The conversations I saw online this year about country music generally revolved around either white male Southern small-town lost-cause grudge-keeping (Jason Aldean, Oliver Anthony, and Maren Morris’s backlash to the same) or alternate viral routes to popularity (Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Oliver Anthony again, Bailey Zimmerman and Jelly Roll maybe, and I suppose Warren Zeiders and now a band called Red Clay Strays though I’ve yet to see anybody mention them.)
And okay, maybe Morgan Wallen having both the biggest single and biggest album of the year in any genre, according to Billboard. And mainstream country music sounding more legitimately “country” than it had in years, especially through that era of bro-doldrums, according to the neo-neo-traditionalists (or just reactionaries) at Saving Country Music. And Luke Combs crossing pop with a Tracy Chapman cover. Which song I usually stayed tuned to when it came on in my car, but none of which otherwise had much to do with my own 2023 listening.
Somebody reading over the list below might be more inclined to believe that the year’s biggest trends, occasionally intersecting ones, were (1) songs with a good beat and you could dance to them that I have no idea whether anybody actually ever did since I have two left boots and don’t frequent honky tonks much and (2) young women following the confessional footsteps of Time magazine’s Person of the Year Taylor Swift like podunk garage bands trying to be the next Rolling Stones in 1966. More likely that’s just my own personal taste. But on the other hand these songs did happen, so who can really say?
Then again, as pop-oriented as many if not most of my choices lean, it’s relevant that none of them actually dominated the charts. One possible reason: My back-of-the-matchbook calculations estimate my list is 62.5% women (25 singles out of 40) and 20% people of color (8 out of 40.) The latter of which still seems pretty low to me, but both of which most likely greatly exceed ratios country radio would permit.
That said, since Nashville Scene doesn’t poll like they used to, and since I set a precedent in my 2022 Best Country Singles post, my top 10 country albums this year would more or less shake out as: Megan Moroney, Bloody Jug Band, Tamara Stewart, Li’l Andy, Tyler Dial, Lauren Alaina EP, Jason Eady, Nude Party, Tanner Addel, Chickasaw Mudd Puppies. Which I realize is a rather odd and open-ended list, and less commercially inclined than my norm. (Honorable mentions: Jelly Roll, Kelsea Ballerini EP, Ashley McBryde, Mike Jacoby Electric Trio, Fanny Lumsden, Peter One, Hot Spring Water, Leah Marie Mason EP.)
But then again you’re not some old fogey who cares about albums, now are you? Heck no! Here are the country singles you came here for:
1. Fanny Lumsden “Millionaire“: I still don’t have a great idea of what passes for country music in Australia, but both this song and another a few rungs down by 36-year-old New South Wales native Lumsden suggest the genre’s granted a wider perameter there than here — to include hard-jangling summery ’80s post-Paisley Underground modern-rock pop, at very least. Can’t recall much country sounding like that even back then — even early Rosanne Cash or Carlene Carter never got MTV play the way, say, the Bangles did, and “Millionaire” actually seems closer to that band. It’s easily one of sunniest and most optimistic records I heard in 2023, certainly from an economic standpoint. Lumsden says she got her first job when she was 15, working on weekends, and “we didn’t make much but even ten bucks would make you feel rich.” Actually being a millionaire was never her life goal, see. I wonder how teenage employment down under compares to the US, where it peaked my high school senior year 1978 (I had busboy, dishwasher, Fotomat, golf caddie and newspaper delivery gigs myself), then fell gradually over the next few decades, only to finally recover slowly after bottoming out with the Great Recession of 2008. Three years after her first job came Lumsden’s first car, a lime green Daewoo Cielo the lyrics say even though in the video she apparently drives a Toyota Seleka. (I’m no expert, but I can read.) I guess part of what makes this “country” is that she’s singing about being “kids out in the sticks,” the sticks in the video being “the land of the Wiradjuri people,” who she thanks in the credits, paying “our respects to elders past, present and emerging.” It’s unclear if anybody in the video (or Lumsden herself) personally qualifies as indigenous, and I’m not sure if that matters; in a year when 60 percent of Australians voted against giving Aboriginal people a constitutionally mandated advisory voice in Parliament, I suspect it might. But even that doesn’t cut into the uplift I get from this music, set in a country where the west remains wild.
2. Devon Cole “Hey Cowboy“: Canada also defines “country” wider, I’ve long suspected. Here Alberta pop-rock singer-songwriter Cole, 24 years old with a psych degree from Kingston, Ontario, compares her boots to those of a dude she meets in a cowboy bar, taking him home then riding away into the sunset after he serves his purpose — which, judging from the lyrics and sound effects, involves at very least some light bondage and a cracking whip. First song I’ve ever heard mention Burt’s Bees. And the video honors alternate lifestyles. YouTuber alexaderford5371: “as a bisexual man, this video had me gasping for air, please dont assault me like this again.” Youtuber skydivertanner: “I had a performance idea for my fiance who does drag. When I came youtube to see if there was a video, it did not disappoint!!!! Now I feel he HAS to perform this song in drag.” Your move, American country.
3 -4. Megan Moroney ”I’m Not Pretty” and “Lucky“: “I’m Not Pretty,” where the Savannah, Georgia 26-year-old’s ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend scrolls through the Savannah, Georgia 26-year-old’s “Insta-graham,” might be the closest any song on this list came to being a legit Billboard hit — and at #38 Hot Country, #30 Country Airplay, it still wasn’t all that close. Said girlfriend keeps reassuring herself that Moroney’s not pretty, that (in a reference to a 2021 should’ve-been-hit by Priscilla Block) Moroney’s one of those girls who peaked in high school (with an “emo cowgirl” sticker on her locker door judging from the video!), that she (again according to the video) can’t sing and only writes about ex-boyfriends and uses too much makeup and could use a stylist. One way to deflect criticism, I guess — especially criticism your major influence Taylor Swift had to deflect first — is to head it off at the pass. So Moroney (whose name gets misspelled on purpose once in the video) blesses her rival’s heart. It’s somehow sad but resilient; I wish the video didn’t necessitate blondes beating brunettes in a baking contest, but I’ll let that slide. The singer accuses her nemesis of “overanalyzin’ like the queen of the Mean Girls Committee”; in “Lucky,” one of the year’s sprightliest straight-up sawdust-dancefloor boot-scoots, she tells the ex who’s about to get lucky with her (because she’s drinking, probably spicy margaritas judging from the other video) to “come over and don’t overthink it,” though I may be overanalyzing/overthinking to connect the two. (My theory: Megan herself does both.) “Lucky,” like Olivia Rodrigo’s “Bad Idea, Right?,” is about hooking back up with somebody who you broke up with. For some reason its opening melody reminds me of Dion’s “The Wanderer,” and its “tell me whatcha gonna do” Greek chorus of Alice Cooper’s “Teenage Lament ’74.” Either way, Meg’s “only ambition is to make a bad decision,” clearly a proud and popular choice with young county women these days.
5. Shy Carter & Frank Ray “Jesus at the Taco Truck“: This could easily have come off condescending and corny. Doesn’t hurt that it’s sung by two people of color — one a 39-year-old whose dad is Black, who grew up in Memphis on Three 6 Mafia, and whose credits include records with Chingy, Meghan Trainor, Faith Hill and Gloria Trevi; the other a Freddie Fender-and-ranchera-inspired 36-year-old ex-cop from New Mexico whose birth name is Francisco Gomez and who’s landed two previous songs on country radio. But what helps more is that it hits so many bases without pulling punches, from just 20 seconds in: “I asked him how it’s been in Tennessee, he said some people here want to crucify me.” “The only way he could get in was to walk across the Rio Grande, I saw all the scars on his feet and his hands.” (Stigmata!) “I know I’m gettin’ into Heaven, but it was hella hard gettin’ into Texas.” No doubt — what with the governor defying feds by slicing up refugees with sunken razor wire across state-trooper-patrolled border waters, not to mention the criminal on the verge of returning to the presidency, in his best Hitler imitation, pledging to round up into gigantic concentration camps those dark-skinned people he calls vermin poisoning the blood of America. A mainstream county song so blatantly pro-immigrant in 2023 is a miracle in its own right, even if the melody didn’t reel you in.
6. Caitlin Cannon “Amarillo and Little Rock“: Pretty much a straight line due east, just under 600 miles in an eight and half hour drive. Cannon, who’s been tearing up the Americana circuit she’s too lively a singer and tunesmith for this decade both solo and with her duo Side Pony (one album each), breaks down (figuratively) and fails to abide by a traffic stop (literally — well, her protagonist anyway) somewhere between. Though probably not in Oklahoma City, which is near the halfway point. Where she’s pulled over, seems like, is the middle of nowhere. Whatever speed she’s been going wasn’t fast enough to catch up, just like every other Middle American balancing hay by the roll or bale with covert cash crops. The trooper trying to meet his ticket quota checks her driver’s license and asks why she’s so far from home (where she wasn’t long enough to call it that) or if she’s sober (“I really don’t knowww, sir.”) Heck, only reason she stayed in the South in the first place was the low property tax. Okay, and maybe the pills.
7. Mackenzie Carpenter “Huntin’ Season“: A marriage song! About occasional time away not being a bad thing! Because absence makes hearts grow flounders, I mean fonder! Basically, Carpenter (a Georgia 24-year-old whose late-year country retooling of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” didn’t quite cut it) looks forward to Hubbie going hunting so she “can shop online, drink all the wine, binge a whole season of The Real Housewives,” not to mention “stay up all night talkin’ bout our feelin’s” and leave the toilet seat up. (Wait, I thought guys did that?) Excellent “deer” puns and drunken slurring of the title. And “doncha come back without a 12! Point! Buck!” makes for a super fun yellalong.
8. Breland “Cowboy Don’t“: New wave 1979 rockabilly, á la Moon Martin or Dave Edmunds — except as a country dance song in 2023, sung by a Black man wearing nerdy glasses who says he enjoys doing stuff cowboys don’t. For instance his boots are made not for walkin’, but for knock-knock-knockin’, and “the back road’ll get you where you’re goin’ by the end of the night, but thе highway’ll save a couple of minutes wе can spend on the side.” Anti-rural country! The video also seems to identify dominoes, DJing, basketball, twerking, eating corn on the cob and soaking in wading pools as activities cowboys avoid. That other things cowboys won’t are sexual is, at least, implied.
9. Robyn Ottolini “Sad To Work“: Monday morning and she’s still mourning. Got dumped over the weekend though she “would’ve made a good wife,” but can’t use that as an excuse to stay home from the “shitty ass restaurant” (or bar, it looks like, in the video.) “Gotta be nice to people knowin’ you’re with her for eight straight houuuuurs, smilin’ and noddin’ and sayin’ yessir.” So if the fries are running a tad late be polite to your waitress, advises Ottolini, another twentysomething (28) from Canada (Uxbridge, Ontario), and one of the more promising post-Swifties of recent years. File this selection’s service-industry drudgery alongside “9 to 5,” “She Works Hard for the Money,” “Mr. Sellack” by the Roches — only from a more heart-achey angle.
10 – 12. Cecily Wilborn “Pickup Truck” and “Southern Man“; O.C. Soul “I’m Packing My Clothes“: All Southern Soul is country, in a sense — no other genre, for instance, devotes so much time to songs about trail-riding. (Well okay maybe zydeco, but trail rides are where the two styles meet.) But some Southern soul is more country than others. Cecily Wilborn of population-3000 Marianna, Arkansas makes my list primarily by virtue of subject matter: How can a song about a pickup truck, especially how men with pickup trucks exude an irresistible attractiveness to women, be anything but country? Even if it opens with spoken monologue in the style of ’60s/’70s/’80s soul diva Barbara Mason, and Wilborn says she and her new pickup man dance to her favorite song “Let’s Get It On.” “Southern Man” (not the one by Neil Young) is along the same lines: His allure comes from how he’s not afraid of hard work, loves his mama and attends church, treats his stepkids like they’ve been his from the start, leaves his workboots by the door and loves to dance, not to mention “by the way he wears his pants” and how “he gotta smooth walk, he kinda grrrrrowl when he talk.” The sultry groove, eventually, seems to take in the Staple Singers’ “Let’s Do It Again.” OC Soul is no grrrrrowler himself; he’s way too relaxed for that, tender even when he’s on the way out the door with his luggage packed because he “can’t do it no more.” But “I’m Packing My Clothes” sounds country to me the way, say, Bobby Bland’s “Members Only” (later covered by boondock booster Billy Joe Royal with happiest girl in the whole U.S.A. Donna Fargo) or James Brown’s “How Do You Stop” sound country. It would have fit right in on Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country, which the German label Trikont compiled back in 2004. Its unashamedly amateurish eight-minute (including intro and outro) video, though, is just bizarre, especially since at the end you realize that the guy packing his hobo backpack with clothes and alcohol while his wife looks on and at one point blindfolds him (??) is not OC Soul at all.
13. Jiraya Uai & MC Toy “Joga a Bunda“: Rednex-style hoedown parts in a Brazilian favela/baile-funk carioca context, with “Hwa! hwa! hwa!” vocal percussion, laughs incorporated into the mix, and cowboy-hatted wolves in the video. That said, I’ll turn this over to Frank Kogan, writing about Uai’s “Hoje Tem Rodeio, Baile De Favela” with MC Tarapi, in his November blog post “The Ministry of Funny Beats“: “Google Translate says ‘Today there’s a rodeo, a favela dance,’ and perhaps the cowboy hats are meant to signal sertanejo, a rural-identified genre I have no sense of. The music on this seems pretty radical and experimental. What puts this in the funny category is its folkish-countryish tendency, the snaking gtr line and the two (!) harmonica parts (one sucking in and the other blowing out). And to call the guitar ‘folk’ or ‘country’ fails to communicate the psychological sense it has for me: it’s the sort of line I’d have sold my kidney to write in 1979 when I was listening hard to Miles Davis’s On The Corner and even more to ‘Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose’–era James Brown and trying to twist those into something stranger and more destabilizing, aspiring to create a kind of no wave that wouldn’t necessarily be abrasion so much as the feeling when you suddenly go into a roller-coaster drop.”
14 – 15. Elvie Shane “Forgotten Man“; Elvie Shane feat. Jenna McLelland “Jonesin’“: Nobody in country rocked harder than Elvie Shane this year, starting with his six-minute version of “Sympathy for the Devil” on the Rolling Stones tribute compilation Stoned Cold Country back in March. The standalone singles he’s snuck onto streaming services since pick up where Eric Church left off a few years back, in terms of pumping up volume with a chip on the shoulder. “Forgotten Man” is convincing working-class resentment: Shane inherits the blue on his collar and red on his neck from his dad, who wore his workshirt’s name patch like a badge of honor; he can’t keep up with gasoline inflation or banks pissing away his I.R.A. or gentrification “sending rent through the roof.” He hints he’s in the rust belt, and when he says of his “little white house with a flag in the front” that “way that it is, is the way that it was,” you’re not sure whether he’s stubbornly stuck in another century or just can’t afford renovations. “Sent me off to school, tried to turn me to a scholar” (but he clearly resisted) might refer to the singer’s actual stint at Western Kentucky University, from which he dropped out. Needless to say, in the Trump age, this kind of populist indignation carries more than a hint of threat, even more than during Church’s or Montgomery Gentry’s heyday. So it’s worth noting that in the video, not everybody is white or male, and at least one teacher and one nurse balance out all the assembly liners and firefighters and farmers. Lots of farmers. John Mellencamp would approve. Which is to say, this song is not “Try That in a Small Town,” nor even “Rich Men North of Richmond.” It’s smarter, not as bigoted. Also: fatter drum fills and bigger guitar bwaaaangs than you’d expect in this genre. “Jonesin,” not as overtly inebriant-oriented as Jamey Johnson’s 2006 “Keepin’ Up With the Jonesin'” but still about how Shane can’t get no satisfaction ’cause he’s addicted to the edge and a hell too hot and heaven too high, propelled by AOR electropercussion and climaxing with swirling guitar effects, might be even louder.
16. Renee Blair “SPF Me“: Give or take a grossout redneck comedian or two who nobody’d ever want to go to bed with anyway, this is as explicit as country music gets. A whole lot of epidermis gets massaged, in other words, even if it’s to apply suntan oil, and I doubt the title’s “F Me” ending is accidental. “Lather me up with that Australian Gold…might get a little bit messy”: Good, since country too often avoids messes. My only complaint is the gratuitous wolf-whistle after Blair asks her paramour to untie the strings behind her (itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot?) bikinki. Trivia note: Turns out Blair, a Dixie Chicks- and Nelly-inspired St. Louisian who co-wrote Hardy and Lainey Wilson’s “Wait in the Truck” and whose debut album Hillbetty is due in 2024, shares her name with a character played by Rosemary DeWitt in the 2011 romcom A Little Bit of Heaven!
17. Luke Combs “Joe“: Forgoing alcohol has been a go-to aging male country theme for decades now — off the top of my head, I’m pretty sure Ronnie Milsap, T. Graham Brown, Gene Watson, Montgomery Gentry, Jamey Johnson and Tim McGraw have all produced plaints along those lines, and heck maybe you could trace them all back to the hangovers hurting more than they used to and corn bread and ice tea taking the place of pills and 90 proof in Hank Williams Jr.’s “All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down” way back in 1981. Or even further, maybe. I appreciate the struggle and sentiment, and as somebody who has hugely reduced his own consumption in recent years, I even relate to it to a certain extent. But it’s also kinda predictable, and I have to admit that my long-standing grudge against cults like AA and even Smart Recovery leaves “What do you want, a medal?” in my arsenal of reactions. But not to this song, easily my favorite on a big album by a big guy who seems like a good guy to boot. (Released prior to Gettin’ Old, “Joe” actually reached #22 on Billboard‘s streaming-dependent Hot Country Songs chart, but didn’t touch the airplay tally.) Joe who did county time for a fuckup or two gets hired down at the Texaco, never shows up late or drunk, and his pals come by and ask how it’s going and he tells them “sleepin’ pretty good, stayin’ dry.” Mainly, Luke Combs’ humility is so believable you just wanna hug the big lug.
18 -19. Hot Country Knights feat. Darla McFarland (aka Lainey Wilson) “Harassment“; Lauren Alaina feat. Lainey Wilson “Thicc As Thieves“: Funny how Lainey Wilson showed up as a guest on two different country songs this year about voluptuous gluteal curves, both the supposedly satirical one and the (comparatively) serious one. Also they both reference “Baby Got Back,” of course. (And maybe both contradict what I just said two minutes ago about country not getting explicit, but never mind.) Fronted by Dierks Bentley under the pseudonym Douglas “Doug” Douglason with an alleged Terotej “Terry” Dvoraczekynski on fiddle, Hot Country Knights are billed as a ’90s country parody even though three years past their debut The K is Silent I still can’t pinpoint what ’90s country they’re supposed to be poking fun at. “Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans On” by Mel McDaniel came out in 1984, if you’re keeping score. “Harassment” (as in “…everything to me”) has all the jokes you’d expect about one-crack minds and anacondas and “Fat Bottom Girls” and pirates digging up booty on the beach, plus at least one fake blooper about anal sex and a #metoo joke at the end, but it makes me laugh anyway, in part because it works better musically than any of Bentley’s non-spoofs the past few years, in turn in part because he sounds like he’s having a blast. In the video he even bares his belly under a cutoff Florida T-shirt. “Thicc as Thieves” is just two ladies complementing each other’s brickhouse figures (“Busting out the tin like some Pillsbury biscuits, how we got in ‘em that’s some tae bo fitness,” etc.), and ends referencing Luke Bryan’s bro-country mainstay “Country Girl (Shake it for Me).” Let’s just say I’m an admirer of this particular aesthetic.
20. Brennen Leigh “Running Out of Hope, Arkansas“: Could easily have paired this with “Amarillo and Little Rock” (both about Arkansas and running out of hope) or even “Sad to Work” (both about crummy jobs — Leigh rings up diesel, cigarettes or Mountain Dew at a service station.) But where Caitlin Cannon’s always been on run, Leigh’s “never been past Little Rock and I’m damn near 33,” and where Robyn Ottolini’s conception of country starts around Taylor Swift, Leigh sounds as traditional as anybody listed here. This is quite the front-porch lower Appalachian foot-stomper. The main drag’s all boarded up, her friends are all married or in jail, and she’s finally fleeing the holler, with her landline disconnected and mail forwarded nowhere.
21. Priscilla Block “Fake Names“: Let’s see here: Eve as played by Joanne Woodward in 1957 had three personalities or at least “faces”; Sybil in Flora Rhetta Schrieber’s 1973 book had 16 that later turned out to be fake; SheDaisy in 1999’s almost-top-10-country “Lucky 4 You (Tonight I’m Just Me)” had at least 32 (the one assigned that number “wants to do things to you that’ll make you blush”). Priscilla Block, the 28-year-old from Raleigh who’s had a couple minor country hits this decade (this sadly not being one of them) calls hers “alter ego”s and treats them like get-out-jail-free-cards. Alphabetical roll call: blacked-out Britney who pukes on your expensive boots (“rowdy ostrich” runs $645 on the Lucchese site and that’s not even near the highest-priced); Elvira who goes home with the doorman; bat-shit crazy Hurricane Hayley from Alabama; Navy pilot Mary Jane; Rhoda who winds up in North Dakota; brain surgeon Tawanda. So….six. At least. All of whom appear to pop Pedialyte bottles for morning hangovers, and wish they could escape their small town (which may or may not be Harper Valley) where the PTA (which may or may not include book-ban bigots Moms For Liberty) should calm down. Let’s hope the threesome scandal in Florida expedites that outcome.
22. Fanny Lumsden “When I Die“: More twanging, clanging, ringing hard pop-rock — guitars at points could pass for the new wave pub-powerpop of Bram Tchaikovsky or the Records (though I suppose it’s more likely they’re shooting for Tom Petty’s early Heartbreakers), who in turn probably aimed for the Byrds. About how deaths should be toasted wake-style, not mourned: “We’re gonna shoot my ashes into the sky…so plee-ee-ee-ee-ee-eeze don’t cry, cause I lived a good life,” clang clang. In the video — filmed, this time, “on Ngarigo land,” which is to say Australia’s southeastern corner, right across the Bass Strait from Tasmania — Lumsden’s surrounded by old guys happy just to be there; judging from YouTube comments, one is her dad.
23. Sunny Sweeney & Jamie Lin Wilson “Red Dirt Girl“: I probably don’t listen to Emmylou Harris as much as I should, so excuse me for being oblivious to this song until this version even though Harris recorded it way back in 2000. Also excuse me for being confused because “red dirt music” is what cigar aficionados call the dusty, dusky, windswept, parched and underproduced regional Americana honky-tonk style of Texas and Oklahoma, and this song is about a girl and her best friend Lillian from a town called Meridian, which the lyrics suggest is in Alabama but Wikipedia tells me is “the eighth most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi“. Maybe Emmylou meant Meridianville, instead? Heartbreaker of a tale either way, at least as Texans Sweeney and Wilson tell it — especially when Lillian’s brother doesn’t come back from Viet Nam and she herself perishes at 27 with five kids, from the whiskey or the pills or “the dream she was trying to kill.” Or just as likely, from all three.
24. Abby Anderson “Heart on Fire in Mexico“: Most somber song on this list, partly because maybe the only one in a minor key. Starts with a “dark-haired Juarez beauty” tending bar, then knocked up from a one-night stand with a soldier she never sees again. She winds up abandoning her kid, who grows up angry in foster homes. Or as YouTube viewer Evija3000 put it, “The story goes through generations and initially you might think the heart on fire belonged to the girl who got pregnant, but in the end it actually fits the daughter much more because the mom ended up just running away, but their daughter had to live with the consequences. Because of one reckless night a little girl had to grow up in the system and become stronger and smarter than both of her parents.” Anderson, who wrote it, has Instagrammed that the daughter is her own mom. In the tradition of the Supremes’ “Love Child,” the Roches’ “Runs in the Family,” Elvis’s “In The Ghetto.”
25. Brad Paisley feat. Volodymyr Zelenskyy “Same Here“: Hard not to have a soft spot for how Paisley still does his quixotic damnedest to keep the liberal dream alive in Nashville country music. First verse: Californians? They go to the corner bar and brainstorm the state of the world, just like us! Second verse: Mexicans? They tear up at weddings, just like us! Third verse: Ukranians? They love their families and flag and losing football team, just like us, even though it’s a different kind of football! Then he talks to President Zelenskyy on the phone — back in February, when most Republicans could still be reasonably assumed to want to help Ukraine out! Now though? Fat chance! At least not ones in Congress holding financial support hostage to extreme immigration restrictions. And to be honest, recent news reports of Ukraine yanking otherwise exempt men off the street and forcing them to enlist probably aren’t helping. Or the hypocrisy of funding bombs for the oppressors in one war and the oppressed in another. But hell, just two years ago, Toby Keith of all people took it for granted in “The Worst Country Song of All Time” that country fans would naturally despise Vladimir Putin. Those were the days.
26. Sara Petite “Bringin’ Down the Neighborhood“: From San Diego and on her seventh small-label studio album, she’d place higher with this celebration of wasted friends in low places if it didn’t lose so much momentum with the spoken sermon section aimed no doubt deservedly at dissemblers three-quarters of the way through, and to a lesser extent with her awkward “whoooo!” exclamations whenever she mention police sirens. Still, it’s a barrel-of-monkeys corker over a barrelhouse groove, and the part about how “we got a lot of magic mushrooms, pills and pot” (and Mama’s “hopin’ our asses don’t get caught”) really does flash me back to Singin’ Bear’s psilocybin in “Hoodoo Bash” on Michael Hurley and the Unholy Modal Rounders’ 1976 Have Moicy!, as unruly as disreputable backwoods parties get.
27 – 31. Lola Kirke “He Says Y’all“; MaRynn Taylor “Shakin in My Boots“; Catie Offerman feat. Hayes Carrl “Ask Me To Dance“; Shania Twain “Giddy Up!” ; Sophia Scott “No You Didn’t“: Dance songs! Or rather (after “Hey Cowboy” and “Lucky” and “Huntin’ Season” and “Cowboy Don’t” and “Thicc as Thieves” etc.) more dance songs! Though the only one that precisely spells out instructions in its video is the one where the London-born, New York-raised actress daughter of longtime Free/Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke falls for a fella with a hillbilly drawl because she likes her boots clean and boys dirty, and dances with stars of David on the seat of her pants and her friend Tim twinky in pink by her side. (“Step forward right, double clap, step back left, single clap, grapevine to the right…” — which apparently means crossing one leg behind — “…6, 7, 8, big step left, drag your right toe,” and so on.) MaRynn Taylor, for her part, spends her video getting gussied up, trying on lots of different outfits while hoping her date is “pickin’ up what my mind is two-steppin’ on.” Offerman’s “gettin’ bored and the night’s gettin old” and hopes she didn’t get dressed up for nothing, but somehow dueting with fellow Texan Hayes doesn’t make her boot-scoot too Americana for a YouTube commenter to rave that “it feels like ’90s country.” Shania, of course, is ’90s country, so she rents “a car with the ’90s on” while heading out west to Arizona from small-town Oh-Hi-Oh atop a modified Bo Diddley beat, which a multi-racial contingent in sundry laundromats, convenience stores and diners, including one woman in a wheelchair, slide left and right to in the video. Sophia Scott’s in denial after making bad decisions (see I told you they were popular) the night before; her number’s off an album called Barstool Confessions but she’s apparently not quite ready to offer any just yet.
32. Alana Springsteen “Twentysomething” : 23 to be exact, and says people her age don’t eat or sleep enough, leave clothes in the dryer but need air in their tires, and are lucky if they’ve got half a tank and fifty bucks in the bank. So, clearly another post-Swifty. Wonder if anybody’s pointed out to her that her lastnamesake Bruce Springsteen, who she’s not related to though she recently covered “I’m on Fire,” also rhymed growing up with throwing up (or some conjugation of those verbs) at her age. Near as I can tell, Adny Shernoff wasn’t quite 20 when he rhymed them in the Dictators’ “Master Race Rock.” (“It’s the dues you’ve got to pay for eating burgers every day,” he explained.) Still, what great company!
33- 35. Jordyn Shellheart “Tell Your Mother I’m Fine“; Brettyn Rose “Boys Night“; Taylor Edwards “Petty“ : Three more twentysomething women deal with breakups, and what gets said in the aftermath. Jorydyn Shellheart, who has written songs recorded by stars like Little Big Town and Cody Johnson, receives sweet texts checking up on her from her ex’s mom, who may not know the whole truth about her no-good son; it extends the lineage of Dr. Hook’s “Sylvia’s Mother” and OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson,” but the cracks in Shellheart’s voice are what put it over. Brettyn Rose worries not so much about what her ex told his friends, but how the rumors about what happened late one night spread from that point, in a cadence recalling a young Suzanne Vega; “don’t know why they gotta be so petty,” she frets. But Taylor Edwards opts to turn the tables and be the petty one instead; “it’s kinda working for me,” she grins, as she heads home with her ex’s buddy. Of the three, she’s the only one who sounds especially happy about her situation.
36. The Nude Party “Ride On“: What used to be called cowpunk, with some Stones r&b in its shamble. Old vaquero Alfredo riding bulls in the Mexican rodeo, grocery store greeter Juanita nearing 95 working 9 to 5, this North Carolina sextet playing rock’n’roll for a dollar to pay a two-dollar toll all won’t quit, though they might be better off if they did. A couple minutes in, the singer turns into Lou Reed. Got to #20 on Billboard‘s Adult Alternative chart (“sometimes they play us on the radio,” the lyrics humblebrag), and it’s not even the best song on the album. Which might not even be their best album. I’m way outside the Americana loop, but how are these guys not bigger there?
37. Zac Brown Band feat. Jamey Johnson and Marcus King “Stubborn Pride“: Southern rock with soul backup, seven minutes long. Opens teasing you into thinking you’re about to hear “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” Video naturally rendered in sepia. Jamey Johnson gutbusting that he was always 12 steps behind. Gypsy hearts tamed by womenfolk. Marcus King’s blues guitar solo telling the real story.
38 – 39. Kassi Ashton “Drive You Out Of My Mind“; Karley Scott Collins “Heavy Metal“: “In country music, the space in which women are allowed to feel sexy about themselves, for themselves, is very small,” central Missouri’s Ashton confided in statement later in 2023, when she covered “Genie in a Bottle” by Christina Aguilera. “I hope this widens it.” How often do you hear a country singer admit how narrow country is? But to my ears, Ashton’s been testing those limits with the rough huskiness of her singing alone for a couple years now, at least since “Heavyweight” in 2021. Nobody in the genre right now has more full-bodied pipes. So it’s interesting that Karley Scott Collins, a moonlighting Florida actress, might be giving Ashton a run for her money in a single similarly called “Heavy Metal” — not about that music although her dad brought her up on Guns N’ Roses and Alice In Chains, but about a wedding ring weighing a woman down.
40. Sabrina Estevez “Vintage“: A slow drag — the “vintage” San Antonio’s Estevez croons about dancing to in the kitchen is “old country songs, George Strait to Jones,” but the sound here is older. Maybe not as old as the mariachi her grandpa used to play, but still lost in the ’50s tonight, as Ronnie Milsap put it in a 1985 Five Satins update. Almost four decades later — farther from Milsap than his nostalgia was from “In the Still of the Night” — the stillness can still give you shivers. Given that San Antonio was once known for Mexican American female doo-wop groups (Roulettes, Uniques, Dreamliners), there’s every reason to believe Estevez is carrying on a local legacy.
Eliminated for Reasons of Space 
via facebook:
Edd Hurt
Elvie Shane, yeah.
The dirt in south Mississippi and Alabama is red, thus the title of the Sunny Sweeney-Jamie Wilson cover of the Emmylou song. If you’re southeast of Meridian, Miss., you’re in southwest Alabama!
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Looks like somebody put together a Spotify playlist of all the songs I write about here. (Thanks, Gary Chun, whoever you are!)
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