Rolling Stone's 25 Best Country & Americana Albums of 2021

Morgan Wade’s road to her debut album has been a winding one. The Virginia-born artist is only 26 years old, but the songs that make up the album reveal a depth of life experience—including heartbreak, addiction, and sobriety—typically only heard from older, more seasoned songwriters. After devoting herself in earnest to songwriting in her freshman year of college, Wade began playing shows and festivals locally and regionally, eventually landing on the radar of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit guitarist Sadler Vaden, who co-produced *Reckless* with Paul Ebersold (Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, The Weeks). The resulting 10 tracks are fringe country at its finest, recalling the spitfire sass of Miranda Lambert and the hard-earned wisdom of Ashley McBryde. Though Wade’s wildest years are behind her, she tells Apple Music that making *Reckless* helped her bridge the gap between her rowdier younger days and her future as a professional musician. “I felt like it summed up these songs, whether it was referencing me being reckless or someone else being reckless, or just life in general feeling reckless sometimes,” she says. “So I think that it’s the perfect title for that chapter of my life.” Below, Wade tells Apple Music what inspired each song. **Wilder Days** “Sadler and I co-wrote that together. And it was just the concept of meeting an older guy who has cleaned up his act a little bit. He still has that side to him, but you know that if time would have allowed it, you guys would have gotten into some trouble and been more of a Bonnie-and-Clyde-type thing. So it’s not a depressing song but more of a ‘This isn’t going to work, but it could have worked.’” **Matches and Metaphors** “I had drank way too much coffee that day and I remember I stayed up all night. And I was actually putting a puzzle together at two in the morning, and I don\'t know why I remember that. So, just a ‘late night, miss you, where are you at’ kind of song.” **Other Side** “We were actually recording the record and I was at my hotel. And I woke up one morning and I had that thought in my head of my boyfriend knowing me before all of this. It was like, he\'s the one that\'s been there the whole time, before I had the tattoos. He remembers me before I was sober. He\'s seen all of that.” **Don’t Cry** “I was in the studio and Paul had this track and I was like, ‘You know what? Just keep playing it on a loop.’ And I just sat down with a notebook and listened to it for an hour straight and wrote ‘Don\'t Cry.’ I\'m thinking it was December or January, something around there, which is always a pretty difficult time for me mentally. Just the weather, the time change, everything. And then, of course, it was a good time that we put it out the following year, 2020, and that December was when it came out. For me, it was a big deal to put it out then, because it was like, ‘You know, it\'s been about a year since I\'ve experienced that and I\'ve grown from that.’ And it was just nice to reconnect with that song myself.” **Mend** “That\'s the only song on the record that I wrote before I was sober, and I\'ve been sober for almost four years, and that was the first song Sadler had heard of mine. And Paul and Sadler were very adamant about me putting that one on the record.” **Last Cigarette** “It’s just that idea of, like, ‘Just one more time. I know it\'s bad for me. I know this is not helping me, but just one more time.’ And I feel like we do that a lot with anything in life. And then your last time\'s really not your last time.” **Take Me Away** “I picked up my guitar one day, and it was early morning. And, with the idea of being this person that can be cut off and short and keep things to myself, it\'s just about being vulnerable and letting somebody in.” **Reckless** “Sadler had the idea for ‘Reckless.’ And when we were writing it together, he was like, ‘Man, *Reckless* would sound like a cool album title.’ And that was about it, that\'s all we\'d said about it. And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And then we never brought that up again. And then, when it came time to be like, ‘All right, what are we going to call this thing?’ I was like, ‘Well, that fits it.’ And I felt like it summed up these songs, whether it was referencing me being reckless or someone else being reckless or just life in general feeling reckless sometimes. So I think that was the perfect title for that chapter of my life.” **Northern Air** “We wrote that one about somebody moving away, and the character being in the same place, like, ‘What\'s it like where you\'re at and what can I do to get you to come home?’” **Met You** “I\'m a big Ernest Hemingway fan. There\'s a book written about him \[*Hemingway in Love* by A.E. Hotchner\] and it was just talking about how he never got over his first wife, Hadley. And he started getting fame and his books were picking up and everything good was going on for him when he was living in Paris. He ended up falling in love with another woman and leaving Hadley and breaking her heart. And there was a part where he was in Paris and he saw her years later and told her, ‘Any true thing I write, any true woman I write about, is you.’ And he just never did let go. In this book, he was older and his health wasn\'t great and he was still sitting there and just saying, ‘I regret that.’ And for him, it was just never over.”

Allison Russell has long been a fixture of the roots scene, crafting melodic roots-pop as part of the duo Birds of Chicago and inventive, socially conscious folk with the acclaimed supergroup Our Native Daughters. The Nashville-based, Montreal-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist steps out on her own on her debut album, an expertly rendered and powerfully delivered collection that proves Russell to be just as adept a solo artist as she is a collaborator. (Though, in the spirit of collaboration, Russell invites friends and fellow musicians like Yola, Erin Rae, and the McCrary Sisters to join her.) Thematically, *Outside Child* navigates difficult terrain—such as abuse, neglect, and racism—though it does so with an undercurrent of healing, transformation, and compassion. In an album full of standout moments, it’s hard not to point to “4th Day Prayer,” a brutally frank recollection of Russell’s sexual abuse at the hands of her adoptive father, built atop a soulful, gospel-adjacent arrangement that suggests empowerment rather than victimhood. Russell is one of roots music’s finest musicians in any form, but with *Outside Child*, she stakes her claim as one of its finest visionaries too.

Eric Church’s *Heart & Soul* was the most ambitious work of the country star’s career—a triple album showing off his depth, versatility, and chameleonic nature as an artist. Originally a fan club exclusive, the six songs making up *&* complete the trilogy, rounding out what was already an impressive showing from the Chief. *&* opens with “Through My Ray-Bans,” an emotive, image-rich illustration of how Church sees the world. “Do Side” is a slinky, stuttering jam session, sure to become a staple of Church’s fiery live shows. “Mad Man” is a breakup song as only Church could write one, with lines like “His thumbs-up has been grounded/Now it’s that bird he loves to fly.” Closer “Lone Wolf” caps off the record in grand fashion, complete with a gospel choir and one of Church’s finest vocal performances.

Marfa, Texas, has played host to countless artists over the years, musical and otherwise. The storied West Texas town is known as much for its vast collection of fine arts as its famed Marfa lights, making it a popular destination for anyone in need of a bit of cosmic inspiration. For Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, and Jon Randall, Marfa offered the perfect setting for songwriting retreats, so much so that the trio returned for repeat visits over the last few years. “Jon had been preaching Marfa to us for a long time and telling us how magical it was,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “We\'re all from Texas, but that\'s like a whole other state in itself over there in that area. That was the first time we\'d ever written as a trio even though we had been friends forever. It was instant chemistry, for sure.” *The Marfa Tapes* captures the magic the trio found across 15 tracks, recorded in just five days using one acoustic guitar and two microphones. Accordingly, the desert itself plays a prominent sonic role in the project, with the occasional breeze or crackle of firewood adding the kind of intimacy that can’t be created in a recording studio. In addition to a number of new and unreleased songs, the collection includes an emotional, stripped-down version of Lambert’s beloved *The Weight of These Wings* song “Tin Man” as well as an acoustic take on *Wildcard*’s “Tequila Does.” Below, the trio offers insight into two of the highlights on *The Marfa Tapes*. **“Ghost”** **Lambert:** “That was one of those moments where I was actually venting. I was telling them two things I had done recently to make myself feel better. Some of that involves burning some clothes that weren\'t mine. That\'s how the ball started rolling.” **Randall:** “We were stuck. We were sitting around a fire, and we were playing the song over and over. It never had that thing, whether it\'s a hook or just someone to make it real. That\'s when she goes, ‘And heaven knows I ain\'t afraid of ghosts.’ I started freaking out. \[Jack\] got up and danced around.” **“Amazing Grace (West Texas)”** **Lambert:** “That was all Jon Randall.” **Ingram:** “Around the mountains, you can see for a hundred miles. We saw this cloud and the storm coming in. You could see it raining and how it just looks gray all the way to the ground. It rolled into the ranch where we stayed, the bunk house. It was just beautiful. That song was just like a soundtrack to what we were seeing and the landscape, just the people and the towns and the cows. It\'s like a soundtrack to our trip.” **Randall:** “I can remember how it felt to be at that table outside writing the song. You become part of your own picture.”

Sturgill Simpson has made several sonic detours over the last few years, sharply veering away from the cosmic country of his breakout 2014 album *Metamodern Sounds in Country Music*, particularly into prog rock on 2019’s *SOUND & FURY* and revisiting his bluegrass roots on the 2020 releases *Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 1 (Butcher Shoppe Sessions)* and *Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 2 (Cowboy Arms Sessions)*. *The Ballad of Dood & Juanita* falls more squarely in the latter’s territory, pulling from bluegrass, gospel, traditional country, and mountain music. Thematically, *Dood & Juanita* is a concept album, telling a continuous narrative throughout, something Simpson flirted with in the past but had yet to fully explore. And while Simpson has plenty of his own bona fides, tapping Willie Nelson to join him on “Juanita” sweetens the deal, offering a direct connection to the very lineage Simpson sets out to celebrate.

For Valerie June, spirituality and creativity are one and the same. The acclaimed singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist offered cosmic wisdom on her 2017 sophomore album *The Order of Time*, a collection of folk-leaning tracks that also significantly raised the profile of the Tennessee native. On her follow-up *The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers*, June leans further into her spiritually driven songwriting, telling Apple Music that the impetus of the album was, in part, to inspire others to use their gifts to make the world a better place. “There’s a creative space that you go to inside yourself,” she says, adding that it’s important to “begin to work with the elements in that space and to keep that space sacred and not let people take it.” Opening track “Stay” reminds the listener of the importance of staying present in a given moment, while also introducing the lush, more complex sound that June built alongside co-producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, John Legend). “Call Me a Fool,” which features legendary Memphis soul singer Carla Thomas, and “Fallin’” muse on the power and risk inherent in following a dream. And “Home Inside” channels the transformative power of introspection for an open-minded, open-hearted ode to spirituality. Below, June talks Apple Music through a few of the key tracks. **You and I** “You\'ll notice there\'s two of everything on the record: two drummers, two guitars. We were able to build the sound and take it and make it just that much crazier to meet what I was hearing in my head. The first layering of it I was like, ‘No, I hear it more dimensional, I hear more sonic madness.’ And it\'s a song for sharing, it\'s a song for friendship, for discovery. And for realizing that our thoughts and our intentions, when we join them together with others, that\'s what\'s creating the world we see. And we can\'t have anything without each other.” **Call Me a Fool (feat. Carla Thomas)** “The fool card in the tarot deck represents new beginnings. It represents being on edge and adventurous and crazy and daring. So ‘Call Me a Fool’ is a song for taking the leap. It\'s for being afraid of failure and having the confidence to say, ‘Yeah, I know society might not be ready for my dream of peace and love or whatever the hell it is, or my relationship or whatever, however you relate to it.’ By the end of the song, Carla, the one who was the warning and wise fairy godmother \[in previous track ‘African Proverb’\], she\'s like, ‘Well, I\'m glad you did it, baby.’ And she sings along with you.” **Smile** “It’s a song of transcendence, a song of hope and possibilities and being reborn. And as a Black woman, looking at my people, we\'ve had to continue to be reborn. And sometimes there have been times where all we had was a smile and just to say that that\'s not going to be taken. And for each person, no matter what race they are, to realize that your joy and your positivity and your beauty and the way you see the world—it is a power and it is a tool and it can be manipulated if you let it. But if you don\'t let it, it\'s one of your greatest gifts.” **Within You** “It\'s a mantra song. It is a song for carving out sacred space in your life, inside of yourself, every day.” **Starlight Ethereal Silence** “Jack and I decided that we needed 30 seconds of silence on the record, because I believe that silence is music and that no moment is ever completely silent. And I realized that we, as humans, can\'t hear everything. Your dog can hear things that you can\'t hear, or a dolphin can hear things that humans can\'t hear. So I just wanted to have that moment carved out of silence but then enter into the realm where we\'re being mindful, and we realize that, ‘Hey, yeah, we\'re humans and we\'re special, but we\'re not the only thing on this Earth, making music.’”

“I feel like I\'ve been pretty much saying what I\'m thinking my whole life,” Lainey Wilson tells Apple Music about the credo that also serves as the title of her first full-length album. “My parents wanted to put a dang muzzle on me a time or two, really.” *Sayin\' What I\'m Thinkin\'* may be a debut, but the collection of songs sounds like the work of a far more seasoned artist. True to its title, the 12-song LP finds Wilson putting all her cards on the table as she writes clever, no-holds-barred country songs in the tradition of Miranda Lambert and Gretchen Wilson, with a little pop sass and Southern-rock grit thrown in for good measure. Opener \"Neon Diamonds\" is a fresh spin on looking for love, while \"Pipe\" encourages listeners to let their freak flags fly. Wilson knows her way around a party anthem, but she can get vulnerable, too, like on the unexpectedly heartfelt \"Keeping Bars in Business\" and the closing title track. Below, Wilson shares how each of the tracks on *Sayin\' What I\'m Thinkin\'* came to be. **Neon Diamonds** \"We were bound and determined that day to write a fun song for the girls, really. The first line of the song is \'My left hand ain\'t interested in nothing but a drink in it.\' It\'s just one of those songs that I feel like girls will put on when they\'re getting ready to get back out there and go have a good time when the bars are open.\" **Sunday Best** \"I had the song, and I wrote it with Brice Long and Shane Minor—those are literally two of the countriest dudes I know in Nashville. Actually, that day, we had written it as \'drinking in my Sunday dress.\' I loved the song, but it was still not connecting to me for some reason. Then I realized the reason is because I don\'t wear dresses. Last minute, I was like, \'Well, how about we change it to Sunday best?\' It\'s telling a story about how everybody deals with heartbreak different. Some people cry about it, some people drink about it, some people pray about it, or all of the above.\" **Things a Man Oughta Know** \"I wrote the song with Jason Nix and Jonathan Singleton. Jason had come into Big Machine that day with this idea called \'Things a Man Oughta Know.\' We sat there and we were drinking a pot of coffee that morning, and we were just talking about all the things that we thought a man ought to know. So this song really is, it\'s about having good character. It\'s about discernment, and it\'s about having the courage to do the right thing. Bottom line, it\'s about treating people the way that you want to be treated. I\'m not saying that you\'re not a man if you don\'t know how to change a tire, even though you probably should figure that out.\" **Small Town, Girl** \"I sat there for a few hours and I just aired out all my dirty laundry, and sometimes I think that\'s what you got to do to get a good song. Really, the song is just coming from a perspective of me confronting an old hussy. I hope she\'s reading this, too.\" **LA** \"When I moved \[to Nashville\] from Baskin, Louisiana, about 10 years ago, I was living here in my camper trailer. Everywhere I\'d go, I\'d open my mouth to speak and meet people, and literally the first thing that would come out of their mouth was, \'Where in the world are you from?\' I\'d tell them LA. I was talking about Louisiana, and they were thinking I was talking about Hollywood.\" **Dirty Looks** \"This song is really just telling a story about a blue-collar couple, and I know a thing or two about blue-collar people. I come from a farming community where people take extreme pride in working hard and making a good living for their family. This song really just draws a vivid picture of your everyday blue-collar couple going to grab a beer after the man\'s been busting his ass at work all day long. In my opinion, it don\'t get much sexier than that: dirty looks.\" **Pipe** \"If I could describe \'Pipe\' in three words, I would say it\'s my redneck rulebook. Words to live by. I walked into Luke Dick\'s studio. He has a garage set up behind his house. And I had never met him either. This was the first time we wrote. He was smoking a pipe just right there in the middle of his studio, just lighting that thing up. I was like, \'What is this man doing?\' but like, \'This is my kind of people. He don\'t give two shits what I think. It\'s kind of awesome.\' In my head, I was just sitting there looking at him like, \'He is unapologetically himself, and I love it.\' I was thinking, \'Well, put a little bit of that in your pipe and smoke it.\' I actually said it out loud to him. I said, \'Have you written that?\' He said, \'No, but that\'s what we\'re writing today.\'\" **Keeping Bars in Business** \"I was on tour with Morgan Wallen and HARDY, and we were out in Denver. My dog—her name was Puddin\', she was a little Boston terrier—she was staying with my parents back home in Louisiana because I was going to be on the road for a few months. Long story short, it\'s a real sad story, but they had to put her down when I was on the road. Losing her was, to be honest with you, probably harder than losing some family members, because they are family. Whether you\'re celebrating or whether your heart\'s breaking, at the end of the day, we\'re all keeping bars in business, with an exception of 2020.\" **Straight Up Sideways** \"Right when I thought that you could run out of ways of saying, \'Let\'s get drunk,\' or \'Let\'s turn it up,\' Jason Nix, Reid Isbell, and Dan Alley, literally, it just came out of them. I\'m going to quote the chorus right here: \'Tip them back until you can\'t walk, cut loose like a chainsaw, plastered like a drywall, hammered like an old bent nail, jacked up like a four-by, buzzed as a bug light, long gone as last night, loaded like a buckshot shell. There\'s more than one way to get straight-up sideways.\' There\'s no countrier way to say, \'Let\'s get a little drunk tonight.\'\" **WWDD** \"I wrote this with Michael Heeney and Casey Beathard, and those boys, they knew how much I love Dolly Parton and how much I look up to her. I feel like if more people were a little bit like Dolly, the world would be a much better place. She just has been a huge influence of mine in all parts of my life. When I\'m going through things in life and I don\'t really know how to handle them, I just ask myself, \'What would Dolly do?\'\" **Rolling Stone** \"\'Rolling Stone,\' when I really break it down, it really just tells a story about wanting something so bad in life and not letting anything or anybody stand in your way. I\'m from a town of 300 people. That was literally the only thing I knew. And I\'ve always wanted to be in Nashville. But I knew that that meant that I was going to have to let go of certain things and certain people in my life. I was dating my high school sweetheart, just the same good ol\' boy, for years. He didn\'t realize it at the time, but he was holding me back a little bit. So I bought a camper trailer, I drove it to Nashville, and I wrote this song. It just kind of tells that story.\" **Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’** \"There comes a point where you finally realize you\'re going to be stuck in the same exact place for a very long time if you don\'t hurry up and do something about it. Breaking somebody\'s heart, it\'s terrible. Sometimes it hurts just as bad breaking somebody\'s as yours. It hurts just as bad getting yours hurt. But yeah, \'Sayin\' What I\'m Thinkin\'\' is just about letting those walls down and just cutting to it.\"

After Yola signed with Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye recordings and released *Walk Through Fire*, her genre-melding full-length debut that earned her four Grammy nominations (including a 2020 nod for Best New Artist), she found herself facing a stubborn foe: writer’s block. Her increasingly demanding career yielded accolades and an ever-growing fanbase that included artists like The Highwomen and director Baz Luhrmann, but she found herself struggling to write at the height of it. “I had ideas right the way through, from 2013, when I was learning to play guitar, through to when I first started doing shows in late 2015,” she tells Apple Music. “But I hadn\'t had a single idea from 2019 into the pandemic—just nothing. That level of being busy just completely poached my ability to write. I started deconstructing my process of how my brain likes to function when I\'m creating.” If she started humming a tune while straightening up the house, she wouldn\'t immediately try to interrogate it. She sought out stillness and space, a contrast to what she calls the “excessively conscious” state she often found herself in. “When that part of my brain was off, ideas would appear almost instantly,” she says. “I clearly had inspiration, but there were situations that stopped the ideas coming to the fore, stopped me being able to access them.” Eventually, Yola wrote her way out of writer’s block and into *Stand for Myself*, an album that meets the high standard she set with *Walk Through Fire* while drawing in new sounds (namely disco, which drives the groove of “Dancing Away in Tears”) and doubling down on vintage vibes (notably the ’70s soul of “Starlight”) and declarations of self-empowerment. New collaborators came along for the soulful journey, too: Joy Oladokun, Ruby Amanfu, and Natalie Hemby co-wrote songs for the album (as did Auerbach, who produced the album, along with *Walk Through Fire*), and Brandi Carlile lends her voice to “Be My Friend,” an all-too-timely celebration of allyship. Below, Yola talks through a few of the songs on the album and how they helped get her back on track. **“Barely Alive”** “The first song on the record, ‘Barely Alive,’ is co-written by Joy Oladokun. We were talking about what it\'s like to be Africans and isolated, and playing guitar, and singing songs, and being into a very broad spectrum of music—and growing up having to explain our existence, and ourselves. You are so often called on to minimize yourself. It can be that your life experience is uncomfortable to somebody and it\'s triggering their white fragility, so they\'re encouraging you to speak less on it, or better still, not at all, and to suffer in silence. If you can\'t speak on your life, then you can\'t address what\'s right and wrong with it. That\'s where the album jumps off from: It\'s a very concise narrative on my journey, from that place of being a doormat to having some agency over my own life.” **“Break the Bough”** “‘Break the Bough’ dates back to 2013, and was started on the evening of my mother\'s funeral. It doesn\'t sound like a song that was written on the horns of a funeral; it\'s a real party song. In that moment I realized that none of us are getting out of this thing called life alive, and so whatever we think we\'re doing with our lives, we better do a better job of it—just manifest the things that you want to manifest, and be the you that you most want to be. I\'d been in a writing block up until that point, and that sparked me to decide to learn to play guitar and inexorably start writing songs again—and that led me here.” **“Be My Friend”** “‘Be My Friend’ was one of the songs to arrive in my mind almost complete. That was a real moment, when I was able to come up with something that felt really real, really true, really about the time I was in, but also about my journey. It was as much about allyship \[as\] it was the idea of what I needed to get to this point in the first place. I thought it was important to call Brandi to sing with me: She\'d had the same conversation with me pertaining to queerness, and the pursuit of not being a token, and to manifest your most true self in your art so you don\'t feel like you\'re apologizing for yourself or hiding yourself in your art.” **“Stand for Myself”** “The song ‘Stand for Myself’ is the ultimate conclusion of a concept. It starts with referencing the \'Barely Alive\' version of myself: \'I understand why you\'re essentially burying your head in the sand: You want to feel nothing.\' But also, it can speak on people that are experiencing white fragility. It\'s like, I get it, it makes you feel uncomfortable. You don\'t want to have to feel empathy for people that aren\'t like you, because it feels like work. But then it\'s saying, \'I was like that, I was an absolute parrot, and I didn\'t have any sets of perspective of what I might stand to gain from not being such an anxious twonk.\' That\'s really where we get to: But I did do it, because I was left without choice. Now I feel like I\'m actually alive, and it\'s really great. You can have this, too, if you\'re actually willing to do the work—go and take the implicit test, find out what your biases are, work on them, feel things for other people that aren\'t clones of you—and that\'s really everything. When someone goes, \'Hey, this album should be called *Don\'t Mess With Yola!*,\' I\'m like, you\'ve missed the point of this record. It\'s not a *don\'t mess with*. It\'s not *I\'m a strong Black woman*. It\'s the deserving of softness and a measure of kindness and of support and friendship and love. And that\'s really all encapsulated in \'Stand for Myself.\'”

It’s not uncommon for debut artists to navigate a circuitous route to releasing their first full-length project, but few have traversed paths as long and arduous as Mickey Guyton’s road to *Remember Her Name*. The Nashville-based singer-songwriter first signed a record deal in 2011 and, 10 years later, is finally releasing her debut album. “This whole album really is my life, and my learning self-acceptance, over the last 10 years,” Guyton tells Apple Music. “The ups, the downs, the back and forth, the impostor syndrome that we all tend to get because of the downs—all of that is wrapped up in one album.” *Remember Her Name* opens with the powerful title track, which was inspired both by the murder of Breonna Taylor and by Guyton’s own reclamation of the sense of self that 10 years in the music industry mercilessly eroded. Empowerment is a recurring theme throughout the LP, but Guyton rejects schmaltzy clichés in favor of nuanced, often painfully personal stories of working through internalized racism (“Love My Hair,” “Black Like Me”), embracing the inherently imperfect nature of a marriage (“Lay It on Me”), and fighting for space in a white-dominated industry (a particularly moving rerecording of her 2015 track “Better Than You Left Me”). “I hope people walk away from the album feeling seen,” Guyton adds. “I tried to put my life on display in an honest way, showing the good and the bad. And I hope people can hear that in that album and find hope within their own lives from it.” Below, Guyton walks us through several key tracks on *Remember Her Name*. **“Remember Her Name”** “I wrote ‘Remember Her Name’ in the pandemic. And I was actually watching what happened with Breonna Taylor. Whenever someone is wrongly murdered, a lot of people say, ‘Say their name. Remember their name.’ So, I was inspired by that. And then, as I was writing the song, it turned into my own story as an artist. When I first started music, I had so much excitement and confidence in myself, and then life happened and I lost every ounce of confidence that I ever had. No matter what life did to you, that person, that fire is still in you, and you have to find that person. And the reason why I called it ‘Remember Her Name’ for the album was because it took me so long to get to this point of releasing my first body of work, ever.” **“All American”** “I also wrote ‘All American’ in the pandemic while very, very pregnant. And the funny story about that is, when I tried to record the song, if I ate, I couldn’t sing because I had no room left. My baby was taking over. So, I would have to come back another day when I didn’t have any food in my stomach to be able to record it. I wanted to write a song showing that our differences make America great. I think so many people have forgotten that. And in this genre—this predominantly white genre—I wanted to sing a song that was true to me and all the different parts of America, whether it’s the Texas sky or the New York City lights, whether it’s James Brown or James Dean or Daisy Dukes and dookie braids. All of that is American.” **“Love My Hair”** “I wrote that song after I watched this video on YouTube of this little Black girl with braids crying to her mother because she got sent home from school because they said her hair was distracting. I couldn’t even finish the video because it took me back to my own struggles, as a little girl, with self-love and being in predominantly white spaces in school and just being different. I had those experiences and it’s taken me a long time to get over that and to learn self-acceptance. And this song was a step in that direction.” **“Lay It on Me”** “My husband and I have been together for a long time, almost 11 years. At one point in time, he was really, really sick and he almost died. I just remember, at the time, I was broke and I was working on this album; I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. He wouldn’t let me quit. Even when I wanted to just give up my apartment in Nashville and move to LA, he wouldn’t allow it. And he was giving everything so that I could pursue this dream. It’s watching someone that I love struggle and me wanting to take the load off them for a second.” **“Black Like Me”** “A lot of these songs I’d written two, three years ago. And ‘Black Like Me’ was kind of the one that helped me focus on what, exactly, I was trying to say in this album. I was chasing after acceptance, and chasing after acceptance in a predominantly white genre. And that was a tough pill for me to swallow, but I took it on the chin and had to take a minute and look at myself. As I was looking at myself, I was looking at everything that I was doing in this industry and trying to just get a chance. And it broke me a little bit. ‘Black Like Me’ was that moment of me being like, ‘Hey, it’s hard. It’s really hard for Black people.’ Some have it easier than others, and I’m definitely on the easier side of the spectrum. But there’s a lot of people that it is not easy for, and I wanted to sing about that.” **“Better Than You Left Me” (Fly Higher Version)** “I don’t know what came over me, but I knew that the anniversary of that song was coming up and I was like, ‘I need to do an updated version.’ It has a totally different meaning now, and I needed to put that on the album. When I first wrote the song, I wrote it about an ex that I was so brokenhearted over and that I’d moved on from. But that was forever ago, and that guy is not even a thought in my head anymore; he doesn\'t matter to me, but the song does. I pulled myself out of that with the help of a small group of people. I wanted to include that because I’m just so different and I am better than the town left me. I’m stronger. I love deeper. I fly higher. I’m all of those things.”

All songs written by Micheal Harmeier and Adam Odor except “Paycheck To Paycheck,” written by Micheal Harmeier, Adam Odor, and Omar Oyoque Produced by Adam Odor & Mike And The Moonpies Engineered and Mixed by Adam Odor at Yellow Dog Studios, Wimberley, TX Additional Engineering by Adam Lasus at Studio Red, Los Angeles, CA, and Joel Raif at Niles City Sound, Ft. Worth, TX Mastered by Eric Conn at Independent Mastering, Nashville, TN

A former glam-rock guitarist, Aaron Lee Tasjan is more musically diverse than his 2016 Americana-leaning breakout *Silver Tears* may have suggested. On his fourth album *Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!*, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitarist fully explores his kaleidoscopic vision, fusing Petty-esque heartland rock, Velvet Underground-style art pop, Beatles-styled psychedelia, and modern Americana to craft a truly singular sound. Opening track \"Sunday Women\" is spacey and playful, with Tasjan\'s guitar, at times, mimicking a synthesizer. \"Computer of Love\" pairs incisive lyrics and an acid-laced arrangement to turn a keen eye on social-media-induced narcissism. And on tracks like \"Feminine Walk,\" \"Up All Night,\" and \"Dada Bois,\" Tasjan frankly acknowledges his own gender and sexual fluidity, with vulnerability, heart, and a healthy dose of humor. It\'s appropriate that Tasjan offered this LP as a (cleverly) self-titled project, as it\'s his most fully realized work yet.

“I always want to engage the listener in a question instead of an answer,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music in a conversation about her new album and its provocative title. “That\'s why it\'s *In These Silent Days*. It\'s a question: What did you learn? What did you make of yourself? What did you lose? What happened to you in this time? I want to invite people to reflect, because it\'s such a pivotal time in human history, and a real spiritual upheaval for so many people in really positive and really negative, complicated ways.” Carlile herself was in a deeply retrospective—and stationary—place when she started working on her seventh album. After the resounding success of 2018’s *By the Way, I Forgive You* (which earned her three Grammys), the folk-rock singer-songwriter and her collaborators Phil and Tim Hanseroth (affectionately known as “the twins”) spent much of the two years following its release on the road, pausing only to record the 2019 debut record from The Highwomen, Carlile’s country supergroup with Maren Morris, Amanda Shires, and Natalie Hemby, and for Carlile to co-produce *While I’m Livin’*, the comeback album for outlaw country queen Tanya Tucker. The pandemic forced a slowdown in 2020, and that’s when Carlile started writing—the songs that would eventually wind up on *In These Silent Days*, but also her memoir, *Broken Horses*. “Writing that book gave me this really linear understanding of ‘here\'s how I started and here\'s how I am, and these are the things in between that made it so,’ and it was such clarity,” she says. “This was the first time that I knew what I was writing the songs about while I was writing them. I had so much more to pull from, so much more sensory material, than this abstract half-truth.” *In These Silent Days* meets the standard Carlile has set for her own songwriting: Piano-laden power ballads abound, from the sweeping grandeur of album opener “Right on Time” to the Elton John-channeling “Letter to the Past” through to “Sinners, Saints and Fools,” which gives any rock opera climax a run for its money. Fingerpickin’ folk anthems (“Mama Werewolf”), acoustic meditations (“When You’re Wrong”), and straightforward rock (“Broken Horses”) round out the album and recall the intimacy and intensity that have come to define her live shows. It’s both a companion piece to her memoir and a separate musical autobiography: This is how Carlile spent her silent days, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way. “I realized how much affirmation I get from strangers—that life-affirming response that you get from an audience when you perform,” she says of her new perspective gleaned from this transformative time. “If everybody could just have a job where they just go to scream and stomp all the time, I think they would probably find themselves a little more well-rounded.”

A lot changed for Amythyst Kiah between the 2013 release of her debut album *Dig* and the making of *Wary + Strange*. The singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist gained significant notoriety as part of the roots music supergroup Our Native Daughters, with whom she earned a Grammy nomination (Best American Roots Song) for the song “Black Myself,” on which Kiah was the sole songwriter. Kiah reprises that powerful track here, though she does so in a way truer to her own personal musical sensibilities by fusing her love for both old-time music, which she studied at East Tennessee State University, and indie rock. *Wary + Strange* finds a rich middle ground between these seemingly disparate genres, primarily via the strength of Kiah’s songwriting and singing, the latter of which deserves just as much celebration as her masterful guitar playing, as well as studio assists from producer Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers, Andrew Bird).

Named for an alliterative trio of things that, at varying degrees, can offer healing, the Nashville-based quintet’s fourth studio album is, at moments, their most introspective outing, though sonically the LP still hews closely to the loose jam-country sound they’re known for. The latter is evident on lead single “I Was on a Boat That Day,” a breezy, beachy kiss-off to a lover who walks away. And on standout “No Hard Feelings,” the group taps into their more vulnerable side, presenting a nuanced look at finding platonic harmony after a difficult breakup. The band wrote and recorded the LP in Asheville, North Carolina, where they spent a stretch of time during the pandemic working at the city’s famed Echo Mountain Recording. “We thought it would be a cool thing to try to get outside of Nashville and make a record somewhere else,” lead vocalist Matthew Ramsey tells Apple Music. “We have all kinds of obligations and responsibilities here, and no matter how much you try to separate yourself from that, when you\'re in Nashville, that\'s always going to be there.” Below, the band talks through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“No Hard Feelings”** Geoff Sprung (bassist): “I think it\'s kind of the ideal. We don\'t always get there, but that is kind of, hopefully, the goal any time any kind of relationship ends.” **“All I Know About Girls”** Matthew Ramsey: “That was the last one we wrote, actually, in the whole trip. And at that point we\'re kind of \[running\] on fumes, wondering if we\'re going to have anything, or energy even to do it. And then, of course, Brad \[Tursi\] walks in with this guitar lick and we\'re all like, ‘Man, that\'s super cool.’ I remember we were just sort of kind of joking around on that ‘yeah, baby, now, baby, whatever you want, baby’ part of it. And then you land on the hook: ‘I don\'t know nothing at all.’ And then it\'s like, ‘Wow, what a true statement.’” **“Lonely Side of Town” (feat. Gladys Knight)** Ramsey: “We were standing in the hallway at the studio, because we were in Asheville making this album, and we found out that \[Knight\] lives there. And we came up with the idea of her singing on it before we realized that she lived right down the street. So we\'re talking to the studio manager, who knew her, and we were like, ‘Make sure to tell her that we actually are legitimate, we have hits on the radio, and that we\'ve won some awards.’ So they called and she was like, ‘Of course. I don\'t even need to hear the song. I know these guys. I know their music.’ And we were like, ‘Oh, oh, oh, okay.’”

“We think we delivered our best album of our career so far,” Dan + Shay’s Dan Smyers tells Apple Music of *Good Things*, which follows the pop-country duo’s 2018 smash self-titled third album. That may sound like a bold statement, but Smyers and bandmate Shay Mooney certainly deliver the hits on *Good Things*, which features massive singles like “Glad You Exist,” “I Should Probably Go to Bed,” and the Justin Bieber-assisted pop crossover “10,000 Hours,” which won the duo a Grammy at the 2021 ceremony and shattered streaming records upon its release. While the COVID-19 pandemic halted touring, the time off gave Smyers and Mooney an unexpected amount of time to round out the LP. “We were able to dive in like we would on our first album and just spend every waking minute of the day,” Smyers says, “really, really refining it and making it the best that we possibly could.” Fans of the duo’s infectious, hook-laden take on commercial country will have plenty to dig in to on *Good Things*, thanks both to Smyers’ production and musicianship (he plays many of the instruments across the LP) and Mooney’s inimitable voice. The title track boasts a sneakily complex arrangement, with layer upon layer of harmony vocals making for a massive earworm of a chorus. “Lying” sonically channels Mooney’s roots singing in church. And “Body Language,” a catchy, clever co-write with pop superstar Shawn Mendes, is sure to be another crossover success for the duo. Below, Mooney and Smyers walk Apple Music through several key tracks on *Good Things*. **“Good Things”** Dan Smyers: “‘Good Things’ was actually the first song that we ever wrote on Zoom, which is crazy to say. We wrote that on Zoom with a couple of friends of ours, Ashley Gorley, Jason Evigan, and Ross Copperman. It brought us back to the old days of when we moved to Nashville, writing with just an acoustic guitar. Somebody has a title or a concept and you start writing down words and coming up with melodies, rather than what it\'s evolved to where there\'s a fully produced track that happens first. Nothing against that, we love doing that too, but it just brought us back to basics and allowed us to really focus on the words and the narrative of the song.” **“Body Language”** Shay Mooney: “We actually wrote that with our friend Shawn Mendes. You might\'ve heard of him. He\'s a very, very talented human being, one of the best-looking guys around, I would have to say. Shawn is one of the most talented people on planet Earth. He is absolutely involved and he\'s very hands-on with the process of writing. We got in there with just an acoustic guitar. Dan always has these cool, quirky titles in his phone where he\'ll say them halfway through the write sometimes and we\'re like, ‘That\'s amazing, dude. Why didn\'t you say that at the beginning?’” **“Lying”** Smyers: “‘Lying’ is one of the most fun songs on the album. Shay grew up singing in the church, so a lot of that gospel influence is definitely very present in that song. We had our friends Andy Albert and Jordan Reynolds out on the road with us. We were playing at a festival or a county fair somewhere in the Midwest, and we had this little trailer. I don\'t even know if it had power outlets, it was just this trailer sitting out there in the middle of the dirt, and we pulled up the laptop and Jordan played this little riff, this piano thing. And then we started to freestyle that chorus. It just poured out of us really quickly and we were like, ‘This is something.’” **“Glad You Exist”** Mooney: “That song was very special from the beginning. We actually wrote this before COVID had hit. We had written the song and Dan had that title—it was something that he was saying in everyday life. It\'s a tough sentiment to write with a title like that. And it\'s hard to write those songs sometimes because it\'s very universal. It\'s ambiguous and people can relate to it in their own way, which is very special when you can pull that off. And we just wanted to spread some love and positivity. A lot of people don\'t necessarily have the right words to say, and sometimes a song is just what they need when they need that encouragement.” **“10,000 Hours” (with Justin Bieber)** Smyers: “That was the first song that came out off the album, which, with the success of that song, it really set us off on the right foot. It propelled everything for us and expanded our music into places that we\'d never been to before, and we\'re very grateful for that. That song came about when we were hanging out in Nashville and I had the title on my phone, ‘10,000 Hours.’ We were trying to figure out how we could make that into a love song. How can you relate that to somebody or to a relationship? And it was about learning someone, learning about your significant other. They say it takes 10,000 hours to truly master something or to learn a new skill. And the song is just about wanting to know more, or wanting to learn everything there is to know about your significant other or somebody that you care about.” **“I Should Probably Go to Bed”** Mooney: “This was around the same time that we wrote ‘Glad You Exist.’ We were in LA right before the Grammys and we had had this little riff and this idea of ‘I should probably go to bed,’ and we didn\'t finish it. Then, 2020—the pandemic struck and we got three shows in and the rug was pulled out from under everybody. Dan and I quarantined for what felt like a year and a half and it was probably three or so months. We didn\'t get to see each other for that whole entire time. We got back together and we had that moment of just like, ‘Man, I\'m very thankful for you. Let\'s sit down and just let\'s jam out for a second.’ Dan sat down on the piano and he started playing the ‘I Should Probably Go to Bed’ riff and it was just like, ‘Whoa, man, this song is really cool.’”

When Gary Allan decided he was ready to release his 10th studio album, the longtime country artist had no shortage of material to choose from. Released eight years after his ninth effort, 2013’s *Set You Free*, the album comprises 13 tracks culled from nearly 30 Allan had in the can, a collection he describes as his honest attempt at bringing together the best of his new material. “I hope it fills that need after eight years,” Allan tells Apple Music. “There\'s a ’90s thing that\'s coming back, and I think I just wanted to take advantage of that.” That ’90s influence is all over *Ruthless*, like the midtempo opening track and popular single “Temptation” and the clever “Waste of a Whiskey Drink,” which name-checks another ’90s act: Pearl Jam. Below, Allan walks Apple Music through several key tracks on *Ruthless*. **“Temptation”** “This was brought to me by Brian Wright, my A&R guy, and it\'s just one of those songs—everybody\'s got somebody they always think about but have moved on from, always the slight temptation. I was drawn to this song, I think, mostly because of the melody. And the beat. It\'s a fun song to play live. And I\'m excited to have it out there for everybody.” **“Waste of a Whiskey Drink”** “That\'s about sitting in a bar watching somebody about to make a big mistake with a girl. And I think we\'ve all done that, known the person in the bar that\'s just trouble. You\'re telling your body, ‘Look, that\'s just a waste of a whiskey drink. You got to get out of there.’” **“Slide”** “Everybody always wonders if you\'re going to be enough for somebody. Especially when you\'re about to commit. You\'re thinking, ‘What if I\'m not enough? What if I don\'t live up to what you expect?’ And it’s got a lot of great lines in there. ‘I\'m a hellfire over holy water, blue sky hurricane, I\'m a mix of everything, and I hope if I slip, you\'ll let it slide.’ Fun song.” **“Pretty Damn Close”** “When it comes to love, I\'ve never really believed in ‘meant to be’s’ and all that stuff. I don\'t know what love is, but if it\'s not this, this is pretty damn close, I think is the sentiment of it.” **“Ruthless”** “That\'s my favorite track on there, I think that\'s why it ended up being the title track. I love the melody of it, I love the sentiment of it, I love the lyrics. It\'s one of those songs where it\'s a breakup song, and you obviously still have feelings for this person, and they\'re just kind of ghosting you, ignoring you, pretending like nothing ever happened. And you\'re just like, ‘How? How can you be so ruthless?’” **“The Hard Way”** “To me, it\'s such a poetic song. It\'s like an old rock ’n’ roll song to me—talking about crossroads, and how I feel like I\'ve learned most of my lessons by being kicked in the teeth. It\'s ‘Everything I\'ve learned, I learned the hard way.’ And I think those are better lessons. They\'re harder lessons, life lessons.”

“I think that there is always reward in choosing to be the most vulnerable,” Kacey Musgraves tells Apple Music. “I have to remind myself that that\'s one of the strongest things you can do, is to be witness to being vulnerable. So I’m just trying to lean into that, and all the emotions that come with that. The whole point of it is human connection.” With 2018’s crossover breakthrough *Golden Hour*, Musgraves guided listeners through a Technicolor vision of falling in love, documenting the early stages of a romantic relationship and the blissed-out, dreamy feelings that often come with them. But the rose-colored glasses are off on *star-crossed*, which chronicles the eventual dissolution of that same relationship and the ensuing fallout. Presented as a tragedy in three acts, *star-crossed* moves through sadness, anger, and, eventually, hopeful redemption, with Musgraves and collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk broadening the already spacey soundscape of *Golden Hour* into something truly deserving of the descriptors “lush” and “cinematic.” (To boot, the album releases in tandem with an accompanying film.) Below, Musgraves shares insight into several of *star-crossed*’s key tracks. **“star-crossed”** \"\[Guided psychedelic trips\] are incredible. At the beginning of this year, I was like, \'I want the chance to transform my trauma into something else, and I want to give myself that opportunity, even if it\'s painful.\' And man, it was completely life-changing in so many ways, but it also triggered this whole big bang of not only the album title, but the song \'star-crossed,\' the concept, me looking into the structure of tragedies themselves as an art form throughout time. It brought me closer to myself, the living thread that moves through all living things, to my creativity, the muse.\" **“if this was a movie..”** \"I remember being in the house, things had just completely fallen apart in the relationship. And I remember thinking, \'Man, if this was a movie, it wouldn\'t be like this at all.\' Like, I\'d hear his car, he\'d be running up the stairs and grabbing my face and say we\'re being stupid and we\'d just go back to normal. And it\'s just not like that. I think I can be an idealist, like an optimist in relationships, but I also love logic. I do well with someone who can also recognize common sense and logic, and doesn\'t get, like, lost in like these lofty emotions.\" **“camera roll”** \"I thought I was fine. I was on an upswing of confidence. I\'m feeling good about these life changes, where I\'m at; I made the right decision and we\'re moving forward. And then, in a moment of, I don\'t know, I guess boredom and weakness, I found myself just way back in the camera roll, just one night alone in my bedroom. Now I\'m back in 2018, now I\'m in 2017. And what\'s crazy is that we never take pictures of the bad times. There\'s no documentation of the fight that you had where, I don\'t know, you just pushed it a little too far.\" **“hookup scene”** \"So it was actually on Thanksgiving Day, and I had been let down by someone who was going to come visit me. And it was kind of my first few steps into exploring being a single 30-something-year-old person, after a marriage and after a huge point in my career, more notoriety. It was a really naked place. We live in this hookup culture; I\'m for it. I\'m for whatever makes you feel happy, as long as it\'s safe, doesn\'t hurt other people, fine. But I\'ve just never experienced that, the dating app culture and all that. It was a little shocking. And it made me just think that we all have flaws.\" **“gracias a la vida”** \"It was written by Violeta Parra, and I just think it\'s kind of astounding that she wrote that song. It was on her last release, and then she committed suicide. And this was basically, in a sense, her suicide note to the world, saying, \'Thank you, life. You have given me so much. You\'ve given me the beautiful and the terrible, and that has made up my song.\' Then you have Mercedes Sosa, who rerecords the song. Rereleases it. It finds new life. And then here I am. I\'m this random Texan girl. I\'m in Nashville. I\'m out in outer space. I\'m on a mushroom trip. And this song finds me in that state and inspires me to record it. It keeps reaching through time and living on, and I wanted to apply that sonically to the song, too.\"

“I\'ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song\'s life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we\'re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there\'s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.” That *isn\'t* what happened with *Heart & Soul*, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina\'s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I\'m going to bring in some different players on this album,’” he recalls. “And he goes, \'Man, we\'re kicking ass. If it\'s not broke—\' And I stopped him, I said, \'You break it. We have to mess this up.\'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let\'s write the song that day,” he says, thinking back to their first conversations about *Heart & Soul*. “Let\'s record the song that day. And let\'s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favorite project for that reason, because I\'ve never really put it all out there like we\'ve done on this one.” Though they’re three separate albums, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs,” he says. “We’d finish them by two or three o\'clock in the afternoon, and then we\'d go in the studio and we\'d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I\'m not going to walk in there with anything that I\'m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.” Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off,” he says. “Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.” Fans will recognize the Chief’s intensity throughout *Heart & Soul*, but one single stands out as a telltale track. “Stick That in Your Country Song” is a snarling and somber look at modern American life and the conflicts it entails, one that follows a pattern Church says has followed him from his early days as a recording artist. “If you look at our career, it\'s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive,” he says. “\'Stick That in Your Country Song,\' that\'s aggressive, but the next one\'s normally a pretty big hit. I know that\'s my best chance.”

“I\'ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song\'s life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we\'re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there\'s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.” That *isn\'t* what happened with *Heart & Soul*, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina\'s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I\'m going to bring in some different players on this album,’” he recalls. “And he goes, \'Man, we\'re kicking ass. If it\'s not broke—\' And I stopped him, I said, \'You break it. We have to mess this up.\'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let\'s write the song that day,” he says, thinking back to their first conversations about *Heart & Soul*. “Let\'s record the song that day. And let\'s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favorite project for that reason, because I\'ve never really put it all out there like we\'ve done on this one.” Though they’re three separate albums, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs,” he says. “We’d finish them by two or three o\'clock in the afternoon, and then we\'d go in the studio and we\'d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I\'m not going to walk in there with anything that I\'m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.” Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off,” he says. “Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.” Fans will recognize the Chief’s intensity throughout *Heart & Soul*, but one single stands out as a telltale track. “Stick That in Your Country Song” is a snarling and somber look at modern American life and the conflicts it entails, one that follows a pattern Church says has followed him from his early days as a recording artist. “If you look at our career, it\'s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive,” he says. “\'Stick That in Your Country Song,\' that\'s aggressive, but the next one\'s normally a pretty big hit. I know that\'s my best chance.”