Rolling Country 2023

i saw ZB a month ago and was not surprised to find myself surrounded by 35,000 people screaming along to every word, but still, it was something to see.

and most of them were 25 or younger.

he is, like, 5x Isbell, maybe? 10x? ... and Isbell is doing real good.

i think his songs are fine to good - some are great - but it's hard to figure out exactly what he is doing to command an A+ level fan base. he is likeable ... obviously good on social ... has the military connection ... still, football stadiums? multiple nights at basketball arenas? whatever it is, he should bottle it and sell it. that's where the real money is!

to your point: https://www.stereogum.com/2223439/zach-bryan-came-out-of-nowhere/reviews/concert-review/

I'm quite happy to hear Kacey on a country track again.

This may be a major stretch but reading the SG review Alfred posted had me thinking...is Bryan winning the demographic that was rabid about Dave Matthews in the late 90s/early 00s? Maybe more working class, perhaps, but there's an approachability/familiarity/simplicity to both artists' songwriting.

i don't know as much about emo as ian but i do agree that this album could've been on like saddle creek 30 years ago or secretly canadian 20 years ago etc. he leans into the twang in his voice & i think the songwriting codes as country but the arrangements feel as much like the americana end of indie as it does anything else to me

i love this album btw. for anyone who is having a hard time finding an entry point -- understandable given the scope of his last album -- i would recommend starting w/ the 'all my homies hate ticketmaster' live album from the beginning of the year. he really shines in the live setting imo even via recording -- you get a better sense of his personality, and the arrangements of some of the older records are flattered by the full band behind him. "god speed," "the good i'll do" & "oklahoma smokeshow" are my favs if anyone just wants to cherry pick (also all great in their recorded versions)

is Bryan winning the demographic that was rabid about Dave Matthews in the late 90s/early 00s?

i'm just going off what i saw when i went to one of the NYC shows this summer but i don't think his audience is the jam band crowd. it's gen z kids in the south/midwest who previously would've been fans of mainstream country but now have a wider menu of options to choose from. i mentioned this in the itunes/race thread but in talking to some kids in that demo about music, we're just seeing a generational shift in country where everything that was previously hot in the mainstream (sam hunt, thomas rhett, luke bryan, kane brown) is seen as corny millennial music. of course there's still corny millennials out there so those artists still have big audiences but i have gotten a prevailing sense that bryan is still capturing what is pretty wholly a country-centric fanbase, it's just a young audience growing into its purchasing power that looks at those other country artists as "yours" and zach bryan et al as "ours." obv i'm making some generalizations here but that's my read on it

i do agree that this album could've been on like saddle creek 30 years ago or secretly canadian 20 years ago etc.

opening couple tracks giving me big Okkervil River vibes

i think my favourite is "El Dorado"?

i think also the seeds of this were being planted for years. you have kids who were teenagers listening to stuff like jason isbell, tyler childers, whiskey myers. one of morgan wallen's biggest breakthrough record being a jason isbell song doesn't feel incidental to me when you're looking at the success of zach bryan et al. on the high end of this style of country we're talking about eric church & chris stapleton. those artists used to be seen as losing the battle for the soul of country, but i would look at the current landscape and say that they won the war. so anyway, i don't mean to imply that there was some switch flipped overnight regarding this generational stuff. 3-5 years ago gen z kids in the south, appalachia, midwest etc were coming into their own as music fans & making their own choices about what their music was & now we're seeing the full cultural manifestation of that shift in taste. again please note i'm talking in broad strokes here. but what we're seeing now has been in motion for some years the way we think of, like, the timeline of underground club music changing the sound of pop

the timeline of underground club music changing the sound of pop

and i mean this in a general sense too... sorry i should be more precise w/ my words. i don't want the post to read like i'm calling "underground club music" a concrete individual thing that changed pop music in one moment. but just the way we think of like... a scene grows in the clubs in some city across the world and then starts seeping into pop music before hitting a kinda cultural saturation via that subsumption. i'd think about this stuff in those terms except it's more of a national phenomenon in this case

good posts, jordan, all otm

i feel like the true roots of this movement have to go back 1. beyond Childers / Whiskey Myers (who are certainly major figures in it but feel just a tad too recent to be the forefront) and 2. to someone other than Isbell, who is also a major figure but a little too high-falutin' / progressive / small-time-in-2015 to have generated this kind of surge, especially with conservative kids from the south and midwest. (same for Sturgill, fwiw.)

Chris Stapleton, I think, is the real huge bridge from mainstream to what we're talking about here. Maybe not some revelation ... just thinking out loud. If there's someone that led to him, I'm not quite sure who it is.

anyway, i have decided that Childers is my favorite of this whole gang

i feel like the true roots of this movement have to go back 1. beyond Childers / Whiskey Myers (who are certainly major figures in it but feel just a tad too recent to be the forefront) and 2. to someone other than Isbell, who is also a major figure but a little too high-falutin' / progressive / small-time-in-2015 to have generated this kind of surge, especially with conservative kids from the south and midwest. (same for Sturgill, fwiw.)

i cede to your expertise! i need to listen to childers' music more

Good call on Stapleton, and this makes total sense to me, J0rdan:

a generational shift in country where everything that was previously hot in the mainstream (sam hunt, thomas rhett, luke bryan, kane brown) is seen as corny millennial music. of course there's still corny millennials out there so those artists still have big audiences but i have gotten a prevailing sense that bryan is still capturing what is pretty wholly a country-centric fanbase, it's just a young audience growing into its purchasing power that looks at those other country artists as "yours" and zach bryan et al as "ours."

Only add/caveat I have is that ZB seems to have captured both sides of the fence. Might be just an anecdote but I have two colleagues in their late 20s who love country music. One is a massive Stapleton and Childers fan, the other is a huge Morgan Wallen, Luke Bryan guy. Both love ZB.

Where does Sam Hunt fit? He seems to have since 2020.

I worry about Eric Church's next album.

one of morgan wallen's biggest breakthrough record being a jason isbell song doesn't feel incidental to me when you're looking at the success of zach bryan et al.

Wasn't one of Bryan's earliest youtube breakthroughs an Isbell cover, too? "Dress Blues"? That was back in 2018. I think there were a handful of youtube songs that went viral (whatever that means) a year or so before his first album even came out.

I feel like Bryan was one of the few people to successfully thread the political needle when he dissed Travis Tritt for being a dick, but then later found a way to reconcile off-camera (as it were). He came off pretty well, and I assume his background and disposition (he's stayed pretty mum on own personal politics, hasn't he?) seemingly allows him to straddle different worlds.

In the military, Bryan was an aviation ordnanceman stationed in Washington and Florida, and did tours in Bahrain and Djibouti. He assembled, repaired and loaded weapons, and in his downtime, recorded songs. He was a fan of the Oklahoma country band Turnpike Troubadours — especially the songwriting of its frontman, Evan Felker — as well as Radiohead, Bon Iver, Gregory Alan Isakov and assorted “weird indie music.”

In the current slotting of genres, Bryan falls perhaps closest to country, though it doesn’t feel like home to him. “I think people understand that I’m not that,” he said. “I want to be in that Springsteen, Kings of Leon, Ed Sheeran at-the-very-beginning space,” he said.

But some of the more partisan elements of the country audience can surface at his shows. In Indianapolis, before Bryan took the stage, parts of the crowd broke out in a vulgar chant about President Biden.

“I told people if I heard it, I would stop it immediately,” Bryan said. “Don’t come to my shows and start it. But they do it anyway.” (He describes himself as a “total libertarian.”)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/arts/music/zach-bryan-american-heartbreak.html

"Total libertarian."

I effused about American Heartbreak way up this RC or maybe last year's: so long ago. in a lot of ways, like in a different lifetime, unmentionable by name, to semi-quote Dylan, considering how more recent listens made me recoil: so many, many songs, so many of them soon broken by writhing anxieties, memories barely referenced as they break in, racing by like speedy cold sweat, over whiney, groaning abuse of a Mellencamp manner, minus the pop sense delivery---I feel unqualified to listen, not being a psychiatric social worker (there are others like this, some of them who make better music, but I won't mention them here.)
Still, I kept listening, hoping to regain some faith in my first impression. Didn't happen, which affected some other things in my writing---went on to the live album, which sounded a lot happier, going from abject prolixity to self=amazed prolixity---still so many words, so little music beyond overly familiar vestiges---tried and tried, never got past track 12.
But! Emo country could be cool, with the theatrical flair of Garth Brooks well-studied, in emulative emo, yeah.
(Short of that: a duet album with Musgraves, whose nullity could balance ZB. like excitable Louis Prima with cool Keely Smith---ZB x KM wouldn't be as good, but an improvement on what they do now.)

Incredible -- "I Remember Everything" is #1. How'd it happen?

dow, we quite disagree with the quality of this album, and I hear plenty of hooks. I've had "El Dorado" and "Oklahoman Son" in my head the last five days. This is a better album than AH: (more) coherent, tight(er), its point of view more secure.

-I feel unqualified to listen, not being a psychiatric social worker

And this is a nasty little line. Seriously? It's like Christgau dismissing Kristen Hersh for being 'psychotic.'

I'm talking about American Heartbreak and All My Homies..., haven't heard anything since, hopefully I'll like something of his better/at all. Nasty but true; I wasn't trying to be funny or even judgmental---the more time I spent with him, which was considerable, the more irrelevant I felt, pushed beyond my skill set and capacity for empathy. Also beyond my skill set, and xgau's: labeling someone as psychotic.

I'll be honest as one of the vocal AH proponents here last year, the more time I spent with the album, the more rudimentary and thin the songwriting felt. On one-and-a-half listens, this sounds more ragged and unpolished, but the songwriting seems sturdier.

Sounded good to me when we listened to it in the car the other day. As my daughter said, the keyword seems to be "interstate." Can't go wrong with highway imagery.

xxxpost It's not like therapy, which he may have had, a 12-step program or something, can't provice a connection to effective music: Isbell's "It Gets Easier"("but never easier") is the only song I've ever heard about long-term sobriety, despite the millions of people who deal with it everyday. Lennon's "Mother" was supposedly the result of his experience with Arthur Janov's Scream Therapy (likewise, according to some writers, Tears For Fears' Songs From The Big Chair. Katie Crutchfield seems like she might have gotten some insights that way on St. Cloud---I can't quite follow some of it despite having a print-out lyrics and her track-by=track breakdown for Pitchfork, but she's got some amazing turns of phrase and the overall effect is excellent (even better with the 2021 edition's relevant bonus covers).

"It gets easier, but never *easy*"! Fucking point of the whole thing, sorry.

Mary Gauthier and other country lifers have had this long-term songwriting workshop with Afghanistan-Iraq Wars veterans: I saw a concert documentary in which the vets straight-up said the process had proved crucial to any peace of mind.

But all these people care enough about writing well, which---yeah, xxpost "thin" is a good way to put the way American Heartbreak stretches at such length, seeking sympathy (successfully; no doubt many of his fans, especially the younger ones, are saying, "Yeah, I been there." Me too but jeez)

Confession is good for the soul, let's hope.

first time listening to zach bryan with the new album and i'm impressed. songs like "east side of sorrow" are closer to manchester orchestra than the stuff i hear on country radio so the emo stuff checks out

A Hot 100, country and rock first: “I Remember Everything” concurrently opens at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs charts (as well as Hot Rock Songs), which use the same methodology as the Hot 100. It’s the first song to top the Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs (dating to 2009, when the lattermost list began).

That’s the Zach Bryan & Kacey Musgraves song

No discussion on the excellent Ashley McBryde album? It makes up for last year's blah concept album even if the rawk guitars cause the strong tunes to shudder slight, as if confronted by halitosis.

I should give it a listen. This positive review on the saving country music website is a bit annoying, but he is a fan of Mcbryde

https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/album-review-ashley-mcbrydes-the-devil-i-know/

and I see xgau just awarded an A.

xp they always are

Not going to defend this dude or everything here but I also have to admit I kind of agree with a lot of it? Morris's "exit" seems like a bit of a marketing play, and the songs are still awfully country to my ears.

https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/on-the-maren-morris-exit-from-country-music/

Every time he comes up on here, I can't believe it's not in the worst music writing ever thread.

Both of the Morris songs are fantastic: Her sharpest writing and best vocals on record to date.

Lol @ the savingcountrymusic writer trying to do some high-minded writerly thing about how MM has "personal issues" that she's projecting onto a perfectly healthy country music industry, when his comments section is just 100 people calling her ugly.

Setting SCM aside -- I am no fan of his or his writing but do check it ~1x a month to see if I've missed anything important and appreciate the light he shines on under-covered artists...

"The Tree" is a major retread. Sounds identical to many of her other songs, the allusion is heavy-handed, and the multi-tracked vocals are unnecessary for a singer of her caliber. Agree the vocals are good -- she's an extraordinarily talented vocalist. Best to date? I don't hear it.

"Get the Hell Out of Here" is much better and a promising direction for her. The song itself reminds me a lot of Kasey Musgraves (in a good way), and I'm excited to see what Antonoff and her do together -- the strings and arrangement are really lovely and a more organic sound than I have heard from her. I'm intrigued to hear what the "jam band" and "prog" moments sound like.

The bigger issue I have is how this is being rolled out. She says in the LA Times interview, "I think I needed to purposely focus on just making good music and not so much on how we’ll market it," yet that seems to be the focus of the interview! If she wants to pivot to pop, that's fine -- make great music and let it speak for itself. I don't remember Taylor's Red-era interview with the LA Times announcing she was "walking away" from country.

Speaking of under-covered artists promoted by SCM, this new Margo Cilker record is superb.

Boy, I shouldn't have read a few of those SCM comments before lunch.

Solid profile: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/margo-cilker-new-album-interview-1234820795/

Can't read it (paywall) but really like Bernstein's writing, and he has never steered me wrong.

lol another Margo, another M.

From that profile detailing Margo Cilker history:

She traveled back and forth from northern Spain for a period of several years, at one point forming a Lucinda Williams tribute band called Drunken Angels in the Basque country city of Bilbao.

Really enjoying the Margo Cilker album too.

Anyone heard the new Lillie Mae? I liked her first two albums a lot.

Me too. Margo Cilker is the best musician name I've heard lately, will check her out---not that I'm prejudiced against names like Casadee Pope, or even the self-named Honey Harper,
who is now more than ever a dyad, as ATO Records heralds:

with Honey Harper co-founder and keyboardist Alana Pagnutti taking on a far greater role in the songwriting process alongside frontman William Fussell, adding a palpable new depth to their lyrical output.

The 12 song collection (Honey Harper and The Infinite Sky) also marks their first time recording with their stacked band, The Infinite Sky, featuring their longtime bassist and contributing writer Mick Mayer, pianist John Carroll Kirby (Solange, Steve Lacy), Spoon keyboardist Alex Fischel, guitarist Jackson MacIntosh (Drugdealer, Jessica Pratt), pedal-steel player Connor Gallaher (Black Lips, Calexico), and TOPS drummer Riley Fleck. The album was mixed at Wowcat Studios in Los Angeles by Joel Ford (yes/and, Ford & Lopatin).

How is the Buddy and Julie Miller record?

Oh wow, you're remynding me of my old CD store regular who heard Julie as the late 20th Century Emily Dickinson---

first time listening to zach bryan with the new album and i'm impressed. songs like "east side of sorrow" are closer to manchester orchestra than the stuff i hear on country radio so the emo stuff checks out

Maybe she *is* the latter-day Emily Dickinson! Now's the time to listen more than I ever have, though that isn't saying much in itself.