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There’s always been something twangy in Jewel’s music. The singer-songwriter’s voice has a yodel-like warble, and a banjo or steel guitar could fit right into her folkier hits like “You Were Meant for Me.” But selling tens of millions of records couldn’t help her achieve one of her longtime goals: getting played on country radio. Jewel was signed to Atlantic, a pop label that didn’t have the resources to promote songs to country stations, which tend to prioritize artists on Nashville-based labels. So when her contract was up, she moved to Valory Music Co., an imprint of Nashville’s Big Machine Records, and worked with John Rich of Big & Rich to produce Perfectly Clear, an album marketed as her country pivot. Not only did it go No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart, but its lead single, “Stronger Woman,” worked its way into radio rotation.
For years, established artists have listened to Dolly Parton, who sang in 1973 that Music Row was “where you have to go” if you want to make country music. Yet the city has always been wary of so-called carpetbaggers like Bret Michaels and Steven Tyler, who arrived in Nashville around the same time as Jewel, but whose contrived country songs failed to revive their lagging solo careers. As ‘90s powerhouse Clay Walker put it in 2015, “We have great singers, great musicians. There’s no reason we have to dilute it by letting people in the format that don’t have any business being in the format.” Though Walker didn’t name names, his specific mention of “outdated rock-and-rollers” made it pretty clear who he was talking about.
But not everyone interested in the genre sees a need to engage with its restrictive systems. Today, a new crop of outsiders are trying their hands at country without ever setting foot in Tennessee. By avoiding the industry entirely, they’re circumventing the usual gatekeepers and writing more progressive songs than the middle-of-the-road fare they would’ve found on Music Row. Beyoncé headlines the group with Cowboy Carter, a survey of Americana with one eye to the past and one to the future. Alongside her are pop musicians Lana Del Rey and Maggie Rogers, who are finding fresh inspiration in country sounds. At the same time, indie rockers Waxahatchee, Angel Olsen, and Big Thief are foregrounding the twangy influences that have long lurked in their music.
Unlike Michaels and Tyler, these artists aren’t turning to the genre to juice their own careers. They’re doing it for the same reason as Nashville’s greats: There’s something in the music they can’t find elsewhere. While shunning the system means giving up their chance at radio spins or a No. 1, they’re freeing themselves from the industry’s notions of what its music ought to be, laying the groundwork for a future where Nashville isn’t country’s only player.
The current non-Nashville boom has roots in 2016, when a handful of pop acts began incorporating the genre into their music. Lady Gaga channeled her love of country on Joanne, while Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé honored their southern roots with detours like “Drink You Away” and “Daddy Lessons.” These tradition-steeped songs became hits and fan favorites, proving that the pop-listening public had an appetite for country if it was packaged right.
Kacey Musgraves went further. Though she came up within the country system, she was far from an insider — as a woman with progressive politics that often bled into her music, Musgraves struggled in the conservative world of country radio, which rarely prioritizes female singers. But in 2018, she re-envisioned what country could be on Golden Hour, introducing synthesizers and other pop touches without conceding the banjos or twang that first established her career. Country continued to move into pop in 2019, when Lil Nas X turned a banjo loop into a massive pop-rap hit in “Old Town Road.” It hardly mattered that everyone in Nashville (besides Billie Ray Cyrus) shunned the song, because a bigger audience had already claimed it.
As the 2020s began, a group of indie-rock musicians began tapping into their latent country roots. Katie Crutchfield grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where she listened to Shania Twain, Lucinda Williams, and Gillian Welch. When she started performing, though, it was in punk-rock bands, and her solo career as Waxahatchee snaked from lo-fi folk to noisy rock before she finally returned to country music for 2020’s Saint Cloud. Newly sober, she found clarity in the unadorned sound — so she kept following it. (It also helped that she’d never lost her Alabama accent.) Crutchfield’s latest album, Tigers Blood, sees her settling in and stretching out in the genre.
Other artists made their way back too: Big Thief, Angel Olsen, and Wilco all released self-described country music after previously avoiding those roots in favor of more respected folk or rock. Unbound by Nashville gatekeepers, these artists could see country the way they wanted it to be. Big Thief accompanied hoedowns like “Spud Infinity” and “Red Moon” with glitchy electronic tracks like “Blurred View.” Olsen and Plains, the duo of Crutchfield and Jess Williamson, chased sounds that had long been out of fashion, like crisp ‘70s countrypolitan and plucky turn-of-the-century Americana. Wilco, on their double album Cruel Country, used country and all its baggage as a form to exorcize American history and politics. None of these projects sounded like pivots, but rather, natural progressions of their work.
So does Don’t Forget Me, the third album by Maggie Rogers. In the same Greenwich Village studio where Ian Fitchuk co-produced Musgraves’s folky return Deeper Well, he helped bring a rawer element out of Rogers’s songwriting, who stressed that the vibe of Don’t Forget Me is “vintage, but not overly Americana.” “My friends keep saying it sounds like the version of me that they know,” Rogers wrote to fans. As cheesy as the adage about “three chords and the truth” is, sometimes it’s just true.
As artists found space for country music outside the industry, some in Nashville were becoming skeptical of its racist, sexist tendencies. In 2019, the fiddler and singer Amanda Shires formed the Highwomen with Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby, and Brandi Carlile to sing from Black, queer, and feminist perspectives, with little concern for radio or charts. The folk musician and scholar Rhiannon Giddens was working toward a similar goal when she founded Our Native Daughters, a quartet of Black female folk singers and banjo players, the same year.
It was a stark contrast to the mainstream, where Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous was still topping charts even after he said a racial slur on video. Watching Wallen experience little consequence, Black country musicians and fans became more interested in building their own community — like the Black Opry, founded by Holly G in 2021. Generations of Black musicians before had struggled to find a place for themselves in the Nashville system, and now, their followers decided it was no longer a worthwhile goal. Beyoncé would later turn to some of those same artists — Giddens, Tanner Adell, Willie Jones, Robert Randolph — on Cowboy Carter.
The flow of country music coming from outside Nashville is only set to continue. Lana Del Rey is approaching her new country album, Lasso, less as a fan than as a student of the American songbook. She teased the project last year by covering Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man,” and later by performing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” by John Denver, a man who never lived in Nashville or fit too well into the scene. Del Rey said she recorded some music in Nashville, but also in Mississippi and Muscle Shoals, Alabama — all integral sites to the genre’s history. Maybe she’s a tourist, but at least she knows she’s chasing something that can’t just be found on Music Row.
Zach Bryan has been doing that for years now. In 2022, he made his major-label debut with the triple album American Heartbreak, which bridges country, folk, and rock — and has topped all three corresponding Billboard charts. Music Row had little to do with the album, which he recorded in New York and released on Warner Records’ main label. “At the risk of sounding pretentious; I don’t want a genre, I don’t want a scene, I don’t want a title, I just want to make music,” he wrote in the record’s liner notes.
Listeners gravitated toward something simple and old-fashioned in Bryan’s music: the cutting emotion of the lyrics and the organic arrangements of the songs. So they found more of it. Tyler Childers, a country classicist who has been releasing music out of Kentucky for years, reached a new peak in 2023 when his song “In Your Love” became an unlikely TikTok hit. By then, the Vermont singer-songwriter Noah Kahan had developed a massive following off his folky anthems of northeastern angst like “Stick Season.” Kahan has never claimed much influence from country music, and there’s a pop sensibility to his soaring choruses. But without Nashville drawing the lines, fans were queuing up his songs right after Bryan’s.
The successes of these artists are setting country up for one of its biggest years on record. But what does it mean when the genre’s best music is being made away from its capital? The castle isn’t quite crumbling, but the cracks are still there. With Nashville labels no longer releasing the coolest and most acclaimed new music, rising artists might start to wonder what value the city’s services have. When artists like Bryan and Beyoncé decry the industry as backward, their words reach thousands of budding country fans, who are already finding what they want outside the system. Now it’s on Nashville to regain their trust. The good news is that the solution is simple: Start listening everywhere else.
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Justin Curto , 2024-04-16 18:03:58
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