Rolling Stone's 25 Best Country and Americana Albums of 2023

Megan Moroney’s debut album opens with a wry smirk of a song. At first listen, opening track “I’m Not Pretty” sounds like another variation of the common enough country trope of reminding listeners that they’re beautiful, haters be damned. But Moroney, a swiftly rising star in the genre with a firebrand personality, takes it a step further when addressing an “ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend”: “Keep on telling yourself I’m not pretty.” Such bold assertions populate the rest of the LP, which the Savannah, Georgia-born singer-songwriter recorded alongside producer Kristian Bush, also known as one half of Sugarland. Following Moroney’s wildly popular 2022 breakout EP *Pistol Made of Roses*, *Lucky* takes the best of that EP—Moroney’s sass and swagger, in particular, but also the vulnerability of tracks like “Fix You Too”—and offers a fuller portrait of her specific vision of country music, which is reminiscent of early Miranda Lambert or Kelsea Ballerini. “Girl in the Mirror” is a painful look at sacrificing one’s own selfhood for a wayward lover. “Another on the Way” pairs a dark, swampy arrangement with a tale of a wise barkeep called Miss Daisy, who sagely advises the heartbroken narrator, “Men, they’re like trains/If you miss one, there’s another on the way.” Closer “Sad Songs for Sad People” has Moroney declaring, “I want every word to hurt like blue eyes crying in the rain,” as a gently soulful rhythm section accentuates her natural twang. And “Tennessee Orange,” which was an early viral hit for Moroney, cleverly plays on Southern football rivalries to tease out the complexities of a relationship.

In an interview just after the release of 2020’s *Reunions*, Jason Isbell said the difference between a good songwriter and a great one was whether or not you could write about a subject beyond yourself without making it feel vague. Ten years out from the confessional rawness of *Southeastern*, not only are Isbell’s lyrics ever closer to his ideal, but he’s got a sense of musical nuance to match. *Reunions* and 2017’s *The Nashville Sound* all blend anecdotes and memories from Isbell’s past with fiction, but *Weathervanes* tells a broader story with these vignettes, one with a message that became painfully clear to him throughout the pandemic: You can’t fully appreciate and acknowledge the good in your life without experiencing, and holding space for, the bad. “When I went into writing these songs, it started sort of at the tail end of the lockdown period and continued through our reentry into society; it kind of feels like a new world, for better or worse,” Isbell tells Apple Music. “A lot of these stories came from that, because when you start adding up the things that you\'re grateful for as somebody who tells stories, then automatically I think your mind goes to the counterpoint of that or the inverse of that. And you start thinking, \'Well, where could I be if I hadn\'t made the choices that led me to here?\'” This led to a fundamental shift in his approach to songwriting. “The more specific and the more intense something is, the more likely I am to come at that through a character,” he tells Apple Music. “If I\'m writing about love or death or having kids, I will go from the first person and it\'ll be me. But if I\'m writing about something like a school shooting, it feels like I have to say, \'Okay, this is how this affects me, and this is how this makes me feel.\' The only way I can be honest with that stuff is come at it from a character\'s perspective when it\'s a very specific topic like that.” Sometimes, that means creating these characters—or even reflecting on a younger version of himself in a difficult situation, as he does in “White Beretta”—and trusting them to lead the song down the path it needs. “So many times I didn\'t know what I was talking about until I got to halfway through the song, and I like it best when it happens that way,” he says. “I\'ll just get started and I\'ll say to myself, \'If I make a real person here and actually watch them with an honest eye, then after a couple of verses, they\'ll tell me what I\'m writing about.\'” Below, Isbell tells the stories behind the songs of *Weathervanes*. **“Death Wish”** “This is the kind of song that I have wanted to write for a long time. It\'s expansive from the production, but also you can tell from Jack White doing the acoustic cover that he did, it still feels like a broad, expansive sort of thing. That\'s a modern type of songwriting that I\'m really drawn to, but it\'s also antithetical to the roots-music ideal. And after \'Death Wish\' is over, I feel like, you\'ve hung in there with me through this sort of experimental thing. Now I can give you something that is a little bit more comfortable for your palate, something you\'re a little more used to from me.” **“King of Oklahoma”** “I was out there filming in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. There was a project that I had been asked to be a part of with Darius Rucker, Sheryl Crow, and I think Mike Mills, and a couple of other people. For a minute there, I was like, ‘Well, if I can get home in time to record with you all, that sounds like a really fun time. So I will do that.’ But I was never home in time because they kept changing my filming schedule, so I just missed it. But I wrote that song thinking, ‘Well, maybe I need some songs for this; I don\'t know if this is going to work for them or not.’ Eventually I thought this should be just a song of my own.” **“Strawberry Woman”** “This one\'s probably the closest I come to nostalgia on this record, I think, because there are a lot of moments here that are things that Amanda \[Shires, Isbell\'s wife and frequent collaborator\] and I shared together early on in the relationship. There\'s an undercurrent of the beginning of a relationship when you really need each other in ways that, if everybody\'s progressing like they\'re supposed to, you might not wind up needing each other in the same way 10 years down the road. And there\'s loss in that. It\'s a beautiful thing to grow as a human being, and both of us have, I think a lot, but then all of a sudden, at the end of that, you start trying to figure out what you still have in common. Even though you might not have the codependent nature that the relationship had early on, it\'s still something worth doing and worth working on, worth fighting for. You have to adjust your expectations from each other.” **“Middle of the Morning”** “After the experience of *Reunions*, Amanda and I took a little bit of a break from doing that stuff together. For the most part, I just sat and worked on my own until I got all these done. ‘Middle of the Morning,’ I don\'t know if she likes that song or not, maybe she does. That one\'s very personal as far as the perspective goes. That was a tough one to write and a tough one to sing, because I know there\'s some assumptions in there, and there\'s this sort of feeling of living in under the same roof through the pandemic and feeling so disconnected from each other.” **“Save the World”** “It was right after the Uvalde school shooting, but I didn\'t know that that\'s what I was writing about when I started. When I started, I was writing about leaving my wallet behind, and then I was writing about a phone conversation, and then all of a sudden I was writing about a school shooting. Once I realized that\'s what I was writing about, I thought, \'Oh, shit. Now I\'ve got to do this and handle it correctly.\' It took a lot of work. I finished that song and played it for Amanda, and she was like, \'I think you should write this again. You\'re not saying what you want to say. And at this point, it doesn\'t have enough meat, doesn\'t have enough detail.\' And I was like, \'Yeah, but that\'s going to be really fucking hard. How do you write about this without it seeming exploitative?\' And so it took more than one stab.” **“If You Insist”** “This song is from the perspective of a woman, and I wrote it for a movie—I don\'t remember the name of the movie, and I wound up not using it for the movie. They had given me my own song \[\'Chaos and Clothes\' off *The Nashville Sound*\] as a reference, and so I wrote something very similar to that in feel. I just really liked the song, and whoever we were negotiating with for the situation with the movie, they didn\'t want us to own the master, but I said, \'Well, I\'ll just keep it.\' And so we just kept it and I put it on the record.” **“Cast Iron Skillet”** “I think for a lot of songwriters that are writing whatever ‘Southern song’ or outlaw country they feel like they\'re writing is to go into this idea of, \'This is all the stuff that my granddad told me, and it\'s this down-home wisdom.\' What I wanted to say was, \'There is an evil undercurrent to all these things that our granddads told us, and there is darkness in those woods.\' I don\'t mean to sound like I\'m better at it than anybody else. Sometimes people are aiming for a different target, but I get bored with songs that do the same thing over and over. I wanted to turn that on its head and say, \'Let\'s frame this with this nostalgic idea of our romanticized Southern childhoods—and then let\'s talk about a couple of things that really happened.\'” **“When We Were Close”** “This is about a friendship between two musicians, and a lot of people ask me who it\'s about, but that\'s not the point. It\'s about me and a whole fucking bunch of people, but it\'s fairly specific. I had a friend who I made a lot of music with and spent a lot of time with, and we had a falling-out, and it never got right. It was so severe, and then he was gone, and that was the end of that. There was no closure. I remember when John Prine died, I was very sad, but I was also very grateful that the grief that I felt for John was not complicated. You don\'t have to be angry and you don\'t have to feel like there are things left unsaid or unresolved. This story was really the inverse of that, because it was like, yes, I am grateful for a lot of the things that we did together and that person showed me and a lot of the kindnesses, but at the same time, it was complicated. I have to be able to hold those two things in my head at the same time. You could call that the theme of this whole album, honestly.” **“Volunteer”** “The connection that I have to my home is complicated, because I am critical of the place where I grew up, and also, I\'m very, very fortunate that I grew up there. But my heart breaks for small towns in Alabama, and those small Alabama towns are scattered all over America and all over the world. I go play music in a lot of them, and I feel welcome, but not entirely. I also feel like an interloper. This story is a narrative based on a character that is fictional, but it came from that idea of like the Steve Earle song, \'nothing brings you down like your hometown,\' that same thing. It\'s like, why can\'t I really feel like I have a strong emotional connection to this place where I grew up? And also, why can\'t they get it together? The older I get, the more I think I feel comfortable discussing that and discussing the place.” **“Vestavia Hills”** “It started as me writing about somebody else, but the joke was on me. I got about halfway through the song and I was like, ‘I see what I\'m doing. You asshole.’ Then I thought about, man, what would it be like to be an artist\'s crew member? Let\'s make our character the crew guy, the sound guy who has been doing this for a long time and really believes in the work and really cares about the artist, but he has had enough. Basically, this is him turning in his two-week notice and saying, \'I\'m going to do one last tour with you, and then I\'m going home, because my wife makes a lot of money. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and I don\'t have to put up with this shit anymore.\'” **“White Beretta”** “At this song’s heart there\'s this regret, and it\'s not shame, because I love the concept of extracting helpful emotions from shame. I feel like shame is kind of to protect you from really looking at what actually happened. I can look back and say, \'Well, yeah, it wasn\'t all my fault, because I was raised a certain way to believe a certain set of things.\' I didn\'t say, \'Don\'t do this.\' I didn\'t say, \'I don\'t want you to terminate this pregnancy.\' I was just kind of on the fence. But I was a teenager; I didn\'t know what to do, and I had been raised in a very conservative place, and there was a lot of conflicting emotions going on. A song like that is hard because you have to make an admission about yourself. You have to say, \'I haven\'t always been cool in this way.\' I don\'t think you can give an example to people of growing if you don\'t give an example of what you\'re growing from.” **“This Ain’t It”** “This is sort of post-Southern-rock, because it sounds very Southern rock, but the dad in this song is somebody who would completely, unironically love the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The perspective is he\'s basically trying to sneak back into his daughter\'s life at a very inopportune time. It\'s another one of those where the advice might not be very good, but he certainly believes it, and it\'s coming from his heart. I\'ve proven what I need to prove about my tastes and about serving the song, and sometimes the song just needs to have a bunch of guitar on it and rock, and maybe even some fucking congas.” **“Miles”** “I kept trying to shape it into something that was more like a four-minute Jason Isbell song, and then at one point I thought, ‘No. I think we could just play the way that I\'ve written it here.’ I would have a verse on one page and then that refrain written out on a different page, and I had to go back through the notebook and figure out what belonged to that song. The approach was kind of like if Neil Young was fronting Wings. It was like a McCartney song where it\'s got all these different segments and then it comes back around on itself at the end, but also sort of with Neil\'s guitar and backbeat. It felt like I had a little bit of a breakthrough in what I would allow myself to do, because I\'ve always loved songs like this, and I\'ve always sort of thought, \'Well, you need to stop.\' When Lennon was out of the picture, McCartney was making \'Band on the Run\' and all this stuff. It\'s just one big crazy song all tied together with little threads.”

In early 2023, Kelsea Ballerini released her *Rolling Up the Welcome Mat* EP, a frank collection of songs she wrote and recorded with collaborator Alysa Vanderheym in the wake of her high-profile divorce. The songs span a number of the complicated feelings wrought by a difficult breakup, like the angry skepticism of “Blindsided” and the knowing regret of “Mountain With a View,” on which Ballerini reflects frankly upon the moment things really fell apart in her marriage. *Rolling Up the Welcome Mat (For Good)* expands upon its predecessor, offering new music as well as revisions of original tracks, like the live “Healed Version” of the heart-wrenching ballad “Penthouse.” The EP’s “Interlude” gets a “Full Length” treatment, while the already cutting “Blindsided” adds the sarcastic parenthetical “(Yeah, Sure, Okay)” to its title, as well as additional lyrics which Ballerini debuted during a performance on *Saturday Night Live*. Closing track “How Do I Do This” is brand new, serving as a cautiously optimistic capstone that especially emphasizes the “For Good” in the updated EP’s title.

Brandy Clark’s rise through the ranks of country music from songwriter for hire to celebrated solo artist has been a marvel to watch. Clark, whose early career as a songwriter yielded hits for Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, is one of the genre’s finest craftspersons, writing image-rich, masterfully told story-songs and nuanced snapshots of relationships gone wrong in equally great measure. She first showed off her solo artist chops with 2013’s *12 Stories*, a critically acclaimed collection that led to a record deal with Warner Records. Now on her fourth studio outing, Clark has found a way to combine the intimacy of her early solo material with the savvy sensibilities she developed behind the scenes. Helmed by producer Brandi Carlile, *Brandy Clark* is Clark’s most cohesive project yet, a largely quiet, raw affair imbued with a greater sense of vulnerability than her earlier work. Carlile’s spare production gives Clark ample room to showcase her singing voice especially, as on the forthright and plainspoken “Tell Her You Don’t Love Her,” the soulful “All Over Again,” and closer “Take Mine,” on which Clark serves up crystalline couplets of compassion, sharing her sense of hope with anyone lacking their own. Guests on the album include Derek Trucks, Lucius, and Carlile herself, who joins Clark on the LP’s emotional centerpiece, “Dear Insecurity.”

Zach Bryan has very quickly achieved Ubiquitous Pop-Mythology Origin Story status. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter’s trajectory, from Navy cadet with a preternatural talent for storytelling and a YouTube following to honorable dischargee with a massive grassroots following to, now, major-label superstar selling out 100 or so arenas a year, was both dizzyingly fast and seemingly preordained. His self-titled follow-up to 2022’s triple-LP Warners debut *American Heartbreak* doesn’t necessarily advance Bryan’s story or status so much as cement it, moving past the introduction phase into something more permanent and more meaningful. One way or another, Zach Bryan—and *Zach Bryan*—is going to be with us for a while. The album—a lean 16 tracks compared to *Heartbreak*’s 34—begins with a double-barrel mission statement. The first is the spoken-word opening track, “Fear and Friday’s (Poem),” which distills Bryan’s everyman charm and philosophy into a benediction (“I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common/They are overdone and glorified and always leave you wanting”). This is followed immediately by a Hendrixesque “Star-Spangled Banner” guitar lick and the shout-along bravado of “Overtime,” complete with horn section and empowered nods to his aforementioned mythology: “They said I\'s a wannabe cowboy from a cutthroat town/With tattooed skin and nobody around/Your songs sound the same, you\'ll never make a name for yourself.” Bryan’s three-year whirlwind of making a name for himself has only sharpened his eye for detail—the songs only sound the same in that they all share this quality. A slick turn of phrase like “If you need a tourniquet or if you want to turn and quit/Know that I\'ll be by your side” is delivered like someone who knows what he\'s doing. The songs comfortably inhabit traditional country, Americana, and, on relative barn burners like the veteran’s tale “East Side of Sorrow” and “Jake’s Piano - Long Island,” at least one boot in Springsteen-anthem story-song terrain. And at a moment when country music, possibly more than any other genre, is roiled by reactionary entrenchment in the face of long-overdue advancement, Bryan has managed to stake himself to the center without alienating anyone or, chiefly, himself. He preaches love and tolerance and sings about hard drinking and ’88 Fords, and they don’t sound like opposing energies, because why should they? He goes toe-to-toe with Nashville-outsider kindred spirit Kacey Musgraves on “I Remember Everything,” and even the most intimate songs, like the solo acoustic closer “Oklahoman Son,” sound built for the back row, which gets further away each tour leg. The sum of these parts is nothing less than a confident, headstrong star turn from someone who seems a little ambivalent about stardom, at least on any terms other than his own.

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

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

Some artists use self-titled albums as an opportunity to reintroduce themselves, but for Brothers Osborne it’s something closer to a long-awaited full reveal. The sibling duo’s fourth studio album and the follow-up to 2020’s *Skeletons*, *Brothers Osborne* is the fullest artistic and personal statement from TJ and John Osborne yet, a feat partially owed to TJ’s coming out as gay in early 2021. Accordingly, the duo sounds loose and revitalized, with producer Mike Elizondo capturing an electric moment in time and subtly expanding upon the genre-defying sound the pair has developed over the years. Highlights include the playful, groovy kiss-off “Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That,” a Jaren Johnston co-write with serious disco swagger, and the sexy, soulful “Goodbye’s Kickin’ In,” which makes the most of TJ’s sultry baritone. Closer “Rollercoaster (Forever and a Day)” is a love song for the ages, using gender-neutral pronouns so anyone can relate to the sweet and realistic track. “Writing songs was a lot more enjoyable \[on this record\],” TJ tells Apple Music. “Instead of having to steer around or be fearful of how something was going be portrayed, I think now it was like, ‘Okay, we\'ve been pretty open about who we are,’ and there was a lot less stifling creative barriers there. I think it’s ultimately why we wanted to self-title the album. We don\'t have anything to hide anymore, and it\'s such an incredibly freeing experience.” Below, the brothers share insight into several key tracks. **“Goodbye’s Kickin’ In”** TJ: “As you\'re about to maybe call it quits, there\'s that thing where you\'re like, ‘Wait, no, I don\'t want to do this.’ And whether it turns into making love or when that moment is so pure in adrenaline, just a rush where you get this close to the edge and you rescue one another, it\'s exciting. And so that was what inspired that song there. And I love how you can really hear a totally different influence, I think, than you\'ve heard on any of our other songs on that one. There\'s an almost R&B soulfulness to it that I really love.” **“Love You Too”** TJ: “There\'s times where people will say something and I\'m like, ‘You are getting under my skin.’ But I think that really, when you can step out of it and get above it, it really is the most powerful place to be and to not be controlled. A lot of times when people are saying something hateful, what they really want is your attention, and they\'re just trying to scream as much as they can.” **“We Ain’t Good at Breaking Up”** TJ: “I would say that \[title\] as a joke. People would ask if \[my boyfriend and I\] were still together and I would say, ‘Yeah, we\'re not very good at breaking up,’ as a silly thing to say. And then I said it to Jesse Frasure once and he was like, ‘Well, we got to write that.’ It doesn\'t get into super specifics, necessarily, of my sexuality or anything—all along we\'ve always had gender-neutral songs intentionally and we\'ve still stuck with that theme, which I personally like. I think it\'s just something that we don\'t get recognized a lot for, but do at times, and I love living in that space.” **“Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That”** John: “It’s a disco track, disco strings. I mean, we threw every instrument in the entire studio on that song, too. We wrote that song with Jaren Johnston and Lee Miller at his cabin. He rented a cabin for a couple of days and we just drank more alcohol than we could possibly drink and wrote. And that was, I think, the first one that we wrote. And we were just cutting up laughing. And Jaren, of course, in the room he just likes to get weird, so that\'s where that song was born from.” **“Rollercoaster (Forever and a Day)”** TJ: “That was another really interesting thing for me \[about writing this record\]. While I was in, and still am in, a very loving relationship, before I would\'ve pretended that it didn\'t exist and I would live in someone else\'s life, I guess. And so \[this song\] was heavily inspired by my current relationship.” John: “\[Relationships\] are amazing and they\'re all really hard. That\'s what the song\'s about. I mean, where are the songs for people who don\'t get along? If you listen to a love song, it\'s like, ‘I love you and it\'s great and slide on over in my truck ’cause life is perfect.’ It\'s like, ‘No, it\'s not.’ And then the truck\'s broken down and you\'re pissed at each other, and then two days later, you\'re loving on each other again. That\'s what love is. Love is getting through the hard times.”

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

An Ashley McBryde album is more than just a collection of songs. The acclaimed singer-songwriter creates entire worlds on her records, filling them with quirky characters, familiar places, and tall, tall tales, as especially evident on 2022’s *Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville*. With *The Devil I Know*, McBryde pairs some of that world-building with a bevy of musical influences, including bluegrass and rock ’n’ roll, that breathe an easy, expansive life into the project. Backed by her live band Deadhorse, McBryde sounds vibrant and electric, imbuing songs like the gut-wrenching “Learned to Lie” and the playfully clear-eyed “Coldest Beer in Town” with strength and raw emotion. As she shares with Apple Music, *The Devil I Know* is McBryde’s fullest expression of her artistry, and herself, yet. “I kept trying to—and others helped—pigeonhole myself into just being *this*, or just being *this* part of my identity,” she explains. “It feels so much better to just go, ‘Oh, it turns out I\'m just a complete person, and this is what it looks like and this is what it smells like and this is how fast it can run. And it can\'t jump very high, but it\'s very entertaining.’” Below, McBryde shares insight into several key tracks. **“Coldest Beer in Town”** “Every bar has a sign that it\'s the ‘coldest beer in town,’ or it\'s the ‘best cheeseburger in town.’ And not every single one of them has that. And then you realize as you get older, so that was just like, ‘Hey, dude, if it\'s buy one, get one, the first one wasn\'t free.’ ‘I will love you forever’? It\'s not true. ‘I will move a mountain for you’ and ‘I\'ll never hurt your feelings\'? Also a complete lie. But to be able to wrap all that up and just go, ‘Hey, it\'s cool. Every bar doesn\'t have the coldest beer.\' You found something out today. Adorable.” **“Learned to Lie”** “I called Mom after we cut it and talked both her and my stepdad through the lyrics, and I said, ‘I just want you to know it\'s on the record. It\'s going to hurt, but it\'s not untrue. I didn\'t lie about anything.’ And she was very understanding about that. It\'s not that this song is only about me. Once a listener hears it, it\'s whatever you\'re drawing from. That is what the song is about, and if you had family members that behave that way. But it was difficult to look at that: ‘I wish I had learned how to love the same way I learned how to lie.’” **“Single at the Same Time”** “Nobody in the song is going to cheat. They\'re just saying, ‘I wonder what would\'ve happened.’ My favorite thing so far about this song is playing it in an intimate setting, whether we\'re playing it off the record for someone to listen to or I\'m playing it live. When you play it for a group of 20, 30 people, watch their faces and find out who has one of those \[relationships\]. And when that person crosses their mind, the look that\'s on their face and the way their shoulders change, and even if they\'re just thinking, ‘Oh, I wish I could\'ve said that to him at some point. We could\'ve had that conversation.’” **“Cool Little Bars”** “I don\'t know which work tape Jay \[Joyce\] got, but he thought this was a sad song and he hated it. I\'d hate it too if it was a sad song and I\'m like, ‘Why are we setting it up this way?’ Then we go in to really make the record, and I said, ‘I don\'t know why you don\'t like this song.’ He was like, ‘It\'s so sad.’ I said, ‘It\'s not a sad song at all. This is like a hell yeah kind of a feeling.’ He said, ‘Well, I\'ll tell you what, why don\'t you sit down, just grab a guitar and sit down. Let\'s all sit in a circle. Teach me the song like we\'re on your porch and see if I get it.’ He looks at Chris \[Harris\] and he said, ‘Grab a bouzouki. Quinn \[Hill\], grab whatever you want.’ Quinn grabbed the tiniest little djembe that he had under his armpit. He threw Matt Helmkamp a resonator guitar. He was like, ‘Just play that on a res. Let\'s jam porch-style on this.’ And we did.” **“6th of October”** “The very first line of the ‘6th of October’ is ‘I threw up this morning in Christiansburg, VA.’ So at the time, \[co-writers\] CJ Field and Blue Foley and myself were at my house. This is back when I lived out in the middle of the woods, and we had a co-writer and best friend, Randall Clay, and this is probably six or eight months after he passed away. And we are on the porch to write together—we\'re not going to write about Randall, we just want to invite his spirit to be with us. He\'s just the most amazing songwriter that I had ever had the pleasure of writing with. And CJ\'s like, ‘Man, this one time I pulled into Randall\'s driveway, and he was in his underwear and a T-shirt and he was smoking. He had socks on, on the porch.’ And I just threw out this line, and he took a drag, before he even blew the smoke all the way out of his lungs, he finished the line.”

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

Leave it to Morgan Wade to name an album *Psychopath*. Its predecessor, 2021’s critically acclaimed *Reckless*, boasts a similarly evocative, un-Music Row title—one that nods both to Wade’s outsize persona and to her rejection of any mainstream model for country music success. Like contemporaries Lainey Wilson and Zach Bryan, Wade’s rise to stardom within the genre has been unorthodox—and hugely successful—thanks in large part to that willingness to ignore trends in favor of making music that feels true to her. As she did with *Reckless*, Wade once again taps Sadler Vaden of Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit to produce the record, reprising the boundary-pushing chemistry that made *Reckless* such a hit. Vaden co-writes a number of tracks alongside Wade here too, as does a murderers’ row of Nashville’s finest writers, including Ashley Monroe, Natalie Hemby, Liz Rose, and Lori McKenna. Opening track “Domino,” a sideways rocker about finding respite in a steady love, sets a thematic and sonic tone for the record, its first line, “My roses are dead, all my pills are blue/The house is a wreck, my head is too,” encapsulating Wade’s ability to inject a clever turn of phrase with personality and pathos. Other highlights include “Losers Look Like Me,” a potent pairing of power pop and pop country that confronts the realities of adulthood with humor and humility, and closer “27 Club,” a starkly vulnerable meditation on fame and fast living that also includes one of the album’s most gutting lyrics: “I don’t know if I would call it luck, but I didn’t make the 27 Club/I’m 28, so y’all ain’t gotta dig my grave.”

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

Jelly Roll, the stage name of singer-rapper-songwriter Jason DeFord, has long been one of Nashville’s best-kept secrets. A native of the city’s Antioch neighborhood, DeFord originally pursued music as a hip-hop artist, collaborating with regional talents like Memphis’ Lil Wyte and Juicy J and Nashville’s Yelawolf and Struggle Jennings. While DeFord is a formidable rapper—his flow ranges from a twangy, charismatic drawl to a rapid-fire clip—he also has a singing voice tailor-made for the kind of angsty country rock popularized by artists like Brantley Gilbert and Cody Jinks. On his proper country debut, *Whitsitt Chapel*, DeFord leans primarily into the latter, serving up a mix of brooding rockers and sincere ballads, with a particular thematic emphasis on redemption and recovery—fitting, as DeFord spent his teen years in prison and now works to help others with felony charges rebuild their lives. It’s that willingness to engage with darker realities that draws many to DeFord’s music, something he does not take for granted. “Some of the most honest people I ever met in my life, surprisingly, were in jail,” DeFord tells Apple Music. “Some of the smartest people I ever met were in rehab. I think I just gained such humility from that. When you grow up with literally the opposite of something, anything is awesome.” *Whitsitt Chapel* opens with “Halfway to Hell,” a look at the dueling forces of good and evil causing DeFord to wage war with himself. “Behind Bars” brings both Gilbert and Jennings on board, with a sing-along chorus anchored by the line “Most my friends are behind bars.” Yelawolf shows up with his brand of Southern hip-hop on “Unlive,” a woozy and unflinching look at how poverty and addiction are often so deeply intertwined. Lainey Wilson duets with DeFord on “Save Me,” one of the album’s most tender moments thanks to both vocalists’ vulnerable performances. The album closes with “Hungover in a Church Pew,” a hopeful tune about finding the strength to start over. “This is my coming-of-age record,” DeFord adds. “And it\'s kind of a journey through my growth, the duality that I\'m still a wild card but I\'m an immensely changed man from who I was. The biggest problem we got right now is I might drink a little too much and get a little rowdy. But God’s looking at me with two thumbs up.” Here, DeFord shares insight into several key tracks. **“The Lost”** “We had finished the album, and I called Jesse Frasure to call Miranda Lambert and say, ‘Hey, if y\'all don\'t want to do this \[co-write\] tomorrow, that\'s cool. This album\'s done. We can go in there and dick around. But the singles are picked. This is only ice cream, right? If y\'all want to go out for dessert, okay, but the steak and potatoes are here.’ And I thought Miranda will be like, ‘Oh, no problem. We\'ll write on the next one.’ But Miranda\'s like, ‘What are you talking about? We\'re coming. I got ideas.’ She gives me a synopsis of what my album\'s about and then goes, ‘This is what I\'m thinking. What about this?’ And immediately I\'m like, ‘You are just as badass as everybody said you are.’” **“Behind Bars” (feat. Brantley Gilbert and Struggle Jennings)** “‘Behind Bars,’ for me, was fun because it goes back to songs needing purpose. That song made the album solely because I\'ve always wanted and felt the need to have an old-school sing-along. And I felt like ‘Behind Bars’ is perfect. \[Thinking of\] Garth \[Brooks\], it\'s like ‘Two Piña Coladas,’ right? Like I\'d never cut that song. But what would my ‘Two Piña Coladas’ sound like? And I think that\'s ‘Behind Bars.’” **“Nail Me”** “The country music community came to me wide open. Ninety percent of country radio came to me wide open. I mean, unbelievable, the support. That 10 percent, though, from both sides. That 10 percent deserved 7 percent of my album. So I gave them ‘Nail Me.’ That\'s how I felt. They didn\'t even deserve a full 10 percent of my album, but they deserved a little 7 percent. So I gave them a song. It was just that I felt judged kind of all over again.” **“Unlive” (feat. Yelawolf)** “It\'s the most tied to the old stuff. It was just so cool to write it with somebody like the Grammy Award-winning Ashley McBryde, that she comes straight in. And that song started by us just telling old white-trash stories. I won\'t tell her stories, but we\'re telling each other these funny stories about where we\'re from. And she was like, ‘But you just can\'t unlive where you\'re from.’ I\'m like, ‘Well, that\'s the song today. Let\'s write that one, Ashley.’” **“Save Me” (feat. Lainey Wilson)** “It was the middle of the pandemic. And when I say middle of it, I mean we were spraying boxes with Lysol. And I just couldn\'t sit through that. I was like, ‘We got to work.’ And I was in such a dark space because of that; I knew I needed to write. My father had just died a year before. So I\'m still learning how to grieve through that. And then I\'m like, ‘We got to write. I got to get this out of me.’ So ‘Save Me’ came from a really dark space. It\'s still really hard to sing.”

“I feel like there are two sides of me,” says the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitar virtuoso known as Sunny War. “One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced.” That’s the central conflict on her fourth album, the eclectic and innovative Anarchist Gospel, which documents a time when it looked like the self-destructive side might win out. Extreme emotions can make that battle all the more perilous, yet from such trials Sunny has crafted a set of songs that draw on a range of ideas and styles, as though she’s marshaling all her forces to get her ideas across: ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant garde studio experiments. She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs throughout every song. Because it promises not healing but resilience and perseverance, because it doesn’t take shit for granted, Anarchist Gospel holds up under such intense emotional pressure, acknowledging the pain of living while searching for something that lies just beyond ourselves, some sense of balance between the bad and the good.

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

Riley Green makes it clear he’s here to stay on his aptly titled sophomore LP. The Alabama-born singer-songwriter got to approach this record, produced by Dann Huff, a little differently than previous projects, telling Apple Music that the process gave him a more holistic view and, therefore, a fuller representation of his brand of country music. “We weren\'t cutting singles or EPs, four or five songs at a time,” Green says. “We went and cut an entire album. So I was able to look at it and go, ‘Man, it\'d be good to have something like this on there and something like this,’ but then also have a theme for the whole album. And I think the best thing I can say about it is it\'s got a lot of different kinds of songs on it.” Highlights include “My Last Rodeo,” a song inspired by the passing of both of Green’s grandfathers in quick succession, and opener “Damn Country Music,” a heartfelt cover of the title track from Tim McGraw’s 2015 album. Green knows how to choose ace collaborators, too, as Luke Combs joins him on “Different ’Round Here” and Jelly Roll features on “Copenhagen in a Cadillac.” Below, Green shares insight into several key tracks. **“Damn Country Music”** “I wasn\'t thinking about the album as a whole when I cut that song. I first heard it from Jessi Alexander, who I write with a lot, and I had a vision for how I wanted it to go, and I think that\'s the coolest intro to the song ever. It just seemed like a no-brainer. It\'s just a cool way to start the whole album.” **“Mississippi or Me”** “I had ‘Were you missing Mississippi or me?’ and it was such a catchy hook. I wanted to write something around that, and I held on to it for a while and I kind of got a chorus started and thought I loved the cotton fields and two names on a water tank and Jack, all the visual stuff. We finished it in one day, but it was one of those that I played for a couple of years at shows and people have always caught me. I can post a picture of my dog and people are asking for that song, so it was great to be able to finally cut it and put it out.” **“Ain’t Like I Can Hide It”** “I was on a radio tour and I went to California, LA somewhere, and somebody from the label had steered me and was just like, ‘Hey, when we get out here, don\'t talk so much about hunting or whatever, because they don\'t really do that out here.’ I was telling the story to Bobby \[Pinson\] and Chris \[DuBois\] and I said it: ‘It ain\'t like I can hide it. As soon as they look at me, they\'re going to know I\'m a redneck from Alabama. You hear me talk, it\'s not like I can cover this up.’ And Bobby said, ‘That\'s it. We\'re writing it.’” **“Copenhagen in a Cadillac” (feat. Jelly Roll)** “\[Jelly Roll’s\] got a great story and is very relatable somehow, even though his story is pretty crazy. But we hit it off when we first met and did some shows together. I wrote the song ‘Copenhagen in a Cadillac’ kind of as a joke. It’s a very fun song. And I think it\'s probably tough for me to always make sure I have that kind of thing, because I think I write towards a more ballad, meaningful-type song, and this was an idea I had that was just fun. I don\'t know if I would\'ve cut it had Jelly not wanted to be on it, but I texted him the song and he called me the next day and was fired up about it. I think it\'s cool because it\'s probably a collaboration people weren\'t really expecting.” **“My Last Rodeo”** “That title I\'ve had for 13 years. \[My grandfather\] passed away in 2010, and he was in the hospital for about three months, kind of in bad shape, and then it was my other granddaddy. I took him to his favorite catfish restaurant. The next weekend, he went to bed and didn\'t wake up. So, if I had my choice, that was so much easier, because I got to where I couldn\'t really picture my granddaddy other than that place where he was just kind of not himself. And I think in the struggles of us going to see him every day and him knowing it was tough on us, he said that—‘this ain\'t my last rodeo\'—to comfort me and make it easier on us, because we were tight. And I don\'t really know that I knew it was a song, but it just stayed with me for that amount of time. How tough a guy he was to know that, not to be concerned about himself but \[to\] be more worried about me and how I was going to deal with him passing.”