In the 1980s, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson came together to record as The Highwaymen, one of the most successful supergroups in country music history. Now, like the Pistol Annies before them, four of the genre’s most powerful women—Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires—grab the torch. Their name is more than a play on words: “\[The men\] were able to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other as equals,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music’s Brooke Reese. “This is a difficult time for women to do that because there are so few spaces for us on country radio, and in the industry in general, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we form a straight line? A shoulder-to-shoulder women’s country group?’” Their eponymous debut album puts female stories front and center—mothers, daughters, witches, lesbians, cowgirls, and more—in a celebration of American women who refuse to choose between success and family, power and love. “Making bank/Shaking hands/Driving 80/Trying to get home just to feed the baby,” they sing on lead single “Redesigning Women,” a toast to ambitious ladies “breaking every Jell-O mold.” But underneath those winking lyrics and warm, absorbing harmonies is a serious message aimed directly at Nashville’s old guard: *Hear us*. “I want to get in the door, and I want our band to get played on country radio,” Shires says. “And once we get in the door, I want to hold it open.” The songs here are daringly vulnerable (“Old Soul”), tough (“Don’t Call Me,\" “Loose Change”), and, at their core, unifying. The album standout “Crowded Table” calls for a more inclusive world: “If we want a garden/We’re gonna have to sow the seeds,” they sing in unison. “Plant a little happiness/Let the roots run deep.”
Yola’s sound conjures a moment in the late \'60s when country, R&B, gospel, pop, rock, and the lighter side of psychedelia mixed together so freely—and so seamlessly—one remembered they all came from the same distinctly American well. Produced by The Black Keys\' Dan Auerbach, *Walk Through Fire* is expectedly long on style: “Faraway Look” is Dusty Springfield refracted through Phil Spector; “Walk Through Fire” is a slow folk thump so studiously offhand that Auerbach keeps the count-off in the mix; “Lonely the Night” captures the pop-lite poise of Petula Clark, and “Love All Night (Work All Day)” the catharsis of Rod Stewart. Really, though, it’s a testament to Yola’s writing and voice—smoky and deep but never smothering—that the album manages to cohere as the sound of a single artist.
In the middle of writing her seventh album *Wildcard*, Miranda Lambert hit pause. “I took the first long stretch I’ve ever had off in my entire career since I was 17,” she tells Apple Music. “Finally you realize how much you need a breath.” During that break, the country superstar made some big life changes, surprising the world by announcing that she’d secretly gotten married and was moving part-time to New York City—a switch-up that she says revitalized her creative energy and breathed new life into her sound. “Oddly enough, on my seventh solo album, I feel like I approached it more like my first album than any other record I’ve made,” she says. In many ways, *Wildcard* feels like a new beginning. It’s full of frenetic, uptempo rock (“Locomotive”), propulsive power pop (“Mess With My Head\"), and clear-eyed confidence (“It All Comes Out in the Wash”). The newfound edge is partly a reflection of producer Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Zac Brown Band), with whom she works for the first time here after years with Frank Liddell. Lambert says it was time to mix it up: “Country is what I do, it’s who I am…but I love rock ’n’ roll.” Her country devotees will delight in “Way Too Pretty for Prison,” a deliciously clever breakup song in which Lambert and Maren Morris fantasize about killing an ex before ultimately deciding prison sounds unappealing (not enough boys, beauty parlors, or Chardonnay). And on “Pretty Bitchin’,” a similarly rowdy send-up, she rolls out a series of flexes—fine wine, a new guitar, a kitted-out Airstream—and makes no apologies about relishing her success in a world that is often unkind to women entertainers. “I use what I got/I don’t let it go to waste,” she sings with the remorseless air of someone who has endured their fair share of tabloid headlines. This song is about winning in spite of all that: \"I’m pretty from the back/Kinda pretty in the face/I hate to admit it/But it didn’t stop me, did it?”
“Members of the LGBT+ community that wouldn’t necessarily be at a country show. Mega-fans in Orville Peck masks. Couples in their 80s who are huge country fans. Drag queens. Five-year-olds!” Orville Peck is describing his average audience for Apple Music. “Maybe there are a million reasons for these people to be a room together,” he says. “But it’s lovely that I’m one of the reasons for them to be together.” It’s unsurprising that the fringe-masked, pseudonymous Toronto-based cowboy crooner’s debut album has attracted a broad church. *Pony* offers a very modern subversive spin on expertly informed country, tender torch songs of homoerotic desire and raw rock ’n’ roll decorated with his rich, sonorous voice. Peck may not want to show you his face, but here he’s happy to take you through his extraordinary debut, track by track. **Dead of Night** “This is a song about unrequited love. It\'s about being with somebody you know ultimately cannot give you what you want, and is only going to break your heart. But even just that is better than being without them, so you torture yourself with the inevitable demise. It was the first song I wrote for the album, and I wanted it to sound like something familiar, but something completely new as well. I wanted to provoke the kind of sensation of torturous nostalgia. I think we all go through somewhere where you remember a moment and you think that thinking about it is going to torture you, but you do it anyway, because we have this weird human nature of putting ourselves through emotional pain. That\'s kind of why I wanted the lonely guitar sound, and I wanted to go from very low to very high. I just wanted to give that same feeling sonically that the emotion is about in the song.” **Winds Change** “‘Winds Change’ is a song about traveling around not letting too much moss on your stone. I\'ve lived in many, many different countries, and I\'ve just felt like a drifter my entire life. The song is also about the things that you give up when you live that lifestyle. The benefits are adventure and freedom, but there are things—important things—that you have to leave behind.” **Turn to Hate** “I wrote the lyrics for this song about seven years ago when I was in a really low place. It\'s one of my favorite songs on the album. It\'s about the struggle I\'ve had feeling like an outsider and an outlaw my whole life and not letting that turn into resentment. Like I say in the song, ‘Don\'t let my sorrow turn to hate.’ Anyone who\'s ever felt like a weirdo should remember that is your power, and that\'s what makes you powerful and unique. This song is a mantra to remind myself not to let it go dark.” **Buffalo Run** “I’m not a very skilled technical musician, because I just teach myself everything I play. So I write all my music from a visual or emotive place. Here, I wanted to have my version of a driving train beat: I wanted it to feel like a stampede, essentially, so it needed to start peaceful and calm and slowly build and finally you get that release. I wanted it to feel cinematic. There’s a place in Alberta, Canada, I was thinking about called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, which is this huge canyon where they would do buffalo runs. Canada’s indigenous people would essentially herd the buffalo off cliffs and then gather them. Every time we play it, I genuinely am picturing buffalo stampeding.” **Queen of the Rodeo** “This is about a Canadian drag queen friend of mine called Thanks Jem. It’s funny, because when we first met, we did not get along. But interestingly, she really taught me a lot about myself. She’s from a small town in Canada and moved to Vancouver to pursue her drag artistry. I wouldn’t want to speak on her behalf about her stories, but the general theme of the song is around pursuing something you love, and even if it’s maybe not as fruitful as you’d hoped, it’s the act of chasing what you love in the face of adversity that’s important.” **Kansas (Remembers Me Now)** “This is a tricky song to talk about, as it’s the only song on the record that isn’t connected to my own life. I don’t want to give it away because I’m always proud when someone figures it out and tells me their version. But I’ll give a couple hints: It’s a song about something pretty dastardly. It’s my murder ballad. They have a very long history in country music. It’s about a real-life murder story which also involves a very interesting kind of homoerotic romance. This is my ode to that.” **Old River** “I wrote this very shortly after the death of a family member. It’s a cathartic song for me that I wrote literally driving through the mountains in winter on the way to the studio. I wanted sonically for it to be what is known in Appalachian country as a field holler, which is a mix of the old haunting Appalachian mountain music with a gospel influence. The Carter Family would do it really well. I also wanted it to be just short enough to annoy people. It’s an uncomfortable song for me, and I wanted everyone listening to it to feel uncomfortable too.” **Big Sky** “I grew up a very chatty, outgoing person and I was always performing. I’ve never felt insecure, socially. But the older I’ve gotten, I’ve realized I’m a very closed person with regards to sharing things about myself—real things about myself. I never knew how closed I was for a long time. The song is about three relationships I’ve had, and the funny thing is people tend to think it’s about those people. It is, sort of, but all of the lyrics are actually me exposing my own shortcomings, exposing myself and my role in those relationships, rather than holding anyone else at fault. The second verse deals with a pretty tumultuous relationship that I was pretty fearful of and had never even talked to anybody about before. It’s a really liberating song, as somebody who internalizes a lot.” **Roses Are Falling** “A song about loving somebody so much that they drive you crazy. You know that being with them is not good for you, but at the same time maybe that’s what we all need every now and again. I wanted to give a nod to the era of Santo & Johnny—that pedal-steel Hawaiian influence which moved into country—with a cheeky twist.” **Take You Back (The Iron Hoof Cattle Call)** “There is a classic trope in country music that used to be known as hokum. It\'s funny, because I think it\'s—for people that don\'t really know country today—almost what gave country a stigma for being shallow. But there’s a long tradition in country to incorporate humor, wit, and Southern charm into the music. Dolly Parton is very famous for that, of course, and I love the very famous George Strait song called ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas.’ So this is my hokum song with gunshots, whip cracks, and yeehaws. It’s a rootin’-tootin’ song about leaving somebody and that great feeling of telling them you’ll never take that back.” **Hope to Die** “Although I sing a lot about relationships, this is the only song on the album that’s about true heartbreak. It took a long time to record and I kept making revisions lyrically and to the production because I really wanted to capture a feeling within it. It was that feeling when you’re so at a loss that something fell apart. For me, it was that I was so heartbroken and spent months walking in slow motion. So I wanted to capture that sensation of feeling numb and watching the world pass you but all you can do is think about whatever it may be. It’s strange, because it’s almost a divine, serene feeling, but it’s so negative. It’s very still and peaceful, but it’s so very lonely. That serene unhappiness is something that I imagine people could probably get stuck in.” **Nothing Fades Like the Light** “This song is about the feeling of knowing something is coming to an end, and how that feeling can be more painful than when it does actually end. Embarrassingly, I still really choke up and cry in this song when I perform it. Which sounds conceited, but it’s not because I’m so moved by my performance. It’s very funny, as like I said earlier, I didn’t realize how closed I was emotionally for a very long time. A friend of mine passed away when I was quite young, and I remember being at the funeral and being incapable of crying. It dawned on me, ‘You know, I don’t cry very often. What makes me cry? Should I be crying? Do I feel things? Am I crazy?’ It’s nuts, because after that moment something clicked in my brain and I didn’t cry for about five or six years, at all. I think it became a compulsion where I just could not seem to cry. I eventually did, and it was actually a moment of bliss. Now I cry all the time.”
Combining the lulling ambiance of shoegaze with the iconic melodies and vocal prowess of classic American country music, outlaw cowboy, Orville Peck croons about love and loss from the badlands of North America. The resulting sound is entirely his own. He takes the listener down desert highways, through a world where worn out gamblers, road-dogs, and lovesick hustlers drift in and out of his masked gaze. Orville’s debut album, Pony, delivers a diverse collection of stories that sing of heartbreak, revenge and the unrelenting tug of the cowboy ethos. Warm lap steel guitars and echoing drums move through dreamy ballads and sometimes near frantic buzzsaw tunes - all the while paying homage to his country music roots. Pony’s lead single “Dead of Night” is a torch song about two hustlers traveling through Nevada desert. Their whirlwind romance takes us on a dusty trail of memories - racing down canyon highways, hitchhiking through casino towns and ultimately, ending in tragedy. Orville recalls the adventures of his young love, as he watches the boys silently pass him on the strip, haunted by the happy memories of his past. On the campfire lullaby, “Big Sky,” Orville sings about his past lovers - an aloof biker, an abusive boxer and an overly protective jailor in the Florida Keys - and the inevitable demise of each one, as he leaves them for the wide open, big sky. Meanwhile “Turn To Hate” finds Orville struggling to keep his resentment from building into hatred. A continuous battle between embracing the strength and freedom of being an outsider, and the inevitable struggle of wanting normalcy and familiarity. It encapsulates Orville's dilemma as a cowboy. He sings about having to constantly repair situations in his wake, and fighting with himself over his decision making. To stay or go; to cry or not; whether to leave without saying goodbye in order to soften the blow; All the while wishing someone would tell him that they "can't stay," and to make the decision for him. And “Buffalo Run” acts as a warning, a song built around the imagery of stampeding buffalo in the badlands of the Northern Plains. It’s one that begins peacefully enough but soon transcends into a kinetic charge that crescendos as the buffalo are headed off the cliffside. Pony was produced by Orville Peck, recorded and mixed by Jordan Koop at The Noise Floor on Gabriola Island, British Columbia and mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering in Montreal, Quebec.
Tanya Tucker was already singing in a voice that conveyed grit and experience when she scored her first hit at age 13. In the half-century since, the veteran country star has released roughly two dozen albums. But *While I’m Livin’*, arriving on the heels of an extended quiet spell, is the first full-length she’s recorded that reflects—or, more accurately, magnifies—her life experiences and brassy persona. Shooter Jennings and Brandi Carlile, who both grew up with Tucker’s music, made it their crusade to produce an album that would present Tucker as an artist whose undiminished edge and seasoned wit qualify her as a legend. They selected songs, several of them written by Carlile and her frequent collaborators Tim and Phil Hanseroth, that dramatize Tucker\'s headstrong, hard-living ways and the pride she took in weathering hardship. She makes loping outlaw epics like \"High Ridin\' Heroes,\" \"Hard Luck,\" and \"Mustang Ridge\" her own, and sounds more unvarnished than ever delivering soft, sentimental tunes like \"The House That Built Me,\" \"The Day My Heart Goes Still,\" and \"Bring My Flowers Now.\"
After Maren Morris released her blockbuster debut album *Hero* in 2016, she embarked on a series of unorthodox cross-genre collaborations that, at a different time in country music, could have easily ended her career. Instead, she scored near-simultaneous hits in dance, country, and pop, and established a new breed of Nashville superstar. “It’s a testament to how much the city has changed,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s become an exciting melting pot.” She is being modest: Much of that change is thanks to Morris. Her free-spirited sophomore effort continues to push the limits of contemporary country-pop, infusing it with energy and texture from hip-hop, R&B, and psychedelic rock. \"I wanted to be braver with production and get really weird with it,” she says. \"The lyrics were becoming really assertive and independent and sensual, all these empowering elements. I wanted the music to amplify that.” As the title suggests, womanhood is a theme, but the album steers clear of rallying cries and hear-me-roar tropes; these songs are more about learning to embrace all sides of yourself. By singing about her conflicting emotions and life experiences, she frames her complexity as a kind of power: She can be both romantic and in charge (**“The Bones\"**), pissed off and poised (**“Flavor”**), successful and uncertain (**\"To Hell & Back”**). The latter was the first song she wrote on *GIRL* after wrestling with the explosive success of *Hero*. “It was the bitter and the sweet going on in my head,” she says. “I opened up to this other person and felt like they accepted all my broken pieces. They didn’t try to fix me.” At some point, Morris’ independence and progressive point of view caught the attention of Brandi Carlile, a fellow disrupter in Americana and folk. “She wrote me a note about how she’s got two daughters and she’s proud to know they look up to me,” Morris says. The exchange led to their duet, **“Common”**—a pleading, impassioned ballad about setting aside our differences—and eventually, a supergroup with singer-songwriter Amanda Shires called the Highwomen. (Morris has gently tackled politics before, most notably on “Dear Hate”, her response to the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.) The album’s other collaboration, **“All My Favorite People”** featuring the Brothers Osbourne, is Morris off duty. “It’s a slapping, trashy party song but has all these descriptive, intricate lyrics,” she says. “It’s my favorite kind of song to write: airtight and very country.” She co-wrote the song with her husband, musician Ryan Hurd, who gets a playful tribute on **“Make Out with Me,”** written to mimic a drunken voicemail. “That\'s one of my favorites,” she says, \"because it’s *so me*.\" Just when you think you’ve got Morris figured out, she serves up R&B curveballs (**“RSVP”**), pop-ified love songs (**“Gold Love”**), and lighters-in-the-air sing-alongs that hat-tip her influences, which include Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry (**“A Song for Everything”**). No song packs as much zing as **“Flavor,”** a growling send-up Morris has dubbed \"an F U to your haters.” In her case, they’re mostly online. “This is my middle finger to the trolls, the body-shamers, the slut-shamers, the women-haters, the people who rain on my parade,” she says, pointing out that despite her fame, she still manages her own social media accounts. \"I wanted to tell them: You know what, I\'m cooking up my own flavor, and you don\'t have to like it, but I promise you\'ve never tasted anything like it.\"
Twentysomething East Kentuckian Tyler Childers is the latest standout in a lineage of serious-minded singer-songwriters who’ve chafed at portrayals of their native Appalachia as a boorish, backward place. The nine vignettes on *Country Squire* continue the plainspoken but keenly perceptive storytelling from his 2017 breakthrough *Purgatory*, offering humanizing sketches of struggle, disappointment, and resilience. Some of his loosely autobiographical numbers wryly measure the distance between the modest aspirations he harbored back when his following was merely regional and the more encumbered reality he’s living now. In the title track, he recalls splitting his time between poor-paying road gigs and renovating an old camper trailer: “And when I ain\'t out playing on my six-string/With the nickels I acquire/I’m trying to fix her up a castle/It\'s called the Country Squire.” Childers’ wiry mountain wail and sparing use of keyed-up country vocal curlicues lend songs like “House Fire,” “Creeker,” and “Peace of Mind” a focused emotional intensity. Though this album marks his first partnership with a major label, he kept the producers who steered *Purgatory*—kindred spirit Sturgill Simpson and storied Nashville engineer David Ferguson—and they’ve once again framed Childers with lean, loping performances from bluegrass and country session vets. It suits a searching mind like Childers’ that some of the most down-home grooves melt into mildly psychedelic transitions between tracks.
Kelsey Waldon works in the country, folk, and bluegrass songwriting tradition of depicting rural life—but has zero interest in romanticizing or simplifying her subject matter. On her third full-length—and first for John Prine’s Oh Boy Records—the Nashville singer conjures the rustic places and resourceful people of her upbringing in all their complexity. “Kentucky, 1988” and “Black Patch” are tales of stubborn self-reliance—one autobiographical, the other historical. In the title track, “Anyhow,” and “Lived and Let Go,” she locates enlightenment in plainspoken country wisdom, and in “Sunday’s Children,” she draws a connection between many kinds of people dwelling at the social margins. The album’s sinewy, down-home, occasionally rocking folk-country arrangements revolve around the vinegary stoicism of Waldon’s singing and the plaintive potency of Brett Resnick’s steel guitar playing.
Joy Williams continues to assert her voice following the 2014 breakup of her Grammy-winning Americana duo The Civil Wars, and after welcoming a second child. The songs on her sixth solo album (her second since the split) *Front Porch* reflect tests of faith and lessons learned. Though tunes like “When Does a Heart Move On” and “The Trouble with Wanting” revel in heartache and longing, Williams experiences temptation (“Hotel St. Cecilia”), hometown pride (“No Place Like You”), and gusts of optimism (“Love is always sad when it fades, but glass is better stained anyways,” she muses on the title track). *Front Porch*’s acoustic country format fits Williams well, while also acknowledging her CCM roots on “Look How Far We’ve Come,” “When Creation Was Young,” and “Preacher’s Daughter.”
Nashville is Oz for rising rock and country stars, and Jack White is one of the wizards behind the curtain. His tastemaking Third Man Records launched the careers of Music City mold-breakers like Margo Price and The Black Belles, and his next bet is Lillie Mae, the buzzed-about singer-songwriter touring with Robert Plant. White and Mae go way back—she played fiddle in White’s touring bands for years, until the two collaborated on her 2017 debut *Forever and Then Some*, a rootsy, folksy, electric wonder that made bluegrass feel alive and new. *Other Girls*, her spellbinding follow-up, digs deeper. Produced by Dave Cobb (Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile) and recorded in the historic RCA Studio A, it tells Mae’s stories of heartbreak and self-discovery through deceptively simple melodies (“Some Gamble”), chilling harmonies (“Crisp & Cold”), and expansive, almost mystical instrumentation (“You’ve Got Other Girls for That”). The songs are packed with personality and left turns: “How?” asks big questions with wandering, childlike intonations, and the dizzying, six-minute “Love Dilly Love” is a vision quest of spoken word that seems to recount all the ways love can let us down.
Lillie Mae led a sequestered childhood touring in a motorhome with her musician parents, constricted by religious boundaries. In her adolescence she busked from RV parks to the Rio Grande, swept through Nashville clubs, and achieved Top 40 country status in her sibling group Jypsi, but on Other Girls, a new side of herself emerges with more to say than ever before. She embraces personal triumphs on “I Came For The Band (For Show),” breathes new perspective into “Terlingual Girl,” a song she wrote as a 19-year-old in the South-Texan desert, and professes brave truths as heard in “You’ve Got Other Girls for That.” After a vagabond past, crossing paths with hundreds of musicians, she limits the cast of Other Girls to just her brother, sister, and a few trusted collaborators.
Buddy & Julie Miller helped shaped the songwriting and sonic sensibilities of the Americana scene with the solo and duo albums they released throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then she took a break from the spotlight, while he accepted a series of high-profile gigs as a producer and sideman. *Breakdown on 20th Ave. South*, their first album together since 2009, marks the return of their beloved collaboration. Much of the album was recorded in their cozy living quarters with very little outside assistance. Its dozen tracks showcase the common language they’ve forged out of Appalachian folk harmonizing, singer-songwriter confessionalism, down-home country soul and ropy roots rock grooves, and, most of all, the interplay between Julie’s penetrating sincerity and Buddy’s empathetically yielding musicianship.
