Rolling Stone's 25 Best Country & Americana Albums of 2022

Iowa-born, Nashville-based country artist Hailey Whitters broke out in 2020 with her sophomore album *The Dream*, a colorful, ambitious record that introduced her as one of the genre’s more formidable songwriting talents. *Raised* picks up where that album left off, upping the ante on its predecessor’s vivid narratives and traditional country soundscape with a loosely conceptual, creatively structured collection of songs about home, family, and belonging. The title track is something of an origin story for Whitters, serving as a love letter to the place that made her who she is. “Our Grass Is Legal” and “Beer Tastes Better” play with country tropes like drinking and smoking, but reveal themselves to be multilayered stories with roots in Whitters’ family history. And the whole thing is bookended by the instrumentals “Ad Astra Per Alas Porci” (Latin for “to the stars on the wings of a pig”), lending the LP a cinematic vibe. “The music feels very Midwest, so I think the scenery is probably a little different,” Whitters tells Apple Music. “But I hope that everyone can find something that is universal or reminds them of where they came from.” Below, Whitters shares insight into several key tracks on *Raised*. **“Ad Astra Per Alas Porci”** “That is actually super influenced by John Steinbeck, who\'s a writer that I just absolutely adore. Back when I was putting out *The Dream* and I was fully independent, I named my record label Pigasus, and it was kind of a nod to Steinbeck. And it\'s also a nod to my roots, where I come from in Iowa, the Midwest. Iowa\'s the biggest pork producer in the country. So I grew up around a lot of pig farms, and it reminded me of my roots, and also the saying \'when pigs fly,\' which was a little bit of the sentiment I was feeling when I was struggling in Nashville and couldn\'t get anything going.” **“Raised”** “That song is my first love song. I really have never had a love song, and that song took on a whole different life than I thought it would when I originally threw out the title to Nicolle \[Gallyon\] that day. I think it\'s sweet, vulnerable, and it feels like a little love song to not only the love interest, but also to the town that I came from. It felt representative of the whole record, I think, just because when we started to piece all these songs together, it felt like the concept: where I came from, my roots. I consider it a ‘thank you’ to the place that raised me. I\'m so proud to be where I\'m from. And I know I wouldn\'t be where I am today without it, and without the people that I grew up with.” **“Big Family”** “I come from a giant family—I\'m one of six. My mom and my dad, both one of nine. My grandpa, one of 15. So I am very close to second and third cousins and we all still get together on holidays. Christmas Eve is always a big one. We all go over to my Aunt Tina\'s house and it\'s just loud and people are drinking and eating food. Everyone\'s welcome in the door, and we love pretty hard, pray hard, drink hard. I was sitting around the kitchen table once with some of my great-aunts and we were all just sharing a bottle of wine and they were talking about husbands and ex-husbands and boyfriends and the word of God, and that kind of inspired that song.” **“Middle of America”** “That song came from driving around western Iowa one day and seeing all of these signs that were up that were saying ‘Stop the airport, save the farms.’ I guess that was the first time I\'d ever heard of eminent domain, where the state could just take someone\'s farm. It seemed absolutely crazy to me, because not only are farms such a direct source of the food supply, but it seemed wild to me that they could just take away a farm that\'s been in generations for forever. And so that was the little mustard seed that started that song.” **“Pretty Boy”** “I was thinking a lot about the boys that I grew up with. I grew up with three brothers, a bunch of boy cousins and uncles, really wild boys that turned into strong, tough, hard-working men. And I was just thinking about some of the ways in which the expectations we put on boys and men to be tough, to not cry—‘crying’s weak,’ ‘man up,’ things like that. I think that to expect that boys aren\'t supposed to cry or show emotion or anything like that, I think that can be a little destructive. So I wanted to write that song to speak to them and tell them that I actually feel like vulnerability is a strength and to let them know that it\'s okay and it\'s actually really cool to be yourself.” **“Our Grass Is Legal”** “My grandpa had a sod farm when I was growing up, going back to the ’70s, ’80s. My dad and my uncles all grew up working in the fields for him. He sold grass and he called himself ‘the Grass Man.’ And people from surrounding towns started calling him, asking for pot. They thought he was selling weed. So he made his business motto ‘Whitters Turf Farms: Our Grass Is Legal.’ And I just felt like that had to be in a song somewhere.” **“Beer Tastes Better”** “When I go home, I have the bar that I always go to. I was in one and I saw an old friend from high school that I hadn\'t seen forever, and it was kind of a trip to see her again. She was bartending. To see her again and to just think how much has changed, and also, at the same time, how so much hasn’t—that was the inspiration for that song. I absolutely love that song, because I think, on the surface level, you see that title and you think, ‘Okay, this sounds like a stereotypical cliché country song about beer,’ but it\'s a lot deeper than that to me. It\'s been 14 years since I\'ve been home, and I\'ve been all over, and beer still, to me, just tastes so much sweeter when I\'m sitting at my hometown bar.” **“In a Field Somewhere”** “When I say I\'m from Iowa, people kind of laugh and roll their eyes and say, ‘What\'s up there, corn?’ And there\'s a lot of corn. I grew up in a cornfield, and it\'s so much more than that to me. I learned how to drive in a field. I used to go out streaking, drinking with the boys from high school. We\'d go cut through the cornfield and stay up all night. And I actually got engaged in a cornfield. So it felt really symbolic to me, just growing up and having all of my young life experiences in a field. And still to this day, whenever I go home, my holy place is to grab a bottle of wine and a lawn chair and go out back behind my parents\' house to the cornfield and just sit and listen to music and relax and take it all in and think.”

Miranda Lambert hits the road on *Palomino*, her eighth solo album and the follow-up to her 2019 Grammy-winning LP *Wildcard*. Across 15 tracks, Lambert treks all over the United States, spinning colorful yarns of a rambling life out on the road. “We go to 36 different locations in this record and meet all kinds of characters that we made up,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “Or it might have been characters we have all met in our travels, put into these songs. I\'ve never written with that much purpose.” Lambert sets the freewheeling tone with opener “Actin’ Up,” a swampy ode to bad behavior. Tracks like “Scenes” and “Tourist” are some of Lambert’s most image-rich material yet, while “Music City Queen”—a collaboration with pioneering New Wavers The B-52’s—is easily one of her most fun. Some songs, like standout “Geraldene,” previously appeared in demo form on Lambert’s critically acclaimed *The Marfa Tapes*, a 2021 collaborative LP with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, and take on new life thanks to thoughtful production from Lambert, Randall, and frequent collaborator Luke Dick. Below, Lambert shares insight into a handful of tracks on *Palomino*. **“Geraldene”** “She\'s everyone. I feel like we\'ve all known one or been one at one point or the other. I just had that title because I was watching *Heartworn Highways* like a million times, and in that movie, Townes’ dog is named Geraldine. And Geraldine\'s this German shepherd, and I was like, ‘That\'s a cool name.’” **“Country Money”** “Aaron Raitiere pulls me in on a write one day. He\'s like, ‘Hey, come write with me and Mikey Reaves.’ I had never written with him before, and I was like, ‘Okay, cool, that\'d be different,’ and we wrote ‘Country Money.’ It fit right into the vibe of this road trip we were taking. So it all just happened easily, which makes me a little nervous because I\'m like, ‘Okay, when\'s the other shoe going to drop?’” **“Carousel”** “That is a real feeling. We joined the circus in one way or another, and we\'re so lucky to be part of it. I mean, I\'m like, ‘If I ever lived before, I think I was either best friends with Calamity Jane or riding an elephant somewhere.’ Truly, that\'s what I was doing, because this is as close as I could get to those two things, what I do for a living. I miss so many weddings and funerals and baby showers and important moments of people that are important to me, and of my own, just because I\'m rolling. But I think ‘Carousel’ puts this romantic spin on it where it\'s like, ‘It\'s okay. There\'s this whole other life that can happen, too.’”

Country music has a long-held tradition of narrative music, though the commercial side of the genre has strayed away from such character- and story-driven songs in recent years. Zach Bryan is here to change that, though, on his sprawling, ambitious triple album *American Heartbreak*. Across 34 tracks, the Navy veteran and cult favorite envisions bull riders, long-lost lovers, wandering road warriors, and more, telling their stories over simple arrangements and with an emotionally potent voice that recalls Tyler Childers or early Jason Isbell. “There\'s plenty of characters on *American Heartbreak*—some of them I know, some of them I don\'t,” Bryan tells Apple Music. “Sometimes I\'m just in a breakfast place and I see someone doing something and I\'m like, ‘It\'d be crazy if that person was a bull rider.’ And then I\'m like, ‘Oh wait—that would be a cool story.’” Album highlights include the massively successful “Something in the Orange,” which crackles with brooding intrigue, and “From Austin,” a heartbreak song that avoids the tropes and clichés of similar country tracks in favor of more poetic lines like “Babe, I’ve gotta heal myself from the things I’ve never felt.”

Ashley McBryde delivers her most ambitious project yet with *Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville*, a concept album set within a fictional town named for the late Nashville songwriter Dennis Linde, known for hits like The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” and Joe Diffie’s “John Deere Green.” Like William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the town features a recurring cast of characters, a nod to Linde’s own occasional habit of carrying characters over from song to song. “We wrote a song called ‘Blackout Betty’ and we\'ve had a good time with it,” McBryde tells Apple Music of the concept’s genesis. “I feel better. Therapy is complete. And then I\'m like, you know what? ‘Blackout Betty,’ \[*Girl Going Nowhere*’s\] ‘Living Next to Leroy,’ \[*Never Will*’s\] ‘Shut Up Sheila,’ Aaron\'s got ‘Jesus Jenny,’ Nicolette is Pillbox Patti—we have all these characters that accidentally, over the years, they\'ve popped up… What we should do is make them neighbors on purpose, and then a place to live.” The resulting collection listens like a fever-dream tour of small-town America, with McBryde’s expansive vision fleshed out by contributions from fellow artists like Aaron Raitiere, Pillbox Patti, Brandy Clark, the Brothers Osborne, and more. While *Lindeville* is an album that begs a start-to-finish listen—a compelling narrative quickly develops and sprawls outward, not unlike a novel-in-stories—standout tracks include the tender, realist “Gospel Night at the Strip Club” and a show-stopping cover of The Everly Brothers’ “When Will I Be Loved,” on which Clark, Caylee Hammack, and Pillbox Patti join McBryde in showing that at the end of the day, these small-town characters, these women, just wish to be seen. But McBryde’s doing them one better: Their voices are being heard. Below, McBryde shares insight into several key tracks on *Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville*. **“Jesus Jenny” (feat. Aaron Raitiere)** “Nobody delivers like Aaron Raitiere. I didn\'t notice this until I\'ve been working things up this week to do an acoustic show, but when Aaron sings it, we\'re all laughing and we\'re going, ‘Oh, I don\'t know if I should be laughing at this.’ And then I went to go sing it and pick it and it\'s so sad. I had no idea how sad this song was. Because when Aaron delivers, his phrasing is just absolutely his own. And I\'m like, ‘Well, if I say it that short, or if I say it this way, then it\'s going to sound like I\'m trying to sound like Aaron.’ Then when I sing the line ‘All I can do for you right now is pray that your demons go away and you get home okay’—maybe that\'s what it is that\'s making me so like, ‘Oh my god,’ is that we know that person. And up until recently, I\'ve been that girl, that people are looking at you and going, ‘Well, I hope you get home okay.’ How eye-opening.” **“The Girl in the Picture” (feat. Pillbox Patti)** “‘The Girl in the Picture’ is one of the more somber situations on the record, because that chorus ends with ‘It\'s a shame that all she\'ll ever be is the girl in the picture that won the blue ribbon at the Faulkner County Fair.’ So all we know, as we\'re writing it, is she was at this event and she had her picture taken and that photographer entered that \[photo\] into the county fair and it won the blue ribbon. It\'s also what they use for the ‘missing’ poster now. And nobody knows where she is, so right now all she is is just ‘the girl in the picture.’ We still don\'t know what happened to her.” **“Play Ball” (feat. Brothers Osborne)** “The song is about Pete, but it\'s sung from the point of view of a person who\'s an adult now who, when they were little, Pete took care of a little bit and put his arms around. We didn\'t start with that hook. We started with ‘Who is Pete?’ And so we literally started with ‘Pete chalks the ball field down at Dennis Linde Park.’ And then what else does that mean? That means he turns the sprinklers on at sunup and the lights on after dark. Okay. And then Benjy Davis is the one that comes out with ‘The grass is always greener on his side of the fence.’ And then we got tickled. I\'m like, ‘He lost his wife to cancer and a thumb to Vietnam, and jokes he used to be a hitchhiker, but not for very long.’” **“Gospel Night at the Strip Club” (feat. Benjy Davis)** “‘Gospel Night at the Strip Club’ is a title that I dreamt. I had a dream that me and Brandy \[Clark\] had all this cash in our hands and our friends were like, ‘Where have you girls been?’ And I was like, ‘Gospel night at the strip club.’ And I took that to the table and I was like, ‘It feels like Kris Kristofferson-style spoken word. I know that spoken songs aren\'t \[commercial\]. But it doesn\'t matter. We\'re not going to work that to radio. So let\'s write this.’”

*Humble Quest*, Maren Morris’ third major-label album, is a window into her mind during two of the most unpredictable, cathartic, and life-changing years she’s experienced to date: She gave birth to her first child with her husband and “Chasing After You” collaborator Ryan Hurd; mourned the loss of busbee, one of her dear friends and closest colleagues; and weathered the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic without knowing when, or how, she and her band would return to the road. “We were stuck in the house for two years—not just from COVID, but our baby was born at the beginning of 2020,” she shared with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in a conversation about *Humble Quest* and the process that shaped it. “Both being songwriters, after a few months of learning to be new parents, it was like, ‘Should we start being creative again? I don\'t know, what are we doing this for? There\'s no touring.’ It was sort of this free fall of not being able to tour or write towards a direction, and I feel like that freed us up to write about whatever we wanted.” The path between her 2019 album, *GIRL*, and *Humble Quest* was one of extreme highs and soul-crushing lows, and it was important to her that the full emotional spectrum was represented in each of its songs. Deafening rock anthems (“Nervous”) and fun, flirtatious jams (“Tall Guys”) follow up sage ballads (“Background Music”), determined motivational anthems (“Humble Quest”), and tear-jerking tributes to gone-too-soon friends (“What Would This World Do?”). In spite of the sadness and grief that inspired some of these tracks, Morris finds peace and contentment in where her *Humble Quest* leads. “It\'s two sides of a coin, and darkness is there to make us see light a little bit better,” she said. “When I was listening to all of these songs, I just felt happy. I felt like \[the album\] was healing me in whatever I was drowning in. Ultimately, you can scream in an echo chamber as long as you want, but eventually the songs have to be heard by somebody besides you. I guess my hope is when people hear this, it will feel therapeutic and light.”

Recent years have seen a surge of progressive artists find their footing in country music, bringing new and necessary perspectives to a genre traditionally dominated by those of straight white men. Adeem the Artist is one of the finest of that bunch of up-and-comers, introducing their clever, compassionate, and often complex take on country songwriting via 2021’s breakout hit *Cast Iron Pansexual*. *White Trash Revelry* follows that LP, marking Adeem’s first release on their own Four Quarters Records label and building upon its predecessor’s exploration of identity, class, and marginalization. Opener “Carolina” offers Adeem’s origin story, doing so with a level of nuance rarely heard in the genre. “Heritage of Arrogance” and “Redneck, Unread Hicks” both challenge stereotypes of the uneducated Southerner while admitting the region’s many sins. And closer “My America” caps the project with a weary but quietly hopeful vision of the country, though one imbued with a sense of loving skepticism and concern. “It was really important to me that I have a record that had bold, unapologetic representation but also had real characters from my family and my community,” Adeem tells Apple Music. “I wanted it to feel like these are not mutually exclusive characters or ideas. This is the only way we have of moving forward—to allow these voices to live alongside of each other and find some way to get along.” Below, Adeem shares insight into several key tracks on *White Trash Revelry*. **“Carolina”** “My dad named me after Kyle Petty. He’s a NASCAR driver. He’s a songwriter, too—pretty good songwriter. But he’s not the best NASCAR driver. No disrespect. His dad, Richard Petty, was the best NASCAR driver. They call him The King. So, my dad, with no sense of irony, named me after the son of the best ever. I saw that Kyle was playing Johnson City, and I called the owner of the venue, and I was like, ‘Look, I was named after Kyle Petty. I will sell tickets to this show. I will promote my ass off. You don’t have to pay me. Please let me open.’ That was a pretty good deal, so she gave me the gig. So, I wrote this song as I was imagining getting up in a room full of NASCAR fans at The Willow Tree coffee shop in Johnson City, Tennessee, on Bristol race weekend.” **“Heritage of Arrogance”** “I have this memory of being in Charlotte in the early ’90s, and I don’t know if it’s implanted. I don’t know if it’s a true memory or not because everything gets a little muddy back then. But it’s a memory of seeing the Klan gathered on one side of the road, and a bunch of Black activists on the other side of the road, with their fists in the air, all pissed off. And my dad just kind of being like, ‘Yeah, they hate each other.’ I had this idea for this song, and I was trying to remember if it was real or not, or if it was just a story I heard somebody in my family tell or something. And so, I googled to see if the Klan was still holding rallies in Charlotte in the ’90s. And they were. A lot. Probably a true memory.” **“Middle of a Heart”** “I wrote the song mostly for my friend Bob. He was a retired Knoxville police officer and a Navy veteran. He worked on boats. I would go have breakfast with Bob and make him bacon and eggs. And he’d be like, ‘Make some for yourself, buddy.’ We’d watch the birds outside and eat bacon and eggs, and that’s what we did. All of his kids had died and \[his wife\] Carlene died. And we would just sit there and watch TV and watch the birds. He was a good friend to me. He was a dude who disagreed with me about politics more than anybody I’ve ever known, but he put his humanity first. And, yeah, that song’s for him.” **“Redneck, Unread Hicks”** “It becomes really easy to, I don’t know, kind of view the South through a very myopic lens. It’s all white supremacists or bucktoothed rednecks, yada, yada, yada. And it’s endowed with a lot of classism, and it’s a really dangerous form of erasure, too. It’s true that Bill Lee, the \[Tennessee\] governor who ran on dismantling gay marriage, is from this area and that those are his values. But it’s also true that Martin Luther King, Jr. is from this area. Amelia Parker’s from this area; she helped found Black Lives Matter here in Knoxville and now works for the city council. There are a lot of queer folks who have fought hard and a lot of Black folks who have fought hard. There’s a lot more diversity here and a lot more nuance than people want to give it credit for.” **“My America”** “There’s this guy named Aaron Lewis, and he\'s kind of a shithead. He wrote this song called ‘Am I the Only One.’ And in this song, he has lyrics like, ‘Am I the only one willing to bleed for America?’ This guy’s not a fucking veteran. I listened to this song exactly one time, and I felt so annoyed by it that I parodied it in a silly way on Twitter. I said things like, ‘Am I the only one who’s a self-centered child? I’m only mad because my kids won’t call.’ And people told me I should put it on the record, which was really silly. But it did make me think, ‘Man, what if Aaron Lewis had enough compassion and sensitivity and care that he tried to articulate the perspective of the people he was trying to capitalize on? What if he actually loved them? What if he actually tried to understand them?’ And that song became that for me.”

I was born in Gastonia in 1988 a few months after my grandpa Booge died. He no longer remembered dad because of the Alzheimer’s and I can't imagine how painful it must've been for my father. I don't know what their financial situation was like, to be honest. I know that my grandfather had his little garage and that he didn't charge people very much to work on their cars. I know that he worked his daddy’s farm and then as a machinist, then managed an auto-parts store, that they owned a house in Mecklenburg County. Booge was blue-collar and my dad was blue-collar. I can't say if we were ever people of means. I just don’t know. My dad dropped out, got his GED, and started running the lathe when he was a teenager. One time he told me about running away to the beach with a girl he’d pined over. He described it wistfully as a teenager’s dream. She soon grew lackluster, though, and one day she was just gone. I don’t think he ever told me her name but I remember it as Tiffany. My parents were young. Dad was 23 and mom was 19 when they found themselves expecting me. They couldn't afford me. They didn't know each other. They did the Christian thing and we became a family- a package deal. The first place I can remember is the trailer on Thomas Fite in Belmont. I must've been a little over a year old when we moved in there. I played Power Rangers in the yard. Their friends would come ‘round still in the early years. I remember nights of drinking and partying and I remember these as the fondest years. There is warmth there in the trailer. In Locust, our driveway is lined with Pecan trees. Sarah & I, that is my sister, collect them and crack them when it gets cold and we fill bags and we leave them for the postman and the waste workers and Grady & Dessie who lived next door. We eat them too. Pecans are good. At night, I stay up late with my mother and we watch La Femme Nikita on the television together, fawning over Roy Dupuis. It’s a callback to the trailer where we sit snuggled close on the couch with Days of Our Lives flickering on the tube television. Marlena is possessed by a demon and I mention it over dinner. Dad gets so angry about it- me, cozied up studying the drama. Sometimes, my Grandpa- mom's dad- comes over and he smells stale. I can remember the scratch of his beard and the fullness of his laugh. He is mischievous and jovial. Sometimes Uncle Dave stops by, grandpa's brother. He's loud and raucous and funny and full of contagious joy. My uncle Richard lived with us in the trailer- moms brother. Richard has a laugh like grandpa's, like moms- sometimes, I hear it in my own throat if I'm lucky and I try to recreate it like it'll get me closer to grandpa. It's a kind of hiccupping laugh that rises from the gut like a horse, galloping. Richard is some kind of witch or Satanist- I remember through a fog- and he is reading anarchist theory. He tells me that there are demons and teaches me to see spirits in the sky; gives me a charm. It is a silver wolf with red gems for eyes. He likes good music. Mom is smoking Mexican dirt weed on the other side of the trailer. She has two friends in the neighborhood that she spends time with. Mostly we go over to their houses and I am forced to play with her kids. Lucinda is a good friend to my mother. They are bonded by their survival; victims of extreme trauma. Lucinda has bipolar disorder. She lives up the lane in a cul-de-sac. I grow up knowing her as my aunt. Faye is the other friend & alternative neighborhood aunt. Faye lives in a house on the corner that turns down our street. To me, this is the upper echelons of Belmont in my childhood imagination. She lives with Joel who is the first musician I ever meet. Joel plays Dungeons & Dragons. He has long, beautiful hair and very empathetic eyes. He always smells like weed & speaks softly. My mother told me that he was in love with her and asked her many times to leave dad to be with him. Cannot verify. He gives me my first guitar pick- it is 2mm and dark purple. Joel & Faye have been together for several years but they are not married. This is tough for me to understand at this age. When he died, I was in my teenage years. It was an overdose. Faye was devastated. She gave me a CD of his songs. I still have it. He was a beautiful songwriter. I'll never forget giving him his Dungeons & Dragons books back and explaining how they were wrong because they were against the bible. My father was truly proud of me, I think, in that moment though it brings me great shame now. Given the chance, I'd sure like to see him one more time. I’d tell him that while I’ve never made it above level 8 with any character that I’ve still learned a few spells of my own over the last thirty years. In the trailer, dad and I play games together. We wrestle like the fighters on the TV and we line up army men and throw bouncing balls to see who can knock over the most. My dad would take me to hockey games back then and sometimes we would pick up a box of tacos on the way home if the Checkers scored enough points. I loved Chubby and the cold games with my dad. We had souvenir Checkers cups and a brown food processor. Dad would toss ice cream, milk, and peanut butter in that food processer and we would have peanut butter milkshakes on weekends. We'd drink them out of the Checkers cups. Mom is obsessed with Collective Soul and Nine Inch Nails. We play it on the boombox while they take turns playing Final Fantasy III. One day, mom is so scared by a level that she calls dad and asks him to come home and help her & he does. The building where my dad works looks like a castle and it smells like the metal that is cut and milled by the big machines. His work shirts stink of aldehydes & ketones & even now, I sometimes catch a faint taste of it and I’m instantly transported back. These are some of my favorite memories. Cigarette stained memories. Alcohol scented memories. Everyone is loud. Everyone is profane. Every callous exchange imbued with irreverent humor. Aunt Peggy & her twin sister Daphne’s harmonious, boisterous laughter. Marty’s Budweiser breath, gravel voice full of slurred words and his childlike demeanor, soft & sad & pitiable like a wounded bird. Even now I can almost hear Aunt Peggy singing with her breathy, mournful soprano. My grandma tells me that my parents are lying to me and that there are monsters under the bed. She says if I get up in the night, they'll eat me. Also, I'm getting very fat. I can't say if Booge's Alzheimer’s and death severely wounded her but from stories I'm told, I surmise she was always a little evil. But she feeds me chicken skins and vinegar and buys me action figures from the dollar store. Absolute elation. In the yard at her 700 sq. ft house, I play with uncle Porter’s old toys. Po was a card, my dad tells me. He died on the lawn and nobody did anything. My cousin reminds everyone in the family of Po and for many years I looked up to him as one of the few to get out okay. I still do. Po’s boy made himself a family now. Married his dream girl and they worked together on a pair of sons sweeter than a cobbler. He comes to pick me up from school before the bell rings and I am enraptured with this vicious, frenetic energy. In the parking lot, he asks me what the safe word is and I tell him. “You were supposed to ask me!” He says. “Did you bring the Sega?” I have these power ranger action figures- a whole mess of them- and Ninja Turtles too. The power rangers’ masks pivot into their chests to reveal their natural faces. The pink ranger is in love with me. I am in love with the white ranger (formerly green) and the way the sun sets on the trailer park adjacent to our lot in reds and oranges and purples. Out in the yard, I am assembling a circus of slugs. They have assigned roles but they are underperforming and I am conducting their torpid, enervating movements with a loblolly twig and a hint of mischief. I am enamored with slugs the moment I discover them. The ignominious love affair is short-lived but oft-recalled in pleasantries and hindsight. Mom has met Jesus at a Baptist Church, though. She’s crying when she comes home and has repented from her life of sin. She tells me about him in hurried, urgent breaths. Later, she tells me that upon my birth she offered me up to God as a gift to him. Cannot verify. Certainly, though, I was born into the faith of my ancestors. Christianity was my birthright and though I try to reimagine, it will always stain the pages of my moral guide. I am twenty-two years old when I leave my parents’ house for the first time, out into the infinite unknown. In a flurry of symbolism and rage, my unconscious exorcises the first large, looming specter of my childhood trauma & I am thrust towards the truest parts of myself uncomfortably, armed with a watered-down accent and an arsenal of potato chip casserole recipes. My entire childhood is white trash revelry. Big Dave, the biker my grandfather is friends with, who is on the run from the Hell’s Angels’ pops by the trailer for a meal. Richard brings his girlfriend by and they smoke a joint and we rent a film from the blockbuster in Gastonia. I wish I could slip back inside. I wish I could visit the trailer and see my parents in their youth, still full of hope and playing video games. I wish I could make my grandpa pizza. I'm proud of the way I resemble him when my beard is full and I bet he would love my pizza. I feel so far and away from all of the people who were pillars of my youth. Hardly a one remains. I am just this lost villager from a forgotten & abandoned people; a punchline in some white liberal's social media diatribe. A white trash wanderer- living ghost of my ancestors. ++++++++ This record was funded largely through $1 contributions via Venmo, Cashapp, & PayPal from people who believed in me or thought it was a quirky fundraising idea. It was an impossible dream to create this album that meant so much to me manifested by the kindness of others. The above essay was written 2 years ago and the songs on this record largely fell out of it. The players on this record were folks I had dreamed to be able to pay well to perform with. The studio we recorded in was a block or so from the first apartment I ever lived on my own. A lot of meaningful pieces came together for this and it all began with a phone call to my friend Kyle on October 30th, 2021. I said, "I want you to do something on my new album yet but I haven't decided what yet." He said, "Why don't you let me produce it & my buddy Robbie Artress can engineer?" I said, "Well, we'd have to raise at least 5k by the end of the week to hire the folks I'd want to hire and all that." Kyle said, "Maybe you can, I don't know." So, that night I posted a silly Tik Tok saying all I needed was 15,000 people to donate $1 each for the album to be funded. That included a budget for production, mastering, publicist, radio, & the whole shebang. By Tuesday, we had $5,000. I paid for the studio time and started asking people if they'd come. By the end of December, all the parts had been tracked & I was slack jawed. I threw a little party at my buddy Troy's tattoo shop. We got tattoos and ate barbecue & listened to the first mixes and took photos for the album cover & accompanying lyric book. What a rush, the whole thing. A whirlwind.

Like many artists, Kelsea Ballerini took stock of her life during the pandemic, both personally and professionally. Having released her third album, *kelsea*, in mid-March 2020 and unable to tour in support of the LP, it felt like a natural time to reflect on her career thus far and dream of the next chapter. During this quiet period, her fourth album, *SUBJECT TO CHANGE*, began taking shape, its title a nod to Ballerini’s newfound acceptance of the impermanence and unpredictability inherent to life. “The theme was change and evolution and growing up, and a lot of contrast within that and juxtaposition within that,” Ballerini tells Apple Music. “And I loved the idea that we’ve all been really challenged by change the last several years, and by change that’s really out of our control, that’s kept us at home and all of that stuff. And so, I loved the idea of that being such a relatable, universal topic.” *SUBJECT TO CHANGE* opens with its title track, an uptempo anthem that celebrates being open to growth and possibility. “IF YOU GO DOWN (I’M GOIN’ DOWN TOO)” takes cues from The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” and Taylor Swift’s HAIM collaboration “no body, no crime,” with Ballerini promising a friend that she has her back if shit hits the fan: “If it all blows up and we end up on the news/If you go down, I’m goin’ down too.” Another standout is “YOU’RE DRUNK, GO HOME,” a collaboration with Kelly Clarkson and Carly Pearce that makes good use of the trio’s combined talents, with a healthy dose of soul from Clarkson and Pearce putting her alto to good use in telling off a stubborn suitor. Here, Ballerini talks through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“SUBJECT TO CHANGE”** “I’ve always been really scared of change because it’s been something that has influenced my life in ways that I don’t always love or that I’m not always ready for. And I liked the idea of making a record, and especially starting a record, with a song that says, ‘But what if we take the power away from change?’ And whether it’s bad change or good change, it’s meant to happen for me in my life and where I’m supposed to get to. And when you take the power away from it and the fear of change away from it, and you just open your arms up to it, you start living.” **“IF YOU GO DOWN (I’M GOIN’ DOWN TOO)”** “One of the things that I’ve really realized in the last few years is how important female friendship is. ‘IF YOU GO DOWN’ is the last song we wrote for the record. And I was sitting around with Shane \[McAnally\] and Julian \[Bunetta\], and we had already cut most of the songs, so we called it the Hail Mary day. We’re like, ‘Just in case there’s anything else in the tank.’ I also wanted there to be what ‘hole in the bottle’ brought to my last record. It was this performance element where I got to be silly, and I got to just play a little bit more. So, with ‘IF YOU GO DOWN,’ I was like, ‘I want there to be this witty *Thelma & Louise* anthem where, when people come to my show with their girl gang, they can scream it with each other, and I can honor my friends, and I can also have a tinge of, ‘Oh, she listens to the *Crime Junkie* \[podcast\].’” **“YOU’RE DRUNK, GO HOME” (feat. Kelly Clarkson & Carly Pearce)** “I loved the idea of having not one but two different voices that have power and wit and sass. And I was looking at my friendships because I love collaborating with friends, and my first call was Carly. Without even hearing it, she said yes because we just go so far back, and we just have so much respect for each other. We’re ‘sweatpants friends’—that’s how I categorize it now. And then, I texted Kelly Clarkson the song, and she did vocals that night. We were just talking about women friendship in the industry. I’m offline friends with these two women, and they both inspire me so much in different ways and also in similar ways. And now I get to have this moment with them, and I just feel so proud to be able to be a part of that.” **“DOIN’ MY BEST”** “‘DOIN’ MY BEST’ is a celebration of taking ownership of cringe, because I think when you’re just like, ‘These are the things in my life that you’ve seen that are chaotic, and I understand they’re chaotic. Trust me, I’m experiencing it. It’s more chaotic than you’ll ever know, but here it is, and I’m truly just doing my best.’ I think just taking ownership of that and just going, ‘I’m a human, here it is’—there’s something that was so freeing writing that song.” **“MARILYN”** “‘MARILYN’ is the first song I wrote for this album. I wrote it in the summer of 2020, during the unraveling of all of our lives, of just taking the inventory, stepping back, being in the stillness. And to me, \[Marilyn Monroe\] is such a metaphor for—I can only speak for myself, but I feel like a very universal thought for us of just going like, ‘Man, we are conditioned, and we get met with a more celebratory response when we present beautifully.’ And there is always so much more going on. To me, she is just that metaphor, and it’s kind of the bigger sister to ‘homecoming queen?’. I wrote the song by myself.”

Jimmie Allen has never been an artist concerned with strictly adhering to a particular genre, a trait that has made the rising pop-country star one of the more fascinating figures to emerge in recent years. On his third full-length album, Allen shows that the successes he found with 2020’s *Bettie James* and 2018’s *Mercury Lane* were no flukes, and that the creative experimentation that served him so well on those releases is still one of the sharpest tools in his arsenal. Across an ambitious 17 tracks, Allen explores how country music can intersect with pop, R&B, hip-hop, and more, doing so while maintaining a firm sense of self that keeps the collection feeling cohesive. Standout tracks include “on my way,” a duet with none other than Jennifer Lopez, and the chill, melodic “settle on back.” In addition to Lopez, Allen tapped an eclectic and star-studded roster of guest musicians to join him on *Tulip Drive*, including CeeLo Green and T-Pain on “pesos” and Katie Ohh on “broken hearted.”

Nashville singer-songwriter Kelsey Waldon is one of a handful of young artists keeping traditional country music alive and well. Signed by the late, great John Prine to his Oh Boy Records label, Waldon is revered for her nuanced, image-rich songwriting as well as her agile voice. *No Regular Dog*, which she recorded alongside producer Shooter Jennings (Brandi Carlile, Yelawolf), follows 2019’s *White Noise / White Lines* and builds upon the narrative writing and clear-eyed insight of its predecessor. Highlights include the atmospheric, fiddle-heavy “Sweet Little Girl” and the sweet, tender “Simple as Love.” But “Season’s Ending,” Waldon’s tribute to Prine, is the album’s beating heart.

I am so excited to announce that my new record “No Regular Dog”, produced by Shooter Jennings, will be out on Oh Boy Records and into the world on August 12, 2022. This record feels like a lifetime in the making after all we’ve been through the past couple years, and I am so proud of the stories and songs and what we created. The first single “Sweet Little Girl”, is in part about me, but perhaps it’s also about you. It’s about the rage and unrest inside during a process to find healing. It’s simply just about a gal who is trying to find her way back “home”. I hope y’all enjoy the journey with this album. There is so much more to come and I can’t wait to share it all with you in the months ahead.

'The New Faith' will be released on September 23rd, 2022 on CD/digital and early 2023 on LP. 'The New Faith' tells an Afrofuturist story set in a far-future world devastated by climate change. Jake Blount and his collaborators embody a group of Black climate refugees as they perform a religious service, invoking spirituals that are age-old even now, familiar in their content but extraordinary in their presentation. These songs, which have seen Black Americans through countless struggles, bind this future community together and their shared past; beauty and power held in song through centuries of devastation, heartbreak, and loss. Learn more: folkways.si.edu/jake-blount/the-new-faith

Billy Strings quickly and decisively established himself as a new guitar god with his 2017 bluegrass-adjacent debut, *Turmoil & Tinfoil*, further solidifying that status with 2019’s Grammy-winning LP *Home* and 2021’s Grammy-nominated *Renewal*. For Strings, though, his stepfather, Terry Barber—who taught him to play the instrument—is the family’s true guitar hero. The two get to live out their father-son duo dream on *Me / And / Dad*, a collaborative covers album Strings and Barber recorded during one of Strings’ brief breaks from touring. Across 14 tracks, Strings and Barber offer up their own takes on the bluegrass, gospel, and old-time songs they love best, doing so with an all-star band that includes Jerry Douglas, Michael Cleveland, and Rob McCoury. Another prominent player on the LP is Barber’s old Martin guitar, which Strings tracked down and purchased for him after Barber had pawned the instrument during a time of financial struggle. Highlights on the album include a spirited version of The Stanley Brothers’ “Stone Walls and Steel Bars” and a stirring rendition of the George Jones song “Life to Go,” on which Barber takes lead vocals. Strings may as well already be in the bluegrass history books, and this document of his formative musical education is a fascinating, excellent glimpse at how he got there.

The latest release from Nashville-based Caitlin Rose, CAZIMI captures a voice which is equal parts honeyed and world-weary, and sees her singing self-aware songs of self-destruction, documenting proclivity and impulse control, bad habits in life and in romantic pursuits. She skips across genres, combining new wave influences with pop stylings and the melancholy folk songwriting that made her such a staple of the Nashville rock scene.

If you’ve spent time in Nashville, you know how rare it is to meet an actual native of the rapidly growing city. Gabe Lee’s third album *The Hometown Kid* nods to that phenomenon, as the critically acclaimed singer-songwriter grew up and cut his musical teeth in Nashville, making him uniquely positioned to write about the city at the heart of so many country songs. “Authenticity is what *The Hometown Kid* strives for,” Lee tells Apple Music. “It\'s pushing that idea, that there are in fact honest folks out there who have everyday feelings about sadness, joy, love, fear, sorrow. All of those things are okay to feel through music and this record, especially.” *The Hometown Kid* opens with “Wide Open,” an origin story of sorts, told in three parts, that traces Lee’s roots from a young man singing in church to the artist he is today. “Longer I Run - Hammer Down” is a double track, with each half serving to offer a different perspective on similar feelings. It’s one of several points on the album where Lee employs a more literary approach to his songwriting, something that has set him apart in the crowded emerging country field since he made his debut. And on closing track “Angel Band,” Lee nods to his roots growing up singing in the church with a gospel-tinged celebration of the players who keep Nashville worthy of its “Music City” nickname. Below, Lee walks Apple Music through several key tracks on *The Hometown Kid*. **“Wide Open”** “It\'s three vignettes, essentially: childhood, adolescence, and growing into adulthood. So, and there\'s also a cycle of birth and birth and death. The first line is \'You woke up in the hotel room and you feel like you needed to chase something.\' And then by the end, it\'s talking about an old stone wall and talking about just civil rights parades and civil wars. There\'s a lot of mortality in that as well. So it\'s definitely the three vignettes are just moments captured in my memory of places that I essentially drive around in, in Nashville. Whether it was as a kid in high school or growing up around the area, just images that popped out when I was writing a song.” **“Over You”** “It’s hard to have a good record without throwing in at least one or two heartbreak or heartache songs on there. But ‘Over You’ is really about, in a lot of ways, more than just the struggle of the internal emotion that you might have, more than just ‘F you’ to whoever the other person in the relationship is, or whatever it is you may be leaving behind. It doesn\'t have to be interpersonal. I mean, I\'ve framed the song as a romantic relationship. But it could be the distance between a person and a community, or multiple groups of people. Or even, on the *Honky Tonk Hell* record from 2020, there were even relationships that I was, I guess, metaphorically writing about, but they were more about tradition and new culture happening. So all of that plays in when I use lyrics that sound very interpersonal, like just a normal breakup.” **“Rusty”** “‘Rusty’ absolutely encompasses that vibe that sometimes you have to leave a place and return to it to really appreciate it. I think there was a crossroads. There have been many crossroads, but I think there was one, especially, that is very, very formative and is a huge linchpin for how my life was going, post-college. And it was a crossroads of having to make decisions based on trying to learn and better yourself. I think, at a time, I had essentially soured or spoiled a lot of relationships in my life on my own end and was looking for, I guess, a restart in a lot of ways. And it eventually did lead to me to come back to Nashville, which was exactly what needed to happen.” **“Longer I Run - Hammer Down”** “‘Longer I Run’ and ‘Hammer Down’ are obviously a double track on the record, and we just intended that from the beginning, to meld the tracks together because they told two sides of the same story. And it leads off with ‘Longer I Run,’ essentially someone who\'s not settled, someone who, while they may have things to ground them and a home even, they\'re seemingly having taken it for granted and feeling like their spirit needs to wander more. And it leads to ‘Hammer Down,’ which is a story about someone who\'s been locked out or has locked himself out. And I ended up just being inspired to write about that, to connect that ‘Longer I Run’ story to this slow country swing ballad. I guess, in a lot of ways, it’s about shooting yourself in the foot and knowing it and being aware of it.” **“Angel Band”** “It is a goodbye, in a lot of ways, on the record. The last two records we\'ve put out had solid, very obvious farewell songs. But the Honky Tonk Angel Band, it\'s like it\'s an ode to Nashville pickers and musicians. Because in a lot of ways, I think the industry sees itself apart from others and even other art and entertainment because it\'s its own crazy world. And where else would we all be if we didn\'t have music or country music or the industry of music in Nashville? So I think there\'s a lot of folks who see themselves as lucky misfits in this town. It\'s like, ‘You know what? If I can\'t do anything else in this life or beyond, just at least let me play guitar in the Angel Band. If I can\'t succeed at anything else, at least let give me that.’”

As longtime Nashville stalwart Joshua Hedley declares on one of *Neon Blue*’s decidedly down-home standouts, the man is a bona fide “singing professor of country and western.” On his sophomore album, the singer, guitarist, and fiddle player eschews the glitzy sound of 2020s country-pop for the glorious heyday of ‘90s honky-tonk, evoking the likes of Alan Jackson and Garth Brooks with the electrifying chicken pickin’ of the title track or the raucous hard-times anthem “Broke Again.” And in the same tradition, Hedley offers a master class in songwriting about getting dumped (“Old Heartbroke Blues”), going on a bender (“Bury Me with My Boots On”), and offering his own take on a country icon’s work with a devotional cover of Roger Miller’s “River in the Rain.”

Released on Willie Nelson’s 89th birthday, *A Beautiful Time* testifies to the country icon’s enduring talent and astounding longevity. Perhaps it’s no surprise that mortality is on the mind throughout, but Willie doesn’t get too maudlin about it—the album opens with the sweet, slow-rolling “I’ll Love You Till The Day I Die” and touches on country funk for the celebratory “I Don’t Go To Funerals.” He makes some beautiful cover choices, too, offering a twilit take on Leonard Cohen’s “Tower Of Song” and kicking up the dust on The Beatles’ “With A Little Help From My Friends.” The full weight of Nelson’s life experiences permeate *A Beautiful Time*, but no more so than on the intimate curtain-closer “Leave You With A Smile,” as he sings, “If I run out of time, I’ll wait for you in the sweet by-and-by.”

S.G. Goodman’s 2020 debut album *Old Time Feeling* announced the Kentucky singer-songwriter as one of roots rock’s finest new voices. Its follow-up is no sophomore slump, further showing the depths of Goodman’s talents as a writer and performer. Recorded in Athens, Georgia, alongside co-producer Drew Vandenberg, *Teeth Marks* is an immersive listen and often surprising, with Goodman eschewing genre confines in favor of a sonic world big enough to suit her larger-than-life songs. Goodman has a knack for finding the universal in small details, as on standout “Dead Soldiers,” which was (its title slang for empty beer bottles) inspired by a friend’s battle with alcoholism. A pair of songs at the album’s center—“If You Were Someone I Loved” and “You Were Someone I Loved”—tell twin tales of the devastating effects of a lack of compassion, with particular regard to the opioid epidemic. Mixed emotions abound, too, like on “Work Until I Die,” which pairs a jaunty beat with a decidedly less playful take on labor.

Recorded at the Bomb Shelter in Nashville, TN with Producers Dennis Crouch and Andrija Tokic. Ten Melissa Carper originals, a co-write with Gina Gallina, cover of Brennen Leigh, cover of Odetta. Country, Soul, Jazz, R & B.

Following a Grammy-nominated debut album may sound like a daunting task, but Ingrid Andress makes it seem like a breeze on her sophomore outing. The LP finds Andress taking what stood out about her 2020 debut *Lady Like*—infectious melodies, conversational and often vulnerable lyrics, a playful take on the country sound—and expanding upon it with a more adventurous approach to production (Andress co-produced the LP) and confident, story-based songwriting. Unable to tour in support of *Lady Like* due to the pandemic, Andress wrote much of *Good Person* during quarantine, using the time for reflection on herself as a person and an artist. Songs like the poppy “How Honest Do You Want Me to Be?” and the old-school “Pain” bristle with raw self-assuredness, fruits of that period of forced introspection. “Blue” is a tender, souful dispatch from the colorful vistas of newfound love, with one of Andress’ finest vocal performances accented by gentle pedal steel. And the title track, one of several which seamlessly incorporate a vocoder, gets at a core human struggle: how to be good.

“I guess it’s just the dad in me—I don’t care what people think anymore.” That’s country superstar Kane Brown, telling Apple Music radio’s Kelleigh Bannen about the fearless philosophy he adopted while creating *Different Man*, available now in Spatial Audio. His third studio album features the hit singles “One Mississippi” and “Like I Love Country Music” and follows Brown’s American Music Award-nominated 2018 LP, *Experiment*. That bold spirit permeates *Different Man*, which finds Brown digging deep into his Southern roots and exploring a broad new spectrum of sounds that pulls from Southern rock, blues, gospel, and R&B. Opener “Bury Me in Georgia” pairs a stomping, swampy beat with church choir harmonies, with Brown and his band channeling fellow Georgia luminaries like Macon transplants The Allman Brothers. Single “Like I Love Country Music” tips its hat to ’90s country, complete with a nod to Brooks & Dunn’s 1991 debut single “Brand New Man.” And Blake Shelton guests on the emotional and evocative title track, with Brown’s own wife, Katelyn Brown, lending an assist on the sweet, poppy “Thank God.”