Anything But Country

Hey Josh,

While you go through your punk phase, I’m on my way through my country phase. Guess I’ll have to get some cowboy boots and a hat, huh?

For most of my life, I’ve been the type to respond “pretty much anything but pop and country” whenever someone asked me what sort of music I enjoyed. I held a deep-seated grudge against the genre for some reason. All I saw from the outside was inauthenticity. It was all just fake dudes dressing the part singing about guns, drinking, and cowboys. To my younger self, country music was, to be frank, uninspired drivel.

However, through a series of different musicians, I slid down a slippery slope and landed myself right into the middle of the genre and couldn’t help but acknowledge that I had a newfound love for country. Here’s the story about how a little punk kid from a small midwestern town came to fall in love with country music.

Growing up, country hits from the late 90s into the early 00s were all I ever heard. My dad loved the stuff, and I did too. It was fun to listen to in the car or while hanging out outside. I listened to so much country that I still have most of the hits from that era etched into my brain for better or worse. Over time my love turned more into resentment as I became more enamored with music I thought was more authentic like hip-hop and pop-punk. Country, so I thought, didn’t have anything left to offer me, so I got on my proverbial horse and rode away.

During college, with the help of the soaring vocal melodies of City & Colour, the authenticity in Frank Turner’s lyricism, and the gritty down-to-earth nature of Chuck Ragan’s musical style, I found myself enchanted with music that was a hard shift from the “screamo,” metalcore, and pop punk to which I was accustomed. As Frank Turner sings in his song Nashville Tennessee, there was a “punk rock sense of honesty” to their lyrical themes but with a more folk-country sound.

Through Chuck Ragan, I discovered other bands/artists that infused punk rock with americana sensibilities like The Gaslight Anthem, Dave Hause, and Tim Berry. At this point, my conversion to the world of country was inevitable as these artists showed me that there was something for punks in country music. These artists led me to what would be the first artist who could probably actually be considered country thus far: The White Buffalo.

The first time I saw him live in Chicago, he opened for Chuck Ragan. His performance, at once, struck me as powerful and raw; it expressed something I had never thought, at the time, that country could express - an outlaw, almost punk rock attitude through storytelling. More specifically, the song “Oh Darlin’ What Have I Done” lodged itself into my mind with the way it conveyed regret and pain through a fictional character’s eyes. His music forced me to reckon with the fact that my perception of country music thus far as being all just guns, beer, and trucks was incorrect.

The fictional storytelling in The White Buffalo’s music was something that I had rarely experienced in music up until that point. As I delved deeper into country music, I realized there was actually a deep tradition of telling stories in folk and country music dating all the way back to the beginning. This was a far cry from the more intimate, personal lyrical themes of the punk, metal, and hip-hop to which I had been listening. This isn’t to say storytelling wasn’t employed in those genres, but the way it was employed to construct fictional stories in the country music I was discovering to elicit specific emotional interaction caught my ears.

Throughout the next year, I yearned for more of the same sort of storytelling. Off and on I tried a lot of different artists, but nothing ever really stuck with me the same way The White Buffalo’s music had. Yet, in the year 2015, an album called “Something More Than Free” by Jason Isbell was gaining popularity. I decided to take a listen to the song “Something More Than Free” from that record and the simplicity yet profundity of the lyrical themes whisked me away once again. As with The White Buffalo, I found myself getting lost in Jason Isbell’s ability to construct narratives around fictional people’s lives that caused me to think about my own life. It was the first time I felt a country record speak to the angsty, existentialist in me. The questions I had at the time about work, finding purpose in the world, and dealing with my vices were all themes dealt with on the record. Even if my experiences weren’t exactly in line with those being written about on the record, it was still the first time I truly felt like country spoke to me.

At this point, I was listening to quite a bit of country artists that I discovered through Jason Isbell like Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers and had to admit that I was finally a fan of country music. I often used caveats though like “It’s more country-western or americana than country” when telling people about it because popular country still held that “guns, beer, and trucks” stigma in my mind that I didn’t want to be associated with. The emotional, personal, and storytelling roots in the country music I found were more important to me.

But, you can’t hang out on the slippery slope forever, so ya-da-ya-da-ya-da and now I’ve listened to new and old “pop country” stars like Luke Combs, Zac Brown Band, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, Midland, and much more. I still have reservations about a lot of country music that’s on the radio, but I’ve found something redeeming in a genre that I once held an unnecessary grudge against. And I’ve found a lot of my absolute favorite songs and artists (Johnny Cash) to this day because of it.

So there you have it. I guess I have to admit that I’m a country music fan.

Ever the best,

Phil

Album Recommendations:

Bring Me Your Love by City and Colour (What Makes a Man?, Death of Me, The Girl)

Little Hell by City and Colour (We Found Each Other In The Dark, Grand Optimist, Northern Wind)

Every Album by Frank Turner (Love Ire & Song, Long Live The Queen, Try This At Home, I Still Believe, I Am Disappeared, Losing Days, Polaroid Picture, Get Better)

Prepare for Black and Blue by The White Buffalo (Oh’ Darlin’ What Have I Done)

Shadows, Greys & Evil Ways (The Whistler, This Year, Don’t You Want It)

Love and the Death of Damnation (Dark Days, Home Is In Your Arms, Modern Times)

Something More Than Free by Jason Isbell (If It Takes A Lifetime, 24 Frames, Something More Than Free)

The Nashville Sound by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit (If We Were Vampires, Cumberland Gap, Last of My Kind)

High Top Mountain by Sturgill Simpson (Life Ain’t Fair and the World Is Mean, You Can Have The Crown)

A Sailor’s Guide to Earth by Sturgill Simpson (Breakers Roar, Brace For Impact, Call To Arms)

You Get What You Give by Zac Brown Band (I Play The Road, Colder Weather, Let It Go)

This One’s For You by Luke Combs (When It Rains It Pours, Beautiful Crazy, She Got The Best of Me)