballad Rosemary (‘you’ve got a witch that is on your back’). It was written back when she was an indie artist in 2018, since when her career has taken flight.

She will play in front of huge crowds across America this summer, including in LA at what used to be called the Staples Center and in Las Vegas with two dates at their O2-sized arena. The Long Road booked her for 2023, and she could feasibly headline it in 2025. The fiddle stomp and wordless vocal intro of Fox Hunt is matched by Sierra’s confident vocal delivery. On both that track and the satirical I Could Drive You Crazy, where she plays a strumpet who can neither hunt nor fish but can still exert a chokehold on her man, the fiddle-led coda sections must have been inspired by the thoughts of those big shows.

Dollar Bill Bar is magnificent musically, in terms of its arrangement, melody and mood, as Sierra updates Maren Morris’s Rich with less swagger and more inner confidence: ‘Guys like you are a dime a dozen…I’d have enough to break a hundred’. There is also harmonica, which never fails to improve a song.

Toes tap during Money Train, where an uncredited Lukas Nelson adds a coating of harmony to Sierra’s lead vocals to stand in as the lapsed cowboy who ‘wasn’t built for rain’ and who left his partner high and dry. The musician’s musician Chris Scruggs joins in on the glorious bluegrass singalong Lighthouse (‘could you be the guiding light?’), which should be synched to a Netflix indie movie as soon as possible.

I let out a satisfied ‘mm!’ after I’ll Come Off The Mountain, which says what it needs to say in one minute 44 seconds. I actually went ‘what?!’ when Why Haven’t You Loved Me Yet ended after just over two minutes, before I realised it was almost a pastiche of the kind of song Loretta Lynn used to make, complete with pedal steel solo and male backing vocalists around a single mic.

As Trigger from Saving Country music writes in his hyperbole-soaked hymn to the album: ‘[Sierra] has taken entirely outmoded and archaic music, and through her weaving of magic, made it more wildly popular and appealing than anyone would ever have imagined it could be in the modern era.’

It’s a fool’s errand to complain that all country music should be like this, but set against any metric, a song like Wish You Well sounds like a modern standard; in fact, it sounds like Someone Like You by Adele or any number of ‘you hurt me so goodbye’ songs. Not even Adele, though, would write the line ‘I could let you rattle in the rafters of my brain’, though someone like Emily Dickinson surely would.

The most depressing thing of all? If we’d have gone to school together Sierra would have been in my year. It’s great to see people of your own vintage making great music. Stadiums and arenas beckon and, after the Americana Music Association gave her the Emerging Artist award in 2022, she should clear space on her mantelpiece for a few more.

Tanner Usrey – Crossing Lines

Sierra came to the UK in 2023, and Tanner Usrey is coming next month for Highways festival. He’ll be performing tracks from his album Crossing Lines, which came out on Atlantic Records last November and was produced by Beau Bedford who also helmed the Shane Smith & The Saints album. Rather handily, they’re at Highways too, with Tanner playing just before them! Why don’t they just call it Beaufest?!

Tanner is from Texas and combines rock’n’roll, roots and country, a genre I call Red Rocks Country after the Colorado amphitheatre that are the natural domain of acts like Zach Bryan and Charles Wesley Godwin. On Good Friday, he put out a live EP of tracks recorded for radioWV, the same channel which pushed Oliver Anthony to prominence and is more or less the Radio 1 Live Lounge of Appalachian folk music. (Incidentally Mr Rich Men North of Richmond put out an album on Easter Day, Produced by Dave Cobb, with ten tracks and eight Bible readings.)

The EP includes new song Long Haired Stranger and, for those who knew Tanner before he got famous, the 2021 track Hold On To Me. The other three include the moving-on song Make You Weep, which was a solo performance on the album anyway, and Take Me Home, which is heavily influenced by Turnpike Troubadours and has the line ‘I don’t know what I’m running for’. Alongside closing ballad Beautiful Lies (‘I can see the heartbreak in your eyes’) it is the album’s big impact track.

Looking at recent setlists, Highways festivalgoers should expect to hear the two hits along with much of his debut album: the oomphy pair of Give It Some Time and Black Widow and the more meditative Who I Am (‘self-destruction at best’, since you ask). Tanner is also prone to dropping in a cover of Stay With Me, the great three-chord boogie by The Faces, which would make for a great inclusion on a covers EP.

The album opens with Echo In The Holler, which is complete with chain gang percussion, ‘a preacher screaming’, imitations of howling wolves and harmonica blasts, so we know exactly where we are. Then there’s the picaresque rock’n’roll narrative of Guns Drugs and Allergy Pills (‘it ain’t what it seeeeems!’), the forlorn Pick Up Your Phone (‘never felt so alone’) and the chantalong title track. Tanner loosens up on the stoner anthem Down Here At The Bottom, which rumbles on satisfactorily for seven minutes.

Ella Langley, Graycie York and Jessi England join in on Beautiful Lies, Last Goodbye (written with the always brilliant Kendell Marvel) and Evelyn’s Eyes respectively. All of them benefit from the dual perspective where both sides state their case, and are full of pathos and melody. Conversely on Destiny our hero has ‘the prettiest girl in the room’ and is unafraid to boast about her in a cocksure manner. Keep listening for the bluesy ejaculation at the end.

I am tempted to conclude that Tanner Usrey is the result of adding Zach Bryan to Shane Smith & The Saints. Instead of Red Rocks Country, perhaps I should call the genre Highways Country.

Here are some ideas for thinkpieces I won’t write (but others will) about Beyoncé’s album Cowboy Carter.I recommend you listen to it from start to finish. It lasts 78 minutes, exactly the amount of music that can be held on single compact disc.

1 Woman from Texas makes country album

2 Former r’n’b singer makes country album

3 The genre of Beyoncé

4 The death of genre

5 Why this will be Album of the Year at the Grammys, in spite (and because) of Taylor Swift

6 Never mind the racial politics, feel the choons!

7 Never mind the choons, feel the production!!

8 Black woman in country, from Linda Martell to Tanner Adell

9 Why Cowboy Carter is actually an album about America in 2024

10 What Donald Trump would like and dislike about Cowboy Carter

11 The religious implications of an album that starts with a Requiem and ends with Amen

12 American Musics on Cowboy Carter, from Willie Nelson to Willie Jones, from Jolene to Chuck Berry

13 The role of the interlude

14 The new version of Jolene from a music copyright perspective

15 The songs Sweet Honey Buckin’ and Ya Ya and what they too say about the treatment of old copyrights

16 The song Daughter and the role of daughterhood

17 The song II Most Wanted and its debt to queer country

18 The song Levii’s Jeans and the role of Post Malone

19 The song Bodyguard and the ongoing popularity of Adult Contemporary music

20 Never mind the racial politics, or the choons, or the production: don’t forget the vocal prowess!!

Cowboy Carter is out now

NB: All Spotify streaming statistics accurate as of March 29 2024

It was astonishing but unsurprising to see Sophie Ellis-Bextor back in the UK Top 10 in 2024. I was blown away by her Kitchen Disco live set at Latitude in summer 2023, a mix of covers and originals that included Murder on the Dancefloor, which (fun fact) was written with Gregg ‘New Radicals’ Alexander and was intended as his band’s first single.

In the Top 40 too this year was a song that is seldom out of the Top 100: Mr Brightside by The Killers, the last great communal rock song that now belongs to the world much as how every Beatles song, Wichita Lineman and Friends in Low Places does. But which other country songs would chart again if similar rules on ‘ACR songs’ (which have Accelerated Chart Ratio) applied?

Let’s take Spotify metrics and RIAA certifications as indicators. That way, the two biggest songs of the last decade are the two diamond-certified tracks: Cruise by Florida Georgia Line (441m streams) and Tennessee Whiskey by Chris Stapleton, which is closing on a billion and is currently at 895m streams. Strangely, Body Like A Back Road is on that exact number too, although these days I seldom hear what was one of country’s biggest pre-pandemic hits. His shiny poppy sound has been replaced by the gloomy hiphoppy sound of Wallen and Jelly.

Of the tunes that no country celebration can be without, anything by Garth Brooks is tough to see metrics of because he keeps his tracks off Spotify. Now that AC/DC and Taylor Swift have capitulated, Garth is pretty much the only act in the world now whose music is missing. But it is clear that his evergreen about showing up in boots to a black-tie affair is deathless.

Likewise Shania Twain’s refusal to be impressed by someone who has a car (188m streams, though you’d think it would be more), her wedding ballad about how far she and her baby have come (502m streams) and the song where she wants to forget she’s a lady (554m streams).

Both Jolene (611m streams) and 9 to 5 (567m streams) will never stop the pipeline to Dolly’s royalty stream, nor will Don Schlitz be short of money for writing The Gambler, which Kenny Rogers made a standard (373m streams). Live Like You Were Dying, the carpe diem standard by Tim McGraw, was back in the top sellers list this year when Apple reduced its price to celebrate 20 years since it first hit.

I asked Alex Evans aka DJ Trukka which songs captivate the room in which he plays them. Diane by Cam and Chicken Fried by Zac Brown Band were in his list, as was Beer Never Broke My Heart by Luke Combs, which actually segues well into and out of Friends In Low Places.

As if by magic, the NOW Music series recently announced the latest iteration of Now That’s What I Call Country, and all the usual suspects are present and correct. Track one on Disc One? Jolene. There’s also Need You Now, Crazy, Blanket On The Ground, Stand By Your Man, Rose Garden and You’re Still The One, with four country versions of big pop ballads closing the first disc: How Do I Live by Trisha Yearwood, I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing by Mark Chesnutt, When You Say Nothing At All by Keith Whitley and The Wind Beneath My Wings by Lee Greenwood.

Disc Two is the 2000-present day disc, kicking off with Keith Urban, always the most crucial of the Thurbans, and running through Luke Combs (Hurricane), Little Big Town (Girl Crush), Maren Morris (The Bones) and The Shires (My Universe), probably because they are a Sony act and Sony Music owns the rights to the NOW Music brand.

Look here! It’s Dancing by Kylie Minogue and All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow, proving that anything can be country so long as you put a sticker on it. Disc Three begins with Let Your Love Flow by The Bellamy Brothers and runs through some other timeless classics from the 1960s and 1970s: Wichita Lineman, The Gambler, Ode To Billie Joe, Kiss An Angel Good Morning and I Can Help by Billy Swan. There’s also the country waltz Labelled With Love by Squeeze, a country outfit from Deptford, South London.

Disc Four gives us Islands In The Stream, I Love A Rainy Night, Before He Cheats, Achy Breaky Heart and, back to back, Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Duelling Banjos. If you put that disc on at a party, you will not skip one song, which I imagine is the point: Boot Scootin’ Boogie, Redneck Woman, Sweet Home Alabama, Copperhead Road by Steve Earle, Elvira by The Oak Ridge Boys, Margaritaville, Dance The Night Away, Ring of Fire. Come oooon!!

All it takes is an advert, TV show or movie to kick these songs into the public consciousness as large. We can’t let Mr Brightside and Iris by Goo Goo Dolls (which is also perpetually skating in the nineties in the UK charts) be the only consensus hits with guitars on them. Country has dozens of potential smashes, and it won’t take a Luke Combs cover to bring them back to life.

The recent Country Countdown, compiled by the Official Charts Company and broadcast over C2C weekend on Radio 2, lacks Cruise for the inane reason that Meant To Be has been streamed many more times (1.36bn on Spotify, which is triple Cruise’s numbers). Rather than treat it seriously, let’s consider the countdown and see if the tracks are worthy of their evergreen status.

Your Man by Josh Turner? Yes, a super Stapleton composition. One Thing Right by Marshmello and Kane Brown? No, it sounds like 2019. I Hope by Gabby Barrett? No, for the same reason. The Git Up? Do me a favour.

How Do I Live, written by Diane Warren and sung by both Trisha Yearwood and LeAnn Rimes, will outlast us all. The robot/human children of the future will probably get married to a song that is one of the biggest of all Hot 100 hits. It’s all in the key change (verse in E, chorus in D). Amazed by Lonestar is just direct, and helped the band score a direct hit on the pop and country charts.

In Case You Didn’t Know by Brett Young is number 21 on this weird chart; it might be your own wedding song, which means Brett can headline Highways festival at the Royal Albert Hall and lead a singalong of what is a great melody and timeless sentiment. Ditto Beautiful Crazy and Speechless, which are more musical gloop gloop but were absent due to other songs, in Dan + Shay’s case 10,000 Hours and in Luke’s When It Rains It Pours.

That song rivals Chicken Fried as a full-throated evergreen; both are on the countdown, along with Something In The Orange by Zach Bryan, with 786m Spotify streams. Someone recently called Charli XCX a ‘niche star’, and I would consider Radiohead, REM and Zach to be the same. He is beloved by millions and, unlike those three acts, boasts a Hot 100 number one song (I Remember Everything, 474m streams); he’s got three dates at what used to be called the Staples Center lined up along with some stadium dates over summer 2024.

Johnny Cash’s treatment of Hurt is tied in with its immediate posthumous success and the literally iconic video. Who, in all fairness, will be playing Morgan Wallen’s music in 2050? That’s like playing Matchbox 20 today, and they were a punchline in the Barbie movie. Johnny Cash, who was born nearly a century ago, remains an evergreen country artist.

To round off this piece, it is smart that Beyoncé has covered Jolene, a song well known outside country music circles. I wonder how quickly her version overtakes the 611m streams of Dolly’s. I predict that the two singers will play it together at the CMA Awards or, if they don’t want a repeat of the Daddy Lessons farrago, the Grammy awards. It has an outside chance of catching fire and becoming the number one song in America, which would add Jolene to the list of songs which topped the Hot 100 in both its original form and as a cover.

It would be the first composition by a country artist. The others are as follows, and you can judge for yourselves if the songs are evergreens or not.

Go Away Little Girl: original by Steve Lawrence, cover by Donnie Osmond

The Locomotion: original by Little Eva, cover by Grand Funk Railroad

Please Mr Postman: original by The Marvelettes, cover by The Carpenters

Venus: original by Shocking Blue, cover by Bananarama

Lean On Me: original by Bill Withers, cover by Club Nouveau

You Keep Me Hanging On: original by The Supremes, cover by Kim Wilde

When A Man Loves A Woman: original by Percy Sledge, cover by Michael Bolton

I’ll Be There: original by The Jackson Five, cover by Mariah Carey ft Trey Lorenz

Lady Marmalade: original by Labelle, cover by the five ladies who recorded a version for the movie Moulin Rouge

On April 11, the Hollywood Bowl hosts its latest tribute to an Old Rock Star. Jimmy Buffett died last year and the stars are coming out to pay tribute, much as they did for Willie Nelson on the occasion of his 90^th birthday. This time out Zac Brown, Jackson Browne, Sheryl Crow, Jack Johnson, Pitbull and Paul McCartney are all on the bill. I would love it if the last two of those acts did Margaritaville.

Also onstage, inevitably, will be Kenny Chesney, the heir to King Parrothead. Like Buffett, whose song A Pirate Looks At 40 he performed with tears in his eyes at the CMA Awards 2023, Chesney knows his audience and gives them what they want: beach jams, party jams, sentimental jams and, on American Kids, a song about being ‘a little messed up but we’re all alright’.

Chesney has no need to play gigs outside his main market. The reverse is true of Ant & Dec, Romesh Ranganathan, Michael McIntyre, Paddy McGuinness, Mrs Brown and Billy Connolly. Victoria Wood was the same when she was alive, a British comedian playing to British audiences who know the British idiom. So was Bruce Forsyth, because the USA already had Bob Hope.

Robbie Williams was an end of the pier version of Bobby Brown or Justin Timberlake, and if you want to see what happens when Robbie tried to break America, look at the clip of him performing Feel on one of the talk shows in front of Simon Cowell, who knows his shtick, and Mike Myers, who doesn’t.

Ask yourself if any American would warm to Robbie, Romesh or any of those performers, and then you can see why some acts cling to Britain and rarely venture abroad. Credit to Jimmy Carr and James Acaster for trying – the latter is in the new Ghostbusters movie – and to Ricky Gervais for succeeding. Along with Garth Brooks, Chesney is the king of stadium country, as you can hear on his double-disc set Live in No Shoes Nation.

The itinerary for his forthcoming tour is mind-boggling, with Saturday night shows across the USA, starting in Tampa, Florida and heading to Minneapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Detroit and, of course, Nashville. He now has three decades of hits to choose from, many of which sound brilliant when bellowed by thousands of people in the summer sunshine.

There’s Beer In Mexico, Here and Now, Summertime, Get Along, The Good Stuff, Big Star, When The Sun Goes Down, Out Last Night, All The Pretty Girls, Living in Fast Forward and the aforementioned American Kids. There are also his evergreen tracks Young and How Forever Feels, which remain pillars of a career which took off with his second album, 1995’s All I Need To Know.

He celebrates turning 56 on March 26 by bringing out Born, his 20th album and first since Here and Now in 2020. Usually Chesney alternates between an album of fist-pumpers and a more philosophical set; examples of the latter include 2018’s Songs for the Saints, where proceeds went to victims of Hurricane Irma. Here, he combines the two effectively to make up for lost time in his release schedule.

If he were a woman Chesney would have been off country radio years ago, decades ago. Here and Now, however, was the most played song by the end of its run and was followed by a pair of number twos, Happy Does and Knowing You. I preferred Everyone She Knows, which peaked at 17 as the album Here and Now’s fifth single, and thought very little of Tip of My Tongue, a gift from Ed Sheeran.

I find it absolutely fascinating that Chesney, like Buffett and his Parrotheads, is reliant on folk who flock to No Shoes Nation, a tribe who take their name from his beach jam No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem. These fans, Chesney says, ‘experience the experience’ of a Kenny Chesney show. I wonder if there’s anyone he won’t take on board: xenophobes, for instance, or people who are a little too patriotic. ‘Every night we bring the antidote of what they get on TV, all the devices,’ he told NBC’s Willie Geist in an executive bar in one of the stadiums he’s made home. His goal is to get people ‘off the couch and feeling alive’.

His fanbase has even been represented on the TV show The Patient, as he pointed out in a conversation with Bobby Bones. He was drawn musically ‘to people who wrote their songs and went out to perform them, like Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffett…I didn’t know the genius of that. I was playing sports and I heard Alabama on the radio.’ He said to Geist that it was being true to himself, about ten years into his career, that took him stratospheric, even though I think he just nicked two people’s sounds: the Gulf Coast Country of Jimmy Buffett, and the arena-rock guitar sound of David Lee Murphy.

As a sop to him, Chesney has duetted with him and sung his songs; on Born, it is One Lonely Island, which like Thinkin’ Bout and Long Gone (‘still going!!’) is a bit of filler which goes nowhere in an aurally pleasant way. In the Bobby Bones interview Chesney calls the title track, with the hook ‘we’ve all been livin’ since the day we were born’, a reminder that ‘though we’re different, we’re all still the same.

‘When you’re up there singing a song about their life and validating their life journey, it’s just wonderful.’ It is also wonderful to be able to live in Hawaii and be one of America’s top-grossing live performers, handily stepping into the gap where Garth should have been in the 2000s.

‘I’m terrified of being complacent,’ he told Geist, adding in the Bobby Bones chat that ‘you don’t wanna repeat yourself’. This is how Chesney justified taking three years on his album, which was produced by his and Willie Nelson’s long-serving lieutenant Buddy Cannon. By now Cannon can probably just use the ‘Chesney’ setting on his mix console: the guitars come in here, the drum track is at this level, the vocals are given this EQ setting.

Five of the 15 songs were written with Chesney in the room: Just To Say We Did is one of those day-seizing tunes Chesney always records; Come Here Go Away is about the chasm between thought and speech and can only be a Shane McAnally co-write; and Guilty Pleasure, which is blah but has a really lovely chord progression into the chorus. The Way I Love You Now is a Chesney-penned power ballad featuring the word ‘reconciliation’; his co-writer Mike Reid also wrote Wherever You Are Tonight, a pleasingly old-fashioned country ballad dripping with empathy and sentiment which closes the album.

Some songs are pitch-sheet Chesney that seem to satisfy the requirement when writers are told Chesney needs some songs for his new album. Hardy knows his catalogue so well he immediately offered him Take Her Home, which is on a country radio station near you at the moment and crams an entire life into a chorus, much like Buy Dirt, Next Thing You Know and A Guy Walks Into A Bar.

The man known as Charlie Handsome, real name Ryan Vojtesak, and Ernest gift him the meet-cute Blame It On the Salt, where a 56-year-old man sings of ‘catching feelings’. Chesney is nothing if not versatile. Rhett Akins and Ben Hayslip give him a patented Peach Picker three-chord jam Few Good Stories, which inevitably has Chesney ‘trying to get to heaven while I raise a little hell’.

This Too Shall Pass is a thinky-thinker which comes from the minds of Brent Cobb, Jaren Johnston and Charlie Worsham. Top Down is a slow burner whose protagonist is a lady who ‘likes the sweet sound of rock’n’roll’, and the final minute of the song is filled with arena-rock guitars.

In the same way that Shane McAnally – who co-wrote Everyone She Knows and American Kids –  puts vinegar in the cake mix, Chesney likes the rough to roll with the smooth, the Saturday night with the hangover the next morning. This is precisely the theme of Chesney’s song Out Last Night, and that song’s co-writer Brett James offers One More Sunset, which quotes Polonius’s advice to Hamlet (‘to thine own self be true’) and reminds me of Tom Petty’s description of country as ‘bad rock with a fiddle’.

Chesney has notoriously avoided the UK throughout his career, because the paychecks are vast and because he only plays stadiums. Even an arena like the new Co-Op in Manchester, a 23,000-seat arena which is basically The O2 North, or the Hydro in Glasgow would be a step down. Given that his fellow beach monarch Jake Owen finally came over in 2024, what are the odds that Chesney will celebrate 30 years in entertainment with a series of UK shows?

Perhaps, given that K-pop is now hitting the Pyramid Stage, he can follow Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton into the Sunday afternoon Legends slot at Glastonbury. He won’t be overawed by the crowd stretching to the horizon, and I am sure the Eavis family would love She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy! As it is, Chesney is a strong brand whose voice eases the tough lives of thousands upon thousands of fans.

‘We came to see you!’ is his evergreen line onstage, which accurately conveys his own shtick: in a time of atomisation and division, he unites people by selling back sentiments people want to hear wrapped up in solid melodies and arrangement. What a great businessman.

I was going to include this in the Sunday Hymn Sheet but I’ve given it its own place on the site

Riley Green has a new song out called Way Out Here, written by Hall of Famer Casey Beathard, old timer David Lee Murphy and Josh Thompson, who used it as the title track of his debut album from 2010.

Back then it garnered so much airplay and so many sales that it got as high as number 15 on the country charts and number 85 on the Hot 100 at the end of October 2010. The number one song in America that week was Like A G6 by Far East Movement, with Nelly, Usher, Rihanna and Bruno Mars making up the top five and Taylor Swift in at six with Back To December.

Thompson went on to write songs for Jason Aldean like Any Ol Barstool, Set It Off, Blacktop Gone and Drowns The Whiskey. The cheques for Morgan Wallen’s hit Wasted On You must be with him now, and he was also tasked with writing new lyrics for Rebel Rebel on Chris Young’s single Young Love & Saturday Nights.

His other compositions include: Stars Like Confetti, recorded by Dustin Lynch; One Margarita, a one-chord jam for Luke Bryan; I’ll Name The Dogs, the jaunty Blake Shelton hit; the title track of Tim McGraw’s album Damn Country Music; Ain’t Always The Cowboy, a hit for Jon Pardi; and the beach jam Half of Me by Thomas Rhett and Riley Green himself.

Green’s version of Way Out Here was produced by Dann Huff, Scott Borchetta and Jimmy Harnen, who between them run Big Machine Label Group which signed Riley Green and make money off of him. Perhaps they want Thompson to make a bit of publishing money, and he needed no excuse to bring the track back into prominence in an election year.

If anything, the song sums up the state of contemporary country. It’s not Lainey Wilson winning Entertainer of the Year or The War & Treaty, Sierra Ferrell and Kacey Musgraves appearing on Zach Bryan’s album. It’s a chap on Big Machine singing about the heartland. It’s awful and here are ten reasons why:

1. The opening line is ‘our houses are protected by the Good Lord and a gun’, which are two things killing people, not to mention the opioids
2. The second line is ‘you might meet ‘em both if you show up here not welcome, son’, which is a threat
3. ‘We smoke, we chew and fry everything’. That’s not magnificent in a time of mass obesity
4. ‘We don’t take a dime if we ain’t earned it’. That’s false, what with the looting and stealing
5. ‘When it comes to weight, brother, we pull our own’. That’s also false, what with the idleness
6. ‘We’re about John Wayne, Johnny Cash and John Deere’. Two of those ciphers are dead, the other is a brand of tractor which desperate farmers are trying to make a living with
7. ‘We’ve got a fighting side a mile wide but we pray for peace’. That’s false yet again, when whole TV channels exist to make people angry and divide them
8. ‘It’s mostly us that end up serving overseas’. Fun fact: Big Machine was sold to a South Korean company, whose big hit band are all serving compulsory military service. Riley Green is not, but I appreciate that he may perform on USO tours to those who do serve
9. ‘I’d love to see this country run like it used to be’. Is that with the slavery and the lynchings and the outright corruption? Please expand on this point
10. ‘Like it ought to be’. Is that with open arms for the ‘huddled masses’ escaping persecution, and without any respect for the Native American way of life?

I only intended to mention point nine, but it seems that every single line of this song is contentious. Reading up about the original version, there was some pushback over how the town the video was shot in was majority black. Given that Josh Thompson put out the song in the first term of President Obama’s presidency, it had some less than savoury overtones back then; after the furore over Try That In A Small Town, where the video was shot at a venue where lynchings happened, it seems even more rank.

I was moved to email Josh Thompson, and I am not expecting a reply. He’s probably counting all that Aldean money.

The Wandering Hearts – Mother

The economics of country music in the UK means it is far easier to put out a single or an EP than an album. Acts can bed their catalogue into the live set for future recordings, as happened recently when Gasoline & Matches put out Could’ve Been A Love Song to coincide with their debut performance at Country2Country.

I remain impressed that in the last year alone ten top acts in the UK have put albums out: Ward Thomas, Robbie Cavanagh, Demi Marriner, Eddy Smith & The 507, Emilia Quinn, Kezia Gill, Morganway, Ferris & Sylvester, Hannah White and Ags Connolly. Elles Bailey also has one out very soon indeed, while at the end of April the Scottish duo Raintown will put out their first LP in almost a decade.

I first heard The Wandering Hearts at Country2Country in 2017, where they were previewing songs from their debut album Wild Silence, which was put out on Decca Records. Since then, they have lost a member and the Decca deal, and had a difficult time working on their second, self-titled album, to judge by the many, many producers credited on it.

Third album Mother is out on the famous Chrysalis label. It mostly has one producer, Steve Milbourne, and was made in Chess’s studio up in Darlington. She and Tara both had babies during the making and mastering of the album, which must make it fun for third member and unofficial uncle AJ Dean. AJ himself has correctly said the album has elements of folk, pop, blues and rock, which of course makes it UK Americana, the box to tick when there is no box to tick.

The band take the album on the road this month and next, with a date at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, around the back of which I used to live as a student. Their London date on April 12 is at the Electric in Brixton, rather than at a posh sit down venue which would suit the slower folky songs.

The uptempo Fire and Water and On Our Way will forever be in their set, and they turn up the electric guitars on Hold Your Tongue (‘if you’ve got nothing nice to say…let’s agree to disagree’), which is a welcome change of pace after four folk ballads which take their sonic inspiration from Kacey Musgraves’ cosmic country: opener About America has a finger-picked acoustic guitar and a trio of perfectly pitched vocal lines; Tired is the perfect word to stretch out over three-part harmonies, although the song is (fnarrr) a little somnambulant; the line ‘incessant, insatiable’ stands out on Still Waters, where the piano pokes through the arrangement like pebbles on a stream.

Lead single River To Cry has the poppiest arrangement and some MTV Unplugged guitar work, as well as a bridge that crescendos for at least a minute and breaks into a fine wigout. Conversely, Will You Love Me is a Norah Jones-y wedding song that uses the ‘if…will’ construction to devastating effect. Not Misunderstood (good title, using the poetic term litotes) has the album’s best vocal performances. Dance Again has the album’s best melody, which is set to piano chords and brushed snare drums.

Waiting (‘I put myself between you and the bullets…guess love was not enough to make you change’) was co-written with the great Jeff Cohen. It returns to the feel of About America, with AJ on lead vocals. AJ also wrote the music and lyrics for the perky, folky toe-tapper What Fools Believe, with added whistling. Letter To Myself begins ‘I wish I’d stayed younger a little while longer’ and will be the centrepiece of their live show. I wonder whether ‘plastic souvenirs’ is a metaphor, or if it literally means geegaws and trinkets are a waste of money.

The trio are by now experts at achieving sustain and release, which keeps pulling in crowds across the UK. Brilliantly, The Wandering Hearts have now stopped wandering and have found their sound.

Will Page – Still Standing

Noble Jacks are one of those acts I always see on posters or showcase lineups, and the band’s Will Page releases his album Still Standing on Good Friday (March 29). He promotes it via an eight-date, two-week tour that takes him to plenty of UK folk centres including Cambridge, Camberley and Woodbridge in Suffolk. There’s a London date at Camden Green Note on May 12.

As a fiddle player and a fan of folkies Seth Lakeman and Jon Boden of Bellowhead, I should be predisposed to like Will’s music. He also plays harmonica and banjo, and he is joined by drummer Cormac Byrne and Steve Knightley, who have both played with Show of Hands, another one of those UK Americana mainstays.

Steve is credited on opening track The Rise (‘if we hold on we can stand together’) and Find Your Light; the former has a fiddle-tastic outro and the latter has some woahs made for communal singing. Strength to Carry On is good for the soul, with some fine double-stopping on the string and an absorbing narrative, while the folk staples of women and the elements make their presence known on Oceans.

Strip Jig is the album’s centrepiece, followed by the perky and cinematic vignette Broadstairs, where ‘the band are sleeping peacefully’. The Cuckoo is very Lakemanlike and has the line ‘I bet you ten sterling I’ll beat you next game’, and the title track is a full-throated song about ‘pushing on, hanging on’. It’s all very folky and very trad (dad).

Sarah Louise – Change of Plan

Sarah Louise releases her album Change of Plan on her birthday next Thursday (March 28) with a celebration gig the following evening on Good Friday in her hometown of Colchester. She’ll also be down in Southsea for Country on the Coast on the Saturday (April 13), as well as touring as part of the duo From The Wild with her friend Will Underwood.

I remember seeing her at a Live In The Living Room event getting totes emosh playing the song My Grandparents and Me. It is country in as much as Sarah Louise’s voice is full of emotion and she tells stories with it. The proceeds from Cup Of Coffee, which is sung from the perspective of a homeless person, will go to Shelter UK. ‘I just want you to know my name’ is a line full of pain and empathy.

I Ain’t Got the Time is a plea to be loved, while Part Of The Story is sung by Sarah and Patt Fallaize as a duet: ‘When I can’t see you I can’t breathe/ When I don’t feel you it hurts me’ shows how deeply Sarah feels for her beloved. Will also appears on She Lost Her Way, a torch song recorded live in Nashville.

Better Be Lightning (‘what do I need to be wild and free?’) is prettily sung in a bright major key and with a vocal vibrato that reminds me of Alisha’s Attic. Be Real has the feel of a song from Encanto thanks to its fun percussive rhythm and a lyric which includes the line ‘I’m putting myself first’. There’s also a Disney via Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs feel to both Just For You and The Smile, where Sarah Louise is backed up by a saxophone.

I Am Angel (‘we are one’) has a magnificent string arrangement that matches Sarah Louise’s vocal, which is showcased best on Roundabout, the album’s closing track proper. Stick around for the kiss-off Sorry Not Sorry, which will be a nice dessert following the main course of serious songs.

Since 2018, something entirely new has arisen. Just as posh lads and ladies have Ascot, Wimbledon and Henley, so country fanatics in the UK have Compstall, Brands Hatch and Putney. Yes, the Summer Season will soon be upon us.

Compstall is the village next to Marple where Buckle and Boots takes place over the second Bank Holiday weekend in May 2024. Putney’s Half Moon hosts the biannual Country In The Afternoon (CITA), an initiative of Gavin and Christine Chittick who book the venue biannually across two weekends, once in summer and once in autumn.

This year CITA coincides precisely with the Highways Festival at the nearby Royal Albert Hall, which falls across the Friday and Saturday (May 17-18). Brett Young and The Cadillac Three are the big names but the impressive undercard includes Shane Smith and The Saints, William Prince and The War & Treaty.

This year, the Transatlantic CITA line-up was announced before Buckle and Boots, giving an idea of who will play the latter jamboree the following weekend. The big UK acts are longtime favourites – and Country2Country performers in 2023 – Two Ways Home and First Time Flyers, as well as Christian Larsmon, who gives us an idea of what he does onstage via his live album Dark Before The Dawn. All eight tracks are stylishly sung in a rich burr, and the strongly melodic Rush is a good place to start. He will be accompanied by the legendary Sarah Jory on the day.

TWH and FTF will be on the bill for the Sunday (May 19) alongside the visiting Americans John Wesley Satterfield and Ian Flanigan, who will in turn be joined by Jon Stone from American Young. I won’t give away Ian’s recent unorthodox choice of cover, but if Richard Thompson can pick a song from this artist, then so can Ian. His 2022 album Strong features a duet with Blake Shelton called Grow Up which was written by Jon Nite and Jessie Jo Dillon, while Under a Southern Sky was written by husband-and-wife team Jon Randall and Jessi Alexander. This and other songs remind me of Bruce Springsteen singing Phil Vassar’s songbook, which makes him perfect for the estimable rock’n’roll venue in South-West London.

Like Zach Bryan, John Wesley Satterfield saw active service, in his case the US Coast Guard. He raised $20,000 last year to fund the promotion of a new album, from which John has taken the single Good News, which features vocals from Maggie Rose. It has a fun set of lyrics, my favourite being ‘overpaid minions’, and should sound excellent bouncing off the walls off the Half Moon.

Ain’t For Sale namechecks Harry Chapin and is a proper singer/songwriter number where a string section helps bring out the pathos of a lyric that prefers connecting with individual listeners over fame. A-Listers dot the credits on his album too: Old Men Young Women is a gift from the A-List trio Barry Dean, Luke Laird and Lori McKenna, while Benjy Davis, a friend of Ashley McBryde, co-wrote Ghost, which is brilliant thanks to portamento strings and a really excellent vocal performance. Discover JWS ASAP.

On CITA’s Saturday afternoon, which this year falls on May 18, the aforementioned Christian Larsmon will be joined by three Americans. Kim Richey puts out music on the hip indie label Yep Roc. Floating On The Surface is the first single from Every New Beginning, which comes out on May 24. It has the same rootsy feel and direct close-mic’d vocals of Rosanne Cash or Suzanne Vega.

Oliver Darling put out an album called Lee’s Blues at the end of 2022, and there’s some fine slide guitar work on Don’t Think I’m That Crazy Anymore. His new single Forever is gorgeous, with glockenspiel and harmonica underscoring a really light vocal which trembles ever so slightly.

Maggie Baugh spoke of her love of Eric Church in her interview with Matt Clewes on his Clewes’ Country show. Last year Maggie put out her album Dear Me which features a charming homage to the Chief: Take Me To Church interpolates the middle bit of Springsteen and runs together a load of songtitles and signifiers. Much of the album comprises ballads in the Tenille Arts of Cassadee Pope mould, which might act as a comedown at both CITA and Buckle and Boots (John Wesley Satterfield also plays both festivals).

She has already commemorated a break-up on recent single ’24 and has promised new music which she might stick in her setlist. The names at the top of the bill for ‘Buckle’ are the previously announced Canaan Cox, Ian Flanigan and Heartwreckers. The latter’s song Don’t Trust That Truck came out just this past Friday and it’s got as much thrust as a vehicle.

Both it and the power ballad Shut Up will sound excellent alongside Canaan’s set of contemporary country songs that cherrypick the best sounds of country radio: heartland rock guitars, digital drum tracks, lyrics about girls sung by a voice that floats above the arrangements. I was going to suggest fans of Jordan Davis would love his music, then I heard the song JOY (‘joke’s on you!’) which rewrites Singles You Up over the same chord progression. Canaan’s new song Wendy Peffercorn (good title) has the melody and drive of the best One Direction songs, which I hope is a compliment!

Dan Smalley will be back in the UK mere months after touring with Gary Quinn and Jeremy McComb as part of a writer’s round. Jeremy is billed as ‘guest host’ and is thus being positioned as the Jools Holland of Buckle. Drew Dixon, who played a top set at the Camden Green Note in 2022, will be the tallest act on the bill.

Taylor Moss is the latest unknown unknown who will surely become a known known. Having played CMC Rocks in her native Australia this weekend just gone, Taylor is embarking on her first visit to the UK. She comes bearing plenty of songs released in the past five years, including Dream Baby, which is released this coming Friday.

A lot of her material is very country, especially the five tracks on her Heartland EP. Country Proud is a list of stuff, while Both has a groovy riff underscoring a ‘pretty contradiction’ where Taylor is a little bit this, a little bit that ‘but that’s just me!’ Some of her material sounds Eurovision-ready, like the poppy Ghosted and the self-explanatory Get It Girl, and elsewhere it has the tween-pop breathy feel of Mandy Moore or Britney Spears. I also spotted that one of her producers is called Stuart Stuart, so good they named him twice!!

There is, as ever, a stunning British contingent at the festival. Emilia Quinn follows her Country2Country set with a live band show on the Friday night, while First Time Flyers are united at a festival which all four members have played as solo acts. Abbie Mac and Luke Flear both played Country2Country in London, and Robyn Red, Katie Rigby, Sophie Rose, Megan Rose and Emily Lockett were all part of Country on the Clyde, which might as well be called McBuckle.

Mikki Evans, Kier, Nick Edwards, and Wood Burnt Red will be playing Country On The Coast in April and Buckle & Boots in May, which means a lot of driving (and networking!) is in their immediate future. The last two of those acts make it a hat-trick when they headline Live In The Living Room Gives Back on April 7 at the Bedford in Balham.

Elsewhere, Emelle, Lisa T and festival house band Eddy Smith & The 507 are booked for Buckle, as is BCMA Entertainer of the Year Matt Hodges. Matt is also out on the road this month with a stop at Gullivers in Manchester tomorrow night (Tuesday 19). Bristolian duo Foreign Affairs return to the farm with their rootsy, bluesy rocky country, while Fin Pearson’s rocket-powered ascent catapults him (if I can mix metaphors) to Compstall too.

I first saw Megan Lee as a child when she fronted her family band Blue Roses and it’ll be a delight to see her burst out of the chrysalis performing material from her recent Origins EP. Mikala Fredriksson has just released her second single A Horse Is Born To Run, which is surely a t-shirt slogan. Jazmine Honey Banks’ Facebook profile says simply: ‘I write country love songs’; six of them are available now including the poppy Holding Out and last year’s release Seven Steps. Mikol Frachey must be the first Italian to play the festival and will offer tunes like Tennessee Whiskey Girl and Cowgirl Dance. This week she will release an EP recorded at the Jazz Club in Turin. Buenoooooo.

James Stephen, who supported Canaan Cox in 2023, is so local he can probably walk to the farm from his home in Stockport. Oscar Corney was on the same undercard as Kezia Gill and First Time Flyers when Bruce Springsteen came to Hyde Park last year. It does seem that every country act records a song called Open Road, and Oscar has just put out his version.

In a sea of single singers, it is great that Heartwreckers, Eddy Smith & The 507, Wood Burnt Red and First Time Flyers are on the bill. Ditto Green Hot Clover and the Suffolk-based Joe Keeley Band, who play ‘alt-country rock’n’roll’. As well as seeing the welcome return of The Country Orchestra, Buckle & Bass promises one of three things: electronic dance music with a thumping bottom end, an hour of double-bass-led old-time music or (praise be) a combination of the two.

Tickets and camping options for Buckle and Boots are on sale now at buckleandboots.co.uk. The day splits will be posted in due course; last year it was in March so it might come sooner than you’d think. Ditto Black Deer, which takes place three weeks after Buckle & Boots and where Joe Bonamassa has been announced as the second headliner. There is no finer ambassador for the blues, one of America’s contributions to Western culture, so this is a smart move.

Other new additions to a lineup that already had Sheryl Crow on it include: Dylan Gossett, who has leapt from TikTok to the big stages; Turin Brakes, with their awesome harmonies and 25 years of troubadourin’; Zandi Holup, making a quick return after C2C 2024; Dale Watson, the king of Ameripolitan music; and Eli Paperboy Reed, who is his own genre and might well play some Merle Haggard covers as per his 2022 album Down Every Road.

A pair of festivals go big on UK acts. Speedfest at Brands Hatch over the weekend of June 8-9 has a bill topped by Ward Thomas with an undercard that includes Jade Helliwell, Emilia Quinn, Eddy Smith & The 507, Gasoline & Matches and The Jackson Line. Rock N Ribs festival down in Somerset has its own country stage on which Emilia Quinn, Gasoline & Matches, Kezia Gill and Backwoods Creek will all be performing between July 19-21.

Then comes Sarah Yeo’s West Country Music Festival down in Cullompton in Devon, which this year falls on August 10 with headliners Ward Thomas, and The Long Road over the August Bank Holiday weekend (August 23-25) with Russell Dickerson announced as their first headliner. Other mainstage acts include regular UK visitors Chapel Hart, Flatland Cavalry and Randall King.

Randall is also headlining The British Country Music Festival the weekend after The Long Road (August 30-September 1) alongside Kezia Gill and Twinnie. The lineup for that festival is being announced act by act, and already includes Julian Taylor, Beth Nielsen Chapman, St Catherine’s Child, First Time Flyers and the Girls’ Night In quartet (Kezia, Demi Marriner, Jade Helliwell and Jess Thristan).

So that’s Highways, Country In The Afternoon and Buckle & Boots in May; Speedfest and Black Deer in June; Rock N Ribs in July; the West Country Music Festival and The Long Road in August, with The British Country Music Festival rounding things off as summer ticks into autumn. Why on earth would you consider doing anything else with your leisure hours?!

Let the summer season of country music in the UK commence!!