PopMatters' 15 Best Country Albums of 2023

Margo Price’s fourth album is a record born from journeys. There’s the physical one, in which the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and her husband/collaborator, the musician Jeremy Ivey, traveled first to South Carolina to focus on writing new material, much of which made it onto *Strays*, then to California’s Topanga Canyon to record the final LP. And, perhaps more consequently, there’s the spiritual journey, as Price and Ivey spent part of their writing retreat taking intentional, exploratory psilocybin trips in an effort to tap more deeply into their own creative wells. Accordingly, *Strays* is Price’s most expansive, adventurous LP yet, employing an intricate, far-reaching soundscape of rock, psychedelia, ’70s pop, and subtle flourishes of her earlier brand of left-of-center country. The shift in sound didn’t shift Price’s focus, though, which is, as always, crafting songs that stand the test of time. “Sonically, it’s a little bit different,” she tells Apple Music. “But if you strip away all the instruments, what you have left at the end of the day is still a song that’s great that you can play on the piano or guitar and it’ll stand up on its own.” Opener “Been to the Mountain” is part origin story, part battle cry, as Price chronicles the many roles she’s played—a mother, a child, a waitress, and a consumer, among others—before defiantly declaring, “I’ve been called every name in the book, honey/Go on, take your best shot.” The Sharon Van Etten collaboration “Radio” is Price at her poppiest, pairing melodic hooks with frank observations on womanhood and motherhood. “County Road” grapples with mortality and pays tribute to late drummer Ben Eyestone, envisioning the afterlife as an escape from earthly troubles. And closer “Landfill” opens with a gut punch of a lyric—“I could build a landfill of dreams I deserted”—before ultimately ending the LP on a hopeful note. Below, Price shares insight into several key tracks on *Strays*. **“Been to the Mountain”** “This was one of the very first songs that flowed out the next day after we came down from our mushroom trip. I just really wanted to incorporate poetry. I wanted it to be really psychedelic, and I wanted this album to be able to serve as a record that people could put on if they were going to maybe dabble in psychedelics. I think it can be a companion piece in that regard. I feel like whenever I have taken a psilocybin trip, there’s always that moment right before everything starts happening in your brain and your body, and you feel like you’re about to go on a roller coaster. That’s what I wanted—to capture that feeling.” **“Radio” (feat. Sharon Van Etten)** “The melody to the song came to me when I was walking in the woods. I just started singing the melody and the words into my phone and made a little voice memo. I got back home, picked up the guitar, and I was really proud of what I had, but I really wanted the label to be excited and to trust in my ability to write a pop song. So, I said that it was written with somebody I had planned to co-write with, and it just didn’t happen. But I did send it to Sharon Van Etten, and I was like, ‘Does this need a bridge? Do you like this song?’ And she’s like, ‘I absolutely love this song. It’s incredible. I don’t think it needs a bridge, but I would change these lines.’ She began co-writing on it and then put all those incredible harmonies and just added her touch to it. I think she’s one of the greatest writers that’s currently out there right now. I love her and I think everything she touches gets this beautiful, I don’t know, chrome feeling to it. There’s just a little bit of magic in everything that she worked on.” **“County Road”** “This is a song \[for late drummer Ben Eyestone\] that means a lot to me and my band collectively. We truthfully all have to hold back tears when we play it; we just miss him so much. But we know that he is still around, and sometimes we’ll feel his energy when we’re playing that song. It was just really tragic how he passed. A lot of things were at play. I think the American healthcare system and a lot of things just worked against him. He died \[from cancer\] so tragically and so suddenly. But at the same time, it was pre-pandemic. It was before everything changed in our world in so many ways during that year of 2020. It’s a dark song. We say things like, ‘Maybe I’m lucky I’m already dead.’ But really, I think that there is this freedom that has to come with death. You’re not suffering here and going through all these incredibly difficult life lessons.” **“Lydia”** “It’s strange sometimes how you have this premonition that you don’t want to come true, or you don’t think it’s going to go this way. I never saw this *Handmaid’s Tale* future. I thought things were fucked up, but they weren’t this bad. That song was written after walking around Vancouver and seeing a lot of people there that were struggling with opioid addictions. They all seemed like they had this vacant, ghostly quality, and so did the city and the area of town that we were in. There was a methadone clinic really close by, and the venue owners literally told us, ‘Be really careful. There’s a lot of needles out the back door. You guys go that way.’ It was just a really heavy mood. While it has pieces of me and little vignettes of who I’ve been at times in my life, I think this is definitely a character study. It was a person that I created, something that was fictional but that is ultimately a portrait of what it might be to be living in the lower class and struggling in America right now.” **“Landfill”** “I think we go through such wild territory throughout the album, and we’re definitely getting some high highs and some low lows. I really just wanted to end the album with a little bit of clarity and a little bit of peace. I wanted the last word that I say on this album to be ‘love.’ I wrote that song also in South Carolina, and it was at the very end of our trip, after we’d been there for seven or eight days. We were trying to find this abandoned lighthouse and passed a landfill on the way. I just started thinking about the metaphor of how your mind can be that way; you have so many memories and difficult things that you bury and push down. But I wanted it to still be hopeful.”

Produced by Margo Price and Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty), Strays was primarily recorded in the summer of 2021, during a week spent at Fivestar Studio in California’s Topanga Canyon. While the songwriting began the summer prior – during a six-day, mushroom-filled trip that Price and her husband Jeremy Ivey took to South Carolina – it was amongst the hallucinatory hills of western Los Angeles that Price experienced the best recording sessions of her career. Instilled with a newfound confidence and comfortability to experiment and explore like never before, Margo Price and her longtime band of Pricetags channeled their telepathic abilities into songs that span rock n roll, psychedelic country, rhythm & blues, and glistening, iridescent pop. Having been together since the days before Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, her 2016 debut that Rolling Stone named one of the Greatest Country Albums of All Time, Price and her band tracked live in the same room, simultaneously expanding upon and completely exploding the notions of every other album they have made together. With additional vocals from Sharon Van Etten and Lucius, plus guitar from Mike Campbell, strings, synthesizers and a breadth of previously untapped sounds, Strays is also Price’s most collaborative record yet. “I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating,” says Margo Price. “You get stuck in the same patterns of thinking, the same loops of addiction. But there comes a point where you just have to say, ‘I'm going to be here, I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm not going to put so much stock into checking the boxes for everyone else.’ I feel more mature in the way that I write now, I’m on more than just a search for large crowds and accolades. I’m trying to find what my soul needs.”

It’s safe to say that Chris Stapleton has found his voice. The award-winning, widely beloved country singer-songwriter is known for being one of the greatest living singers of any genre, thanks to his soulful, gritty tone, his effortless sense of phrasing and dynamics, and his ease with blending genres and influences to create a sound all his own. Even so, Stapleton tells Apple Music that it took time, work, and experience for him to feel at home in his own voice, rather than trying to imitate artists he admired as he did during the earliest years of his career. “If you heard a demo of \[me\] back then, it’s me trying to be Vince Gill or somebody that was a hero. It’s not as a voice, as a singer with a voice. I certainly hadn’t landed on that,” he says. “I could sing—I had ability—but I was still figuring that out. I think that finds you more than you find it. When you land on it, you’re like, ‘OK, this is what I do.’ I can live a lot of places, in a lot of different kinds of music and have fun with that, but I still feel like I’m me in those things. I’m not trying to impersonate somebody else.” On his fifth solo album, Stapleton sounds as good as he ever has. Coproduced by his wife, Morgane Stapleton and longtime collaborator Dave Cobb, *Higher* is a sneakily expansive slice of country-informed Southern rock and soul, and also boasts some of Stapleton’s best lyric writing. The LP opens on a high point, the Miranda Lambert cowrite “What Am I Gonna Do.” It’s a fresh take on a heartbreak tune, with Stapleton wondering what life might look like after the hurt has faded. “Loving You on My Mind” is Stapleton at his most smoldering, with a come-hither arrangement to boot. And the record closes with “Mountains of My Mind,” a Stapleton solo write/performance bristling with vulnerability. Below, Stapleton shares insight into several of *Higher*’s key tracks. **“What Am I Gonna Do”** “I think \[Miranda Lambert\] is a wonderful artist and a wonderful writer. I don’t think people talk about what a great songwriter she is enough. She and I have written some songs over the years, and I actually called her when we were making this record. I was like, ‘Hey, do you remember that song we wrote?’ I could only remember half the song and I didn’t have a copy. She was kind enough to go digging for it, and she found it so we could cut it.” **“Loving You on My Mind”** “Some of these songs are old, and that’s one of them. That song’s on a Josh Turner record somewhere. He did a great job with it. But it’s always one that I like to play. I like the chords in it and I like the changes in it. It’s a fun one to sing. I probably haven’t done as many of those kinds of \[sexy\] songs \[as I could have\]. My wife pushes for some of that stuff. I’m just like, ‘I don’t know if people want to hear me do that.’” **“Higher”** “‘Higher’ is a song that’s off the first demo session I ever did when I moved to town. It’s a song I wrote by myself. And it was a step or a step and a half lower at that point in time than this. I think we landed at least a step or a step and a half higher on this, just because I was feeling good that day.” **“Crosswind”** “‘Crosswind’ was an idea I got driving on I-65 from Florida back to Tennessee \[when\] it was really windy. It really didn’t turn into a song until the guys were kind of jamming on this groove and \[someone\] was like, ‘Wait, this is what this is.’ And we wrote a truck-driving song in the moment.” **“Weight of Your World”** “I had been listening to a lot of Bill Withers when we wrote that, and I walked into the room thinking about ‘Lean on Me’ and what a great vibe that song is, what a great message it has. I think a lot of that song is probably derivative of that. Nobody quote me on saying that I think it’s ‘Lean on Me’—I don’t. I’m not Bill Withers, and you can only hope to write standards like that. But he had a lot of songs with wonderful messages, and that was one of them. And that was our attempt at that that day.” **“Mountains of My Mind”** “‘Mountains of my Mind’ is one I wrote by myself, and my wife was just bawling in the control room the whole time I was playing it. I just woke up one morning and wrote that one. There’s some of that ‘not being able to get through the day’ sometimes. I think everybody has those days.”

Hailey Whitters’ rise among the country ranks has been one of the genre’s more exciting stories of the early 2020s. A top-notch songwriter with a unique voice to boot, Whitters found critical and commercial success first with 2020’s *The Dream* and her star only rose higher with 2022’s *Raised*. On the appropriately peppy *I’m in Love*—the EP’s cover art serves a delightfully Vegas-wedding vibe—Whitters gets loose and lovey-dovey, showing yet another side of her multifaceted artistry, thanks in part to her co-production with husband and frequent collaborator Jake Gear. Opener “Tie’r Down” is a sweet slice of romantic mythology, describing a free-spirited woman with “a mind of her own” who wants a “one-woman man in a two-horse town.” “Mellencamp” is sparkling summertime nostalgia, nodding to the “Jack and Diane” hitmaker. And the title track pairs a rollicking, banjo-heavy arrangement with vivid glimpses at the ups and downs of long-term love. Whitters closes the EP with *Raised* cut “Everything She Ain’t,” a song she tells Apple Music “changed \[her\] world in so many ways.” “Putting it on this project, it’s kind of like a thank-you to the fans,” she adds. “I felt like it’s the one that started a lot for me and is bridging that chapter into this new chapter.” Below, Whitters shares insight into a few key tracks. **“I’m in Love”** “\[The track\] feels like the early butterfly stages. Nicolle Galyon, Cameron Bedell, and Lee Miller wrote this song, but the minute I heard it, I was just instantly like, ‘I love this.’ And so, to me, it’s the butterfly, giddy \[feeling\], but also there’s that long-lasting element to it, too. The lyric, to me, isn’t all just chronological. It feels like it could be different seasons, different phases, different times. When I sing it, I feel that, too. And that’s cool, to me, because it’s about a lasting, real, true relationship.” **“Bad Love”** “I was just thinking about this phase of life I’m in, where I was about to be getting married. I think about so many bad nights and relationships and the different seasons, and it’s like they all got you here, that kind of thing. I’ve heard so many just horrendous Tinder stories from my girlfriends, and I’m just like, ‘Dang, it is bleak out there, but keep on going.’ And so, I kind of had a little bit of that concept, but that song, we started totally from scratch other than that.” **“Everything She Ain’t”** “That song has always just completely surprised me. I mean, I thought my record was done. That was just an extra song that we had that Jake had played for the label, and they flipped out about it and were like, ‘We have to record this or put this on the project.’ Then, to find out it’s going to radio—now, it’s like I’m playing these stages, and tens of thousands of people are singing it back. And it’s just been so crazy and so bizarre and just really cool because, for me, it was like, this came out of nowhere. I think it’s taught me to allow yourself to be surprised and don’t put too much pressure on a song, and don’t put too much pressure on the recording of it and the writing of it. Just let it be.”

Elvis might be dead, but his spirit is alive and well on Tyler Childers’ sixth studio album. The Kentucky native and cult favorite compiled seven songs new and old with the King in mind, and the resulting collection is as arresting and electric as anything Childers has done to date. The opening title track is boogie-woogie blues with crunchy riffs and juke-joint piano, calling back to the Southern gospel of the LP’s predecessor *Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?* “Luke 2:8-10,” which boasts guest vocals from Margo Price, Erin Rae, and S.G. Goodman, takes a simple, down-home arrangement to spin a yarn about the end of the world, using the fodder of its titular scripture in surprising ways. Childers’ cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” is beautifully bruised, as he masterfully captures the conflicted sentiment of the original. And anchoring the album is the tender love song “In Your Love,” whose music video, a collaboration with the author Silas House, is a poignant short film celebrating a lifelong love between two fictional men who met as coal miners.

On her transcendent new record, Workin' On A World, Iris DeMent faces the modern world — as it is right now — with its climate catastrophe, pandemic illness, and epidemic of violence and social injustice — and not only asks us how we can keep working towards a better world, but implores us to love each other, despite our very different ways of seeing. Her songs are her way of healing our broken inner and outer spaces. With an inimitable voice as John Prine described, "like you've heard, but not really," and unforgettable melodies rooted in hymns, gospel, and old country music, she's simply one of the finest singer-songwriters in America as well as one of our fiercest advocates for human rights. Her debut record Infamous Angel, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, was recently named one of the “greatest country albums of all time” by Rolling Stone, and the two albums that followed, My Life and The Way I Should, were both nominated for GRAMMYs. From there, DeMent released three records on her own label, Flariella Records, the most recent of which, The Trackless Woods (2015), was hailed as “a quietly powerful triumph” by The Guardian. DeMent’s songs have also been featured in film (True Grit) and television (The Leftovers) and recorded by numerous artists. Fittingly, she received the Americana Music Trailblazer Award in 2017. Workin' On A World, her seventh album, started with the worry that woke DeMent up after the 2016 elections: how can we survive this? “Every day some new trauma was being added to the old ones that kept repeating themselves, and like everybody else, I was just trying to bear up under it all,” she recalls. She returned to a truth she had known since childhood: music is medicine. “My mom always had a way of finding the song that would prove equal to whatever situation we were facing. Throughout my life, songs have been lending me a hand. Writing songs, singing songs, putting them on records, has been a way for me to extend that hand to others.” With grace, courage, and soul, Iris shares 13 anthems — love songs, really — to and for our broken inner and outer worlds. DeMent sets the stage for the album with the title track in which she moves from a sense of despair towards a place of promise. “Now I’m workin’ on a world I may never see / Joinin’ forces with the warriors of love / Who came before and will follow you and me.” She summons various social justice warriors, both past and present, to deliver messages of optimism. “How Long” references Martin Luther King, while “Warriors of Love” includes John Lewis and Rachel Corrie. “Goin’ Down To Sing in Texas” is an ode not only to gun control, but also to the brave folks who speak out against tyranny and endure the consequences in an unjust world. “I kept hearing a lot of talk about the arc of history that Dr. King so famously said bends towards justice,” she recalls. “I was having my doubts. But, then it dawned on me, he never said the arc would magically bend itself. Songs, over the course of history, have proven to be pretty good arc benders.” Bending inward, DeMent reaches agilely under the slippery surface of politics. She grapples with loss on the deeply honest “I Won’t Ask You Why,” while encouraging compassion over hate in the awe-inspiring “Say A Good Word.” Album closer “Waycross, Georgia,” encompasses the end of the journey, thanking those along the way. As she approaches subjects of aging, loss, suicide, and service, an arc of compassion elevated to something far beyond words is transmitted. The delicate fierceness encompassed in the riveting power of her voice has somehow only grown over time. Stalled partway through by the pandemic, the record took six years to make with the help of three friends and co-producers: Richard Bennett, Pieta Brown, and Jim Rooney. It was Pieta Brown who gave the record its final push. “Pieta asked me what had come of the recordings I’d done with Jim and Richard in 2019 and 2020. I told her I’d pretty much given up on trying to make a record. She asked would I mind if she had a listen. So, I had everything we’d done sent over to her, and not long after that I got a text, bouncing with exclamation marks: ‘You have a record and it’s called Workin’ On A World!’” With Bennett back in the studio with them, Brown and DeMent recorded several more songs and put the final touches on the record in Nashville in April of 2022. The result is a hopeful album — shimmering with brilliant flashes of poignant humor and uplifting tenderness — that speaks the truth, “in the way that truth is always hopeful,” she explains. Reflecting on the lyrics of the song “The Sacred Now” (“see these walls/ let’s bring ‘em on down / it’s not a dream; it’s the sacred now”), DeMent is reminded of Jesus saying the Kingdom of God is within you and the Buddhist activist monk Thich Nhat Hanh saying the rose is in the compost; the compost is in the rose. On Workin’ On A World, Iris DeMent demonstrates that songs are the healing and the healing arises through song.

DELUXE EDITION COMES WITH AN AIR FRESHENER AND POSTER. SPECIAL EDITION LP COMES WITH AN AIR FRESHENER. RED VINYL IS EXCLUSIVE TO BANDCAMP. About 'The Rainbow Wheel of Death' A country songwriter from Brooklyn's indie underground, Dougie Poole blurs the lines between genre and generation on his third solo album, 'The Rainbow Wheel of Death.' Rooted in sharp songwriting, Poole's golden baritone, and the organic sounds of a live-in-the-studio band, it's a classic-sounding record for the modern world, stocked with songs that make room for everything from old-school synthesizers to contemporary storytelling. 'The Rainbow Wheel of Death's title nods to the colorful pinwheel that appears onscreen whenever a computer's application stalls. For Poole — who found himself working as a freelance computer programmer once the pandemic brought his touring schedule to a temporary halt in 2020 — it's also a reference to the holding pattern that's left much of society feeling stuck, unable to move ahead in an uncertain world. That feeling was pervasive when he began writing these nine songs, finishing the first handful of tracks in his New York City bedroom and wrapping up the songwriting process in the recording studio itself, this time surrounded by a band of collaborators and instrumentalists. Once hailed as the "patron saint of millennial malaise" for his sardonic wit and topical, tongue-in-cheek songwriting, Poole broadens his reach here. He fine-tunes his genre-bending approach to country music, too, with The Rainbow Wheel of Death reaching far beyond the genre's boundaries for new sounds and unexpected textures. "High School Gym" builds a bridge between 2020s lo-fi textures and 1980s pop vibes, while "Must Be In Here Somewhere" — whose narrator sits at a lap top, searching through "every server burning in North Carolina" for a digital souvenir of a long-lost relationship — mixes modern concerns with classic country instrumentation. If records like 2017's Wideass Highway and 2020's breakthrough release The Freelancer's Blues told stories about uninspired Millennials languishing in dead-end jobs and no-good relationships, then The Rainbow Wheel of Death focuses on more universal issues like mortality, love, and the passing of the time. With 'The Rainbow Wheel of Death,' Dougie Poole breathes new life into country music, retaining the acclaimed elements of his previous work — drum machines, acoustic guitars, synthesizers, and his deep-set voice — while pushing toward something warm, organic, and prismatic.

“’Loving You ‘is a reflection on the life and music of Bobbie Nelson,” says Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Amanda Shires. Shires’ mission in making ‘Loving You ‘is to pay respect to the only woman she saw working in a band and pursuing a career as a sideman. “I first saw Bobbie playing when I was 16 at some festival in Texas where I grew up,” she explains. “Much of my path seemed possible because I saw a woman working and making a career of music at a young age, and that woman was Bobbie Nelson.” Amanda and Bobbie got together in 2021 to record at Arlyn Studios in Austin, Texas – a facility co-owned and operated by Nelson’s son, Freddy Fletcher. The album ‘Loving You’ features songs Nelson and Shires played and treasured their entire lives – a few of Nelson’s favorites along with her own elegant solo piano title cut. The album would eventually trace Nelson’s musical story – and personal journey.

William Prince knows he’s got the perfect voice for sad songs—a canyon-deep croon that feels like a warm embrace in your darkest hour. But after working through the death of his father and split from his partner just before their child was born, on 2020’s Juno Award-nominated *Reliever*, the singer-songwriter from Peguis First Nation is eager to show he’s more than a tear-in-yer-beer troubadour. *Stand in the Joy* resides at the same intersection of folk, country, and classic rock that heroes like John Prine and Neil Young orbited in the early ’70s, but Prince is approaching it now from a different perspective. As he achieved a level of commercial and critical success that alleviated lifelong stresses about paying the bills, Prince also met the new love of his life—and that newfound balance of professional and personal contentment couldn’t help but yield a batch of songs brimming with optimism, humility, and grace. “It’s so much more romantic to sing about the whiskey and the hardship,” Prince tells Apple Music, “but I’m kicking against that. I’m really tapping into the goodness and the joy in my life. I was trying to make a happy record, so my family can look back and say, ‘You know what—he enjoyed his life with us.’” Here, Prince provides a track-by-track guide to finding his happiness. **“When You Miss Someone”** “I wrote this song just before the pandemic hit, and I didn’t realize what it would become and how we’d be missing everybody in that time. But even this song has a hope and joyful beauty to it because isn’t it special to have people in our lives who mean so much to us that, when we’re apart from them, we miss them? It’s pretty universal, but it speaks to my wife-to-be and my son, for sure. I even think of my dad in there sometimes—like, I wish he could see all this stuff that’s happening to me.” **“Only Thing We Need”** “This is about wanting to hold on to those simple, fleeting moments, like going back to Peguis First Nation and getting to see my family after a long time away. Moments like that really shift your focus—like, at the end of this run, is it really going to matter how many things we acquired? I’m just going to wish I had one more day. I don’t want to wake up and have missed being present in my life.” **“Tanqueray”** “‘Tanqueray’ is me answering the question of ‘How did you meet her?’ So, it’s kind of a spoken story. ‘Tanqueray’ plays on those first feelings of love and excitement when you’re getting to know somebody: You’re just starting to reveal yourself to them and share these secrets, and the red wine and the gin are flowing, and you’re being more vulnerable, and all these new sparks are flying. It’s like being drunk in love, really.” **“Young”** “This song speaks to the time when I was really wondering what my purpose was going to be. I was a teen and really falling for music, but Peguis doesn’t really present a lot of opportunity to see live music. So, at 16 years old, I would drive around and listen to everything I could get my ears on and emulate it, hoping to be something like that one day. The 37-year-old me today would try to assure that person that you don’t have to worry so much about where you’ll end up because it’s all going to sort itself out.” **“Broken Heart of Mine”** “I strategically put this song where it is on the album to represent a turning point at the end of Side A. As easily as I’ve chosen to be upset, frustrated, mad, worried, and discouraged in the past, I could also choose joy. So, this song is paying respect to those things that were heavy before, and kind of enlightening my audience and being honest with them. Like, it’s my own choices that have broken my heart, too—it’s not just my circumstance. So, I’m trying to grow up and be better than those things—to be a person who makes everybody around them feel good all the time.” **“Pasadena”** “Pasadena is so bright and hot and sunny, and it just represents the love I have. It feels like my partner, it feels like sunshine and gold, and it paints a picture on the map of all these places that we’ve been and that we continue to learn from.” **“Goldie Hawn”** “This song is my wife. I chose to write about all these great women that have qualities in common with her. Goldie Hawn is just so loyal and classy and funny, and she survived Hollywood and didn’t lose the goodness in her—that’s my partner, working through her pain and working through her life that wasn’t easy on her, but she still stayed gold. She still stayed that beautiful person that I’ve fallen in love with. This song is my very public declaration that I’m not available!” **“Easier and Harder”** “This is about not being ashamed of the reality of love. It’s not all roses. You have to calibrate your love to each other, and that gets easier and harder the longer you stay together. There’s a lot of things that become automatic, and you wonder how you ever lived without them before. But then, there’s also the challenges of having somebody be so intimate in your life that you’re together 24/7. I wrote the song the morning after John Prine passed away. We were listening to his songs, having coffee, and my partner was talking about love—and how you try to do your best for one another—and that inspired the song.” **“Peace of Mind”** “This song was a pure moment of joy for me. It’s like, holy shit—you’re living the life of a songwriter, like you always dreamed, and there’s an audience for you and places to go and play. And when you mind your own business and just focus on that, it’s really beautiful to see how simple your life can become. I don’t need 20 good friends. I just need a handful. My bills are paid, my fridge is full, I don’t have to worry about gas in the car anymore. So, thank you for this place where I can just relax and enjoy this...while still being hungry for it all. I don’t want to get too soft and comfortable.” **“Take a Look Around”** “This is the lesson for it all: Don’t forget to take a look around when you touch down at all these gigs, and you have to go to a different place right away, and you’re tired. Remember when you were wishing for this. But at the same time, when I go on my walks at home, I think, ‘Look at your health. Look at your life—you’re OK. You wake up next to the love of your life. Treat her well and don’t get lazy. Be that guy that she fell in love with and always be pursuing your wife.’ And then seeing my son shooting around in the driveway, playing hockey, always reminds me to choose joy and be happy.”

Brent Cobb has a handy way of describing his music: Southern eclectic. The South Georgia-bred artist delights in blending genres and styles, crafting a sound that pays homage to the melting pot of artists who call the Peach State home while furthering that legacy himself. “People ask all the time, ‘Well, what do you call this? What is this considered? Are you Americana or country, or what are you?’” Cobb tells Apple Music. “I don\'t know. Sometimes a little rock, sometimes a little roll, sometimes a little country, sometimes a little soul. But it\'s all Southern. So I call it ‘Southern eclectic.’” On *Southern Star*, Cobb sounds as eclectic—and as Southern—as he ever has. His first self-produced LP, the record is laidback and gentle, well-suited to a leisurely sunset stroll through the miles of farmland surrounding his hometown of Americus (home to another famous Georgian, none other than President Jimmy Carter, from adjacent Plains). Below, Cobb shares insight into several key tracks. **“Southern Star”** “That was the first song I wrote for the album. Then all the rest of them started revealing themselves to this common theme, which was that ‘Southern Star’ theme. I\'ve had almost a 20-year career and I\'ve been all over the place. I\'ve been homesick and I\'ve been happy and I\'ve experienced a lot. And a lot of times when I get out there, people will tell you, ‘Follow the light of the Northern Star.’ But I\'m from South Georgia, so I\'ve always looked for the Southern star. But then I also had a friend of mine, Rowdy Cope of The Steel Woods, pass away in 2021. He was like a big brother to me, a mentor. If Rowdy was nothing else, he may not have been a super worldwide superstar, but he was definitely a Southern star. And I feel that same way about myself.” **“Livin’ the Dream”** “I participate in psychedelics from time to time. If you\'ve ever done that, then you know that if you\'re already an empath, you have even more empathy for just everybody and everything. And you go, ‘Lord, we\'re just all just spinning around. I don\'t know what\'s going on. I don\'t even know if any of it\'s real. But I do know it might all be a smokescreen. I do know, no matter what, I\'m just grateful to be experiencing it at all.’ And so you start seeing all these little trivial things that people will get upset about, that cause great wars. And then here we are, most of us just waking up, just trying to damn make it to our vehicle, to make it to work. For what? Who really knows. But yet here we are all doing it, and it\'s amazing. It\'s terribly wonderful, tragically beautiful, and maybe it\'s all real. Maybe it\'s a dream. Maybe the dream means that it\'s real. I don\'t know.” **“Patina”** “It was one of those nights after a show, and I had been on the road maybe for three or four weeks. I have two kids at home, with my wife. And I was just like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ Just drifting out there, really homesick and hoping that I\'m doing right by them, my family. And typically, my wife is the one who has anxiety, and she\'ll need reeling back in sometimes. But on this particular night, I was the one that was out there. We had been on the phone and I was like, ‘I don\'t know if I\'m doing it right.’ And she just sent me the song. She\'s like, ‘Well, I wrote this a few weeks ago. I didn\'t know if I was going to send it to you, but it helped me when I wrote it.’ And so that line ‘I don\'t know anything, but I do know all we have is right now,’ that line just brought me back down to earth.” **“When Country Came Back to Town”** “That song was really special because it was my personal story. And not just my personal story, it was the story of the independent country scene that I had been fortunate enough to watch from the inside, watch it become what it is now. It\'s flourishing. I was there for the foundation. And it has that Waylon \[Jennings\] feel, because Rowdy fucking loved Waylon. And Shooter Jennings, in my opinion, was one of the very first ones in my time to kick off the whole outside-of-country-radio country.” **“Shade Tree”** “That is the only song, maybe out of every album I\'ve ever made, that the vocal you hear is the vocal right then. We cut that song with a full band a couple days before, and it was good, but the whole idea of this album was I wanted to be ‘Southern eclectic,’ but really honed in on the Georgia aspect of rural soul, country soul music, which it’s damn near the birthplace, ground zero, of that. And \[when\] we cut it, \[we\] leaned a little more into the soul side of that song. So I wanted to rerecord it. I got the percussionist and the harmonica player and we just laid it down completely live. That song was actually a song that I wrote with my sister the day before we started the session. And that was the last song I wrote for the album. My wife also helped write that song.”