Rolling Stone's 30 Best Country and Americana Albums of 2020

“That was the trick: knowing who I was before I tried to tell anybody who I was, or before I let anybody else tell me who I was,” Ashley McBryde tells Apple Music. The magnetically natural singer and down-home storyteller with biker-bar swagger who snuck up on the country mainstream in the late 2010s honed her craft playing in bars. “I would not trade over a decade of playing in bars doing that, because the way I found out if a song was good or not was: Could I make somebody listen to it? And could I sneak it in between covers? I think that made the biggest difference, was just knowing that this is who I am and this is what I sound like when I went to make my first real record.” McBryde’s latest 11-song set, *Never Will*, the follow-up to 2018’s *Girl Going Nowhere*, makes few concessions to record label priorities or radio preferences. It does, however, range through riotous Southern gothic narration, classic honky-tonk transgression, blue-collar anthems of ambition, stoic mourning, and other cleverly altered, time-tested song forms. She, her trusty road band, and their producer Jay Joyce refracted those tunes through a process of studio experimentation that gave serrated contours to the grooves. Says McBryde, “If you\'ve got like a weird, quirky idea, and if your sentence starts with ‘This might sound stupid, but let\'s try,’ Jay will let you try it.” Here McBryde talks through each track on *Never Will*. **Hang In There Girl** “I saw this girl, she might\'ve been 14 or 15, she was standing at the mailbox. This mailbox has been used as a baseball many times. It has been crunched and uncrunched and crunched and uncrunched, and it was just barely sitting on the fence post. She was doing something that I had seen myself do: She was kicking rocks, and not in a mad-at-my-mom kind of way, but in like a ‘Why am I sitting here putting my toe in these rocks? And why is the grass so tall? And why are all the clothes I own, I\'m not the first person to own them?’ I\'m the youngest of six, and not only did I have to wear hand-me-downs, I had to wear my brother\'s hand-me-downs. When I got a bicycle, it wasn\'t because they were able to get me a bicycle. It\'s because one of my older cousins was done using theirs. There\'s nothing wrong with growing up that way. I\'m proud of the way I grew up. I just wanted to pull over and say, \'In only a couple of years, you\'re going to be old enough to get a job, you\'re going to have money, and you can get a car and you can leave this place. And I promise you, you will look fondly on this place once you leave.\'” **One Night Standards** “Nicolette \[Hayford\] and I, we wrote a song called ‘Airport Hotel.’ That hook was ending with, ‘I\'m still sitting here kicking myself for treating my heart like an airport hotel,’ because that\'s not a place you want to stay for very long. We thought we would just let it sit just as a verse and a chorus because something was wrong. Our next write together we had a third, and his name was Shane McAnally. We played him what we had, and he said, ‘I don\'t think there\'s anything wrong with this. Let\'s just keep playing through it and try maybe being a little more honest.’ And I said, ‘Well, there is a reason that hotel rooms only have one nightstand in them, because they\'re one-night-standers.’ And Shane said, ‘Did you say “standards”? Make that rhyme and put that at the end as the hook.’ Then the next verse just came out. It\'s sort of like a ‘Honey. It\'s okay. Don\'t freak out. I\'m going to lay the room key down right here, and if you pick it up and you meet me later, you do. And if you don\'t, it\'s no sweat off my back.’ I did get a little bit of flack when the single first came out, people saying, ‘It\'s not the most feminine thing you could\'ve said. It\'s not the most ladylike thing.’ I\'ve been called a lot of things, but a lady is not one of them.” **Shut Up Sheila** “It was a piano and guitar demo, and I loved it the second Nicolette sent it to me. I\'d never heard a country song about a dying grandmother. And anytime you get to say something like ‘shut up’ or drop an F-bomb, that\'s usually a cool thing to me, too. But there\'s somebody in everybody\'s family, whether they are holier-than-thou or not, that either on a holiday or in times of loss like this, you really just want to look at them and go, ‘Kind of wish you would just shut up.’ So just in case you\'re sitting there biting your tongue at Thanksgiving dinner, just go listen to the song. It made me think about loss, when it came to cut the record. When I lost my brother, I was so mad, and I remember being at the funeral and everyone being like, ‘Let\'s pray together for a minute.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? I don\'t want to pray right now. I want to be angry. I want to get drunk and I want to get high and I want to get away from this for a little bit.’ Everybody\'s going to deal with loss in a different way, and it\'s never okay to push how you deal with it on somebody else, so let\'s give everybody a little bit of breathing room here.” **First Thing I Reach For** “I wrote that with Randall \[Clay\] and Mick \[Holland\] in the morning. Randall came outside and poured whiskey in our coffee, and we all lit a cigarette. And we wrote it as a sad song. I get to the studio and I\'m like, ‘In my world, which is fingerpicking, midtempo songs, what if we played this one like we were a bar band but the bar is inside a bowling alley?’ My lead guitar player, he\'s got a Telecaster with a B-bender in it, and his father is a steel guitar player. So it wasn\'t hard at all for him to come up with a really cool riff there.” **Voodoo Doll** “I knew that I wanted that to be like a slow headbang on the metal side of things, and I didn\'t know how we were going to accomplish it. The band loved the song—we just weren\'t sure how we were going to do this in a studio. And I said, ‘Well, let\'s play it together and make it as big and loud as we can be and then give something small the lead. Let\'s make it a mandolin thing. Let\'s put the most traditional instrument inside the most rock ’n’ roll song. And let\'s take those really traditional sounds and make them with the overdriven guitars.’” **Sparrow** “Nicolette and I had had this idea for a song about sparrows for a long time. When I first started getting tattoos down my arms, the first two were sketches of sparrows on the backs of my arms. She had asked me, ‘Why two sparrows? Why were those the first things you put on your arms?’ And I said, ‘Because it\'s a pretty widely known fact that sparrows fly all over the world, and they never forget where home is. They have the ability to beacon themselves back to the tree they came from, and that is a quality I would love to keep in myself.’ I knew if we brought this subject up with Brandy Clark, she would be able to really help us bring it to life.” **Martha Divine** “I think this was our first song together, me and Jeremy Spillman. We were in the basement of an old church. So, I was like, ‘We should write something dark. I haven\'t written a murder song in a long time. Let\'s murder something.’ We came up with the name Martha Divine, who was an urban legend from his home state of Kentucky. We didn\'t use the actual story that surrounded Martha Divine, I just really liked the name. And I thought, ‘Well, what if it was like a Jolene situation, only the person that we\'re going to write the perspective from is this slightly psychotic, Bible-beating, overly-protective-of-her-mother little girl? Maybe she\'s 15, maybe she\'s 21. She needs to go back and forth, in my mind, between reciting Bible verses like a good little girl and smiling at you because she\'s about to hit you in the face with a shovel and she\'s so proud. I\'ve joked a couple times that cheating songs normally come from the perspective of cheating or being cheated on. Luckily, I was able to write it for the perspective of the daughter, and who knows where I got that perspective from. I\'m sure that my father will really appreciate that song on the record.” **Velvet Red** “When we first started cutting it, I was like, ‘Guys, we\'re going to have to play it as a band and then have \[Chris\] Sancho play that bass part on it, because it\'s really screwing with my head.’ It\'s a big hollow-body bass that he was playing, and he comes from a Motown and a blues background. And next thing we know is we have that \[part\], and it\'s so cool. That way you still get the traditional feel for ‘Velvet Red,’ which is what is best to let that story come through, but then you\'re not beat in the face with just the bluegrass feel either.” **Stone** “Nicolette and I, we have a pretty general rule that normally we don\'t write anything down until one of us cries, either from laughing or because we\'ve hit a nerve, and once we hit the nerve, we jump on it. Our brothers died in very, very different ways. They\'re both Army veterans, but her brother David was hit by a vehicle, and mine killed himself. So, we go outside to smoke, just chitchatting back and forth, trying to stay close to the topic and then get far enough away from it that we give ourselves some oxygen. And she said something, and I cackled, and when I cackled I went, ‘Oh my god, I laugh like him.’ It drives me nuts, and I just started bawling. And she goes, ‘There it is. You\'re so angry because you\'re so hurt, and the reason you\'re so hurt is because you didn\'t pay attention to how alike you were until he was dead. That\'s okay. Let\'s write from there.’ So it\'s not hopeless. It\'s ‘I see little bits of you in me.’ I think it needed to be on the record because it moved me farther through that process than therapy ever could have. Maybe it can help somebody else through it too.” **Never Will** “Matt \[Helmkamp\], our lead guitar player, sent over this guitar riff that he had been playing. It kind of had this cool groove to it. Mumbling around, we came up with ‘I didn\'t, I don\'t, and I never will.’ That\'s when we kind of dove into, remember those people that were mean to you because you wanted to do music? And now you\'re doing things like getting Grammy nominations and all you can do is think, \'You were so confused about the reason that we were making music and the way we were doing it and how I was only playing in bars. How the hell else do you think you get to play in arenas if you don\'t play in bars? A career is not a participation trophy.” **Styrofoam** “I used to play this writers’ night at Blue Bar \[in Nashville\]. It was called the Freakshow. Randall Clay was on stage one night and he just takes off, ‘Well, in 1941,’ and I was like, ‘What is he talking about?’ But by the time he got to the chorus, I\'m cracking up because this song is so much fun to sing, and it\'s actually educational. Randall was just one of those writers that could do that. I grew up eating gas station and truck stop food and getting my drinks from it. I know it\'s environmentally irresponsible, but things just taste better in styrofoam, and it\'s just fun to sing \'styrofoam.\' Of course, he died \[in October 2018\]. We really wanted to pay tribute to him. And there were two other of his songs that are in our live show that I wanted to put on the record that didn\'t get to be there. And on the last day of cutting, Jay goes, ‘I wish we had one more song that was just super fun to listen to.’ So I sat down and sang ‘Styrofoam.’”

Artists who take an approach as acutely personal and unambiguously confessional as Katie Pruitt does on her debut album often revel in rawness. But the Georgia-bred, Nashville-based singer-songwriter treats refinement as a complement to self-expression. The 10 songs on *Expectations*—most of which she wrote solo, and all of which she co-produced with fellow first-timer Michael Robinson—employ lyrical precision in the service of emotional lucidity. Pruitt captures a contrast in outlooks—between fearing the rejection that might come with disobeying conventional codes and bending them to make space for living openly. The elegant contours of her melodies draw from familiar folk, rock, and pop forms, and they hold their shapes even as she applies freewheeling dynamics; the acrobatic intimacy of her singing and the reverb-glazed, guitar-driven arrangements amplify her ebbs and flows in feeling.

“I got to the point where I felt like there was more I still could do, like I was leaving a lot on the table still,” Brett Eldredge tells Apple Music of the period of reflection and reinvention that led to his fifth album, *Sunday Drive*. A country-pop crooner with thoroughly contemporary sensibilities, he’d scored hits throughout the 2010s with songs he had a hand in writing, but after briefly stepping back from the spotlight, he was ready to adopt a more personalized singer-songwriter approach. He selected Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, who’d helped Kacey Musgraves achieve her artistic breakthrough on *Golden Hour*, as songwriting and studio partners and incorporated bits of insight and perspective from his interior life. “To be able to take that leap of faith was the best thing I ever did,” says Eldredge. Intent on getting a bit of distance from Nashville, he, Fitchuk, and Tashian headed to Chicago for recording sessions that yielded a warm, ’70s soft-rock sound. “I think that\'s what allowed me to really make a special record like this, was to get away from the noise and get away from other opinions and forget about the business,” says Eldredge. “You\'re completely out of your usual zone and it brings something else out in you. It certainly brought something else out of me.” Here Eldredge takes a leisurely trip through the songs of *Sunday Drive*. **Where the Heart Is** “This was the song that captured the journey that I was trying to go on to make this album—stepping away from everything and finding that spark, that version of myself that was unfazed by any other opinions. When I first moved to Nashville, and you\'re knocking on people\'s doors and handing them a CD because you don\'t care what they say. You just want them to hear your voice and you want to put yourself out there. And then the world and the business of everything shows up, and you feel like you don\'t get to be that person as much. And then you start putting guards up and you lose a sense of that person. I wanted to find that person again, and that was the whole goal of making this album. The way it starts is with that guitar; it makes you wait a little bit. I love that. It\'s been years since I put out a record, so there\'s a little bit of anticipation.” **The One You Need** “I wanted to be more realistic to what love and relationships were like in my personal life. I\'ve always been known as a guy that sings love songs and all these songs about being deeply in love, and I\'ve never really been in love. I know glimpses of it. I know what it can possibly be, but I\'ve never really been deeply in love. I want to be able to be there for someone like that. It\'s not a guarantee. It\'s not for sure. But I know that it\'s a possibility, and I want to be here for that.” **Magnolia** “I was listening to a lot of Billy Joel and Elton John, The Band and Bob Dylan—a lot of rootsy stuff. I love the sound of mandolin. This song has that kind of feel of a nostalgic yesterday, but just feels a little bit different and unique to itself. The bridge says it all: ‘It\'s a shame that you grow up when you do, because all the miles and all the years take a piece of you. I guess everything gets cut down over time. But that don\'t mean I don\'t go back there in my mind.’ It reflects this kind of carefree feeling of what you thought was love at that time in your life.” **Crowd My Mind** “It\'s a pretty heavy song. I had just got back from a trip in California. I rented a little beach house out there. I was just by myself and very isolated. For Southern California, it was really rainy and really cold. It was very reflective of the people that were on my mind. It\'s stripped back. The song is mostly just piano and a vocal and a little bit of percussion.” **Good Day** “It\'s like discovering that you need to look at the world differently than you\'ve been looking at it. I try to be a positive person, but it comes time in life where you can wake up in the morning and be like, ‘Man, I got all this going on in my life and this here is just another day.’ I think I was realizing that my mind would get in that thought pattern sometimes, and becoming self-aware that I need to make that conscious decision to start my day and say, ‘What if I change it up? You can pick to have a good day and try to put your right foot forward.’ That doesn\'t mean it\'s guaranteed to be a good day just because you say that, but if you make that decision, at least you\'re heading in the right direction. I think that was big for me to realize that.” **Fall for Me** “This guy named Pat McLaughlin, he\'s an awesome artist and songwriter. He’s the king of groove and feel. I\'ve always loved to write with him, but I\'ve never gotten to record a song that I wrote with him. So I get in there to write with him and Daniel one day. He just has this cool groove, and he\'s singing this kind of half-put-together chorus. It\'s one of those songs you put on and it just kind of transports you.” **Sunday Drive** “I\'m an appreciator of family and of memories of the things that shaped you into the person that you are now. This is the only song I didn\'t write. I heard this song over 10 years ago as an intern, and I was so blown away by it. I was just hoping and praying that no one would record it, because I felt like I needed to grow into this song. This is where I got to this record and I got in a place in my life, kind of growing up, self-reflective, in that crossroads of really appreciating those things. I think this song really puts that in perspective. From being a little kid in the back seat with your family, and then going to high school, singing and rolling the windows down and feeling like you\'re free and it\'s always going to be this way. Then all of a sudden you\'re a grown-up and you\'re helping your parents in the back seat and they\'re growing older and you\'re growing older, and you just realize that fragility of time and how to make every moment count.” **When I Die** “It\'s just one of those songs that just popped up. I was doing a meditation. In the meditation, it talked about imagining if today was the last day your life. How would you want to spend it? How would you want to live and how would you want to go out? Letting go of all that, or at least making your best attempt to let go of all the little things and actually live. So it\'s not actually really about dying as much as it\'s about living.” **Gabrielle** “This is a real story for me. You can relate to a past relationship that just didn\'t work. I like that it\'s that specific. I think having this specific memory and being able to realize that was a good moment and you didn\'t go the distance, but you\'re glad you were there for it.” **Fix a Heart** “I wrote this song in the Florida Keys with my friend Scooter Carusoe. I was at a place where I was kind of talking about my journey and then life of how I get caught up in just making music and traveling to the next place. I don\'t have time to get tied down. It took me a while to understand it takes a good woman to fix a heart, all these things. You\'re kind of just avoiding yourself from a really great thing. The horns in there are something that I\'ve always wanted to do.” **Then You Do** “I\'ve sung a lot of love songs that end with happy endings. But the reality is a lot of times you put yourself out there and things seem to go great, and then next thing you know, she says goodbye and splits your world in two. But you’ve got to put yourself out there. That\'s what life is. It\'s the ups and downs and showing up for it.” **Paris Illinois** “This was the last song we wrote before we headed up to Chicago to record this album. We were going to stop through Paris, Illinois, my hometown, on the way up. It\'s about halfway from Nashville to Chicago. The way you remember your hometown and remember the place you come from, it\'s going to be a lot more magical than when you actually show them that. Even when I go back home now, the mom-and-pop shops are mostly closed down and run down. The square is not as in good shape as it used to be. But the heart\'s still there and the courthouse still stands and the good people are still there. I still go back to the nostalgia of the way it made me feel as a kid, even if it doesn\'t look like that anymore. That kind of led to a song that\'s got these horns and strings and is a little bit of a dream. The record started out by trying to find my heart, and it\'s going to end with me realizing that it\'s at home.”

A lump forms in the back of your throat at the beginning of Chris Stapleton’s exquisite fourth album, and basically hovers there until the final strum. It isn’t that there are bombshell moments about his afflictions or personal tragedies; he’s just singing about the small ways life catches him by surprise. But it’s the *way* he does it—sentimental and observant, like a misty-eyed gentle giant—that makes even his simplest songs overwhelmingly emotional to listen to. By making everyday stories feel weighty and profound—the temptation of a highway, the sting of getting older, the yearning for a better life—he teases tangled, complex emotions right up to the surface. Here, guilt, wonder, disappointment, and hope feel as clear as joy and pain. *Starting Over* traces a period of intense self-reflection. After a string of hugely successful albums and high-profile collaborations (Justin Timberlake, John Mayer), Stapleton had reached a level of fame that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He moved his family out of Nashville and tried to mix things up, briefly trading RCA Studio A for Muscle Shoals. In the end, the LP was recorded in both places, with added support from Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. They helped him assemble hard-rocking stompers like “Arkansas,” about road-tripping through the Ozarks, and “Watch You Burn,” a pointed song about the 2017 mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas. Among the album\'s three covers are “Old Friends” and “Worry B Gone” by Guy Clark and John Fogerty’s “Joy of My Life.” But Stapleton just hits different when he’s singing Stapleton. Maybe it’s his devastatingly specific lyrics, recalling, in “Maggie’s Song,” how the family dog placed her head on his hands before passing away (there’s that lump). Or perhaps it’s the way he makes sweeping observations about ineffable things like love and America and still manages to strike a nerve. “I’m 40 years old and it looks like the end of the rainbow/Ain’t no pot of gold,” he sings on “When I’m With You,” a slow-burning song to his wife and singing partner Morgane Stapleton. The album’s final number, a graceful farewell to Nashville, captures the way that cities inevitably let you down. “You build me up, you set me free/You tore down my memories,” he sings with the heartache of someone leaving a first love. “You’re not who you used to be/So long, Nashville, Tennessee.”

Kelsea Ballerini emerged as a leading, youthful voice in country pop during the mid-2010s by forging a chummy connection with fans. She co-wrote everything on her debut *The First Time*, an effervescent album that reflected her insight into what it’s like growing up feeling full-strength feelings. By her follow-up, 2017’s *Unapologetically*, Ballerini was fine-tuning vocal inflections to achieve performances that felt savvier and more personalized. But there’s a more dramatic development on *kelsea*, her third album: She’s stepped into a producing role, emphasizing that she’s shaping her vision from all sides. The overall effect of this new approach is one of unguarded closeness, but in actuality, it\'s her most sophisticated work to date. There’s almost startling clarity to Ballerini’s depictions of anxiety and introversion in “overshare,” “club,” “homecoming queen?,” “needy,” and “la.” It was a highly clever, and relatable, move on her part to craft an airy banger, “club,” about dreading the messy interactions of the late-night bar scene. The track “needy” is deceptively upbeat about the gravitational shift from frequent socializing to retreating into a romantic partnership, even as Ballerini’s choice of language subtly acknowledges insecurity. The wry, bouncy, pop- and hip-hop-influenced “overshare,” full of conversational detail, best captures what she’s up to artistically. “Truth is conversations make me anxious, even if we’re on a first-name basis,” she confides. “Same story for the hundredth time, and they roll their eyes ’cause it’s TMI.” But Ballerini also flexes her stylistic range by summoning the coy kinetic energy of “Toxic”-era Britney Spears during “bragger” and tweaking beloved country tropes elsewhere. The mischievous drinking tune “hole in the bottle” merges down-home chicken-picking guitar with digital gloss and a brisk beat, while “half of my hometown” is a fresh take on how a person’s affectionate relationship to where she came from can be uncomfortably altered by leaving.

“When I feel like I have a lot of heavy on my records, you need the humor to balance that out,” Brandy Clark tells Apple Music. Her third studio album, the Jay Joyce-produced *Your Life Is a Record*, opens with the former—the sweeping, heartfelt breakup ballad \"I’ll Be the Sad Song\"—while tracks like \"Long Walk\" and \"Bigger Boat\" offer moments of levity and respite from unpacking the complexities of romantic relationships. \"Both \[types of songs\] are better because of the other,\" she says. \"Because of \'I\'ll Be the Sad Song,\' \'Long Walk\' probably plays a little funnier.\" Here Clark offers insight into the wit and the wisdom of each track on *Your Life Is a Record*. **I’ll Be the Sad Song** \"Well, I\'m a lover of sad songs. As many times as things work out in life, they also don\'t work out. That doesn\'t mean that they weren\'t important. One of my favorite lines on the whole album is \'If your life is a record, people and places are the songs.\' It\'s why I chose to title the album *Your Life Is a Record*. Somebody\'s going to be your sad song and you\'re going to be somebody else\'s. I couldn\'t be your happy song. But at least we had a song. It is that old saying, \'It\'s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved.\'\" **Long Walk** \"That\'s something my mom always used to say. If I would get upset about somebody doing something, she\'d say, \'You know what? Just tell them to take a long walk off a short pier.\' It was the last song written on this record. I was on Twitter and there was a guy that was saying some pretty mean things about another female artist. I rarely comment on that stuff. But it made me so mad that I said, \'Buddy, you need to take a long walk off a short pier!\' Trust me, this artist did not need me defending her. She\'s a pretty big star. But it made me really mad. As soon as I tweeted it, I thought, \'Well, I better write that tomorrow because somebody else is going to see it and write it.\' So I went in and wrote that with Jesse Frasure and Jessie Jo Dillon.\" **Love Is a Fire** \"The title is from an old Joan Crawford quote. I had gone down this rabbit hole when Ryan Murphy\'s *Feud* was on. One night I was reading about Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and I came across this quote. Joan Crawford said, \'Love is a fire. You just don\'t know if it\'s going to warm you or burn you.\' I thought, \'Man, isn\'t that true?\' So with that, we just played on fire as much as possible without it getting too on the nose.\" **Pawn Shop** \"That one came when I was reading a Stephen King book. In the book, there was a pawn shop and the guy who owned the pawn shop was talking to somebody and said, \'I\'ve got the job of teaching people that something\'s not worth what they think it is.\' That really struck me. Nobody goes in the pawn shop on their best day, like if they\'re pawning a wedding ring or a guitar. But then there\'s also the helpfulness that someone else comes in there to start another dream. There\'s a real sadness in a pawn shop and then there\'s the hopefulness of a secondhand dream.\" **Who You Thought I Was** \"It\'s always hard when you end up not being who somebody thinks you are. Kind of like \'I\'ll Be the Sad Song,\' you don\'t want to be anybody\'s sad song. A lot of times, if I\'ve disappointed somebody I love—be it a lover, be it a friend, a parent—there\'s that moment where I just think, \'God, I wish I could just go back to being who they thought I was before I messed up here.\' Then I wrote with Jonathan Singleton and Jessie Jo Dillon and they were a lot of help.\" **Apologies** \"I had somebody in my life that was always apologizing to me. I had written down \'You\'re so good at apologies. I wish you\'d be better at not having to say them.\' It\'s hard, you can say you\'re sorry and you can hope it makes it better. But a lot of times it doesn\'t. Sometimes for the person saying they\'re sorry, what they really need is for the other person to forgive them so they can be able to forgive themselves. That\'s probably my favorite part of that song, at the very end: \'If you can forgive me, baby, I can forgive me.\'\" **Bigger Boat (feat. Randy Newman)** \"I love the movie *Jaws* and I love when Roy Scheider turns around and says, \'We\'re going to need a bigger boat.\' I\'ve thrown that out in so many writing rooms and just gotten looked at like, \'What\'s that?\' I wrote with Adam Wright, and we were in the getting-to-know-each-other phase of the day. He tells me that his son is obsessed with the movie. I said, \'That\'s so funny. I\'ve always wanted to write a song called \"Bigger Boat,\" just make it about the state of the world or, in particular, our country.\' He totally got it and we wrote the song.\" **Bad Car** \"I wrote that one with Jason Saenz, and it was his idea. It hit me because I think we\'re tied to things. The reason why we\'re tied to an old car, or our first apartment that we\'d never want to go back to, is because of the life we lived in them, and, a lot of times, the people who were alive when we had those things. I think that\'s why we want to hang on to them.\" **Who Broke Whose Heart** \"You hope, in a breakup, you get to where you forget about who ruined whose credit and whose dad hated who. You just get to the point where it\'s like, \'We loved each other and I\'ve forgotten the rest.\' That\'s where that song started. I saw something that said, \'All I know is I loved you. I forget the rest.\' It hit me incredibly hard. It hit me the way \'Who You Thought I Was\' hit me. It\'s probably the most bombastic song on the record, as far as the horns and stuff. Then of course it\'s got the big curse word in it. I think that song is where we all hope to be when we start a breakup or a divorce.\" **Can We Be Strangers** \"That one is the one that\'s more at the beginning of the end \[of a relationship\]. We\'ve all been there, where it\'s like, \'God, my heart is hurting so bad. I wish I could go back to when I didn\'t know you.\' When you were just a random face in a crowd and not a voice that would stop a room for me. It\'s definitely my favorite song to sing on this record.\" **The Past Is the Past** \"That was probably the biggest butting of heads that I had with the record label, and we didn\'t have a lot of butting of heads. They wanted it to start the album and \'I\'ll Be the Sad Song\' to end. I felt very strongly about it. \'The Past Is the Past\' is very bittersweet. But it\'s got a lot of hope in it. So to me, you start the album with \'I\'ll Be the Sad Song,\' which there\'s not a lot of hope in, and you end with \'The Past is the Past.\' The song feels, to me, like you\'re driving away...and that\'s when you can finally move on.\"

As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”

It’s thanks to some combination of powerfully persuasive musicianship and sheer stubbornness that Brothers Osborne carved out a place for themselves in the country music landscape during the latter half of the 2010s. TJ Osborne’s guttural, low-slung lead vocals, languid phrasing, and bluesy bends are situated at the intersection of old-school country, R&B, and Southern rock, and never venture into country pop’s presently dominant mode of emulating hip-hop. John Osborne, the older sibling in the duo, serves as co-lead on guitar, putting muscular, incisive playing squarely in the spotlight at a time when beatmaking has much more of a presence in the format than shredding solos. On their first album, 2016’s *Pawn Shop*, they proved that they\'re in touch with commercially accessible songwriting sensibilities. By the follow-up, 2018’s *Port Saint Joe*, they and their bandmates—the rare Nashville outfit to do double duty on stage and in studio—were stretching out. On their latest, *Skeletons*, the Osbornes and the rest of their crew, including their longtime producer Jay Joyce, really stoke the dynamic tension between hooks, licks, and grooves and showcase what a deep pocket they have as a band. Partway through \"All Night,\" the sinewy propulsion gives way to the barbed, sneaky precision of John\'s guitar vamp. During \"All the Good Ones Are,\" funky guitar rhythms graze a meaty, countrified dance-rock backbeat. The title track features a sly, taunting performance from TJ, who reaches cavernous lows and musters a robust attack an octave higher, while the tricky accents of an Appalachian blues-rock guitar riff toy with the timekeeping. The band hurtles from \"Muskrat Greene,\" John’s blistering, chicken-picking instrumental jam, into the down-home show-stopper \"Dead Man’s Curve.\"

Margo Price began writing this album in the middle of touring her last, and says it was a master class in multitasking. “I wrote in Ubers, airports, airplanes, green rooms, hotel rooms, you name it,” she tells Apple Music. “Then, when it was halfway done, I found out I was pregnant. That changed my headspace a bit.” Actually, of all the life forces that had begun to transform her songwriting–fame, motherhood, the loss of a child in 2010, and the demands of touring that put a strain on her marriage–sobriety was the most powerful, she says. It crystallized connections between her past and future (“Gone to Stay” began as a letter to her son Judah but blossomed into a broader meditation about the things parents leave to their children) and led her from introspective outlaw country into glamorous, dazzling classic rock. If the floral veil, curly calligraphy, jangly instrumentation, and *Rumours* hat tip didn’t give it away, Stevie Nicks is a major influence on the album, which was coaxed along by executive producer Sturgill Simpson. “I grew up listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac, and like most girls, I idolized Stevie,” she says. “But I haven’t seen a lot of people occupying that space since, you know? Classic rock ’n’ roll heartbreakers. When I decided to make this album with Sturgill, that’s what we set out to do.” Here, Price tells the stories behind all ten tracks. **That\'s How Rumors Get Started** “I first heard the phrase from my guitar player, Jamie Davis. We were partying on the bus and someone said something gossipy. And he said, ‘Watch what you say, that\'s how rumors get started.’ I immediately wrote it down. I knew it was going to be the album title before I even wrote the song. Everybody has ideas about who they think the song is about, and I definitely wrote it with a couple of people in mind, but the great thing is that it can be about anybody. For me, a lot changed when I became successful. Friendships were compromised and challenged, it became hard to tell what people’s motivations were, there was a lot of jealousy and competitiveness. It can be very lonely. Over time, you learn to keep your mouth shut. You learn how rumors get started.” **Letting Me Down** “\[Price’s husband\] Jeremy \[Ivey\] and I co-wrote this song together after we’d both written to high school friends that we’d become estranged from. It was a really therapeutic exercise, writing to someone from my past, and put me back in touch with feelings I’d forgotten about, like when you’re living in a small town and just want to escape but feel stuck. It’s taken on new meaning during the pandemic—it talks about loneliness, isolation, unemployment, poverty, workers who need to make ends meet, the struggle that small towns face right now. It all hits close to home for me.” **Twinkle Twinkle** “We had played this really terrible beer festival in Florida. There weren\'t that many people, it was really disorganized, and we didn\'t have a very good show. Afterwards, I found Marty Stuart in his trailer tuning all of his guitars, which I thought was pretty spectacular. I was like, ‘You don\'t have a tech that does this for you?’ And he said, ‘You don\'t need no tech if you do it right!’ And then he asked me, ‘Your band\'s been on the road a lot lately, do you hate each other yet?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, we don\'t hate each other, but our marriages are falling apart and our health is deteriorating. But other than that, we\'re good.’ He smiled really big and just said, ‘You wanted to be a star. Twinkle, twinkle.’ It became this running joke when we were on the road and something went wrong, like a canceled flight that forced us to sleep in the airport all night. We\'d turn to each other and go, ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’ My husband brought the guitar riff to me and it had such a cool, gritty vibe. We were going for Neil Young meets Led Zeppelin, but it definitely came out a little more Led Zeppelin.” **Stone Me** “This song has a few different layers to it. When I was out on the road a lot and my husband and I were having trouble adjusting to it, I wrote the first verse with him in mind and sent it to him in a text message. He took it and put a melody behind it, and I was like, ‘Dude, did you just co-write a song that was supposed to be about you?’ I was also, separately, thinking about these two bloggers who have taken a lot of time to dissect my career. They judge everything that I do, and they’re just so certain they know where I\'m coming from. It was really therapeutic to write. My husband threw me the title. I think he was envisioning more of a stoner anthem, but I used it in the biblical sense of, like, those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Because yeah, I’ve learned that once you get put up on the pedestal, you\'re there to be knocked down.” **Hey Child** “My husband and I first wrote this song back in 2012, and it used to be our closer when we played with my band Buffalo Clover. We wrote it when we were hanging out with this wild group of friends. Everybody was treating us like we were rock stars, but we were the furthest thing from it. We were out on the road, drinking too much, taking a lot of drugs, and I just felt like there was this recklessness going on. Jeremy and I wrote the verses to some of our friends, but I also think we were writing it to ourselves. I had totally forgotten about the song until Sturgill convinced me to rerecord it, and then we added the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir on background vocals, which took it to a whole other place.” **Heartless Mind** “This song turned out completely different from how I initially envisioned it. I thought it was going to have a heartbreaker, guitar-driven vibe, but once we got the synths, it became more of a Blondie track. This is the only song that James Gadson didn\'t play drums on, my drummer Dillon \[Napier\] did, and he knocked it out of the park. And then later, when we were doing overdubs, David Ferguson–who co-produced this with Sturgill and I–laid down a drum machine that basically doubled the snare. So really, this is my first song with electronic drums, and I love it.” **What Happened to Our Love?** “I wasn’t expecting to record this song, but my husband loved it and encouraged me to bring it into the studio. It wound up becoming this whole thing that I never knew it could become. Once I figured out how to go into my upper register at the end, with the Nashville Friends Choir on background vocals, it entered this psychedelic Pink Floyd territory that I never expected. I was reading a lot of Leonard Cohen at the time—especially his book *The Flame* that came out posthumously—and I was influenced by the way that he writes, using the push and pull of opposites. I wrote it partially about my own marriage, as well as some of the other relationships I was seeing at the time that were struggling to stay together.” **Gone to Stay** “I knew that I needed to write a song for my son Judah. Somebody told me that at a show a long time ago—they said, ‘You\'ve written a song for the son you lost, you need to write a song for your son that\'s still here with you.’ We wanted to do a ‘Forever Young’ or something—wisdom that you can pass on to your kids and that can stand in for you when you can’t be there there—in my case, when I\'m on the road. But it became something bigger; it’s a letter with advice about protecting the earth and leaving something positive behind. I loved that I got pregnant in the middle of writing it and it turned into something for both of my children. There’s a line that says, ‘You can’t turn money back into time,’ and I think anybody can relate to that, whether they have children or not. All the things we do for work, all the things we miss. That line\'s been resonating with me throughout this quarantine. Because as hard as it is, I\'m finally just here enjoying my time.” **Prisoner of the Highway** “This was written on an airplane tray table while I was headed to California to play the Hollywood Bowl. I was opening for Willie Nelson during his Outlaw Music Festival and had just found out that I was pregnant. I hadn\'t told anybody yet because I was still grappling with the fact that I was going to miss things in my child’s life all over again. There’s a Townes Van Zandt quote that goes something like, \'I knew that if I wanted to do this music thing, I was going to have to sacrifice everything—financial stability, a family, friends.\' I have so much respect for him, because that’s dedication to your art, but it can still feel really selfish to chase your dreams. I think about all of my friends\' weddings that I missed, school events, funerals—all to chase the next perfect line in a song.” **I\'d Die for You** “This is my favorite song on the album lyrically. I\'ve been in Nashville 17 years and have seen so many things change, seen so many communities and local businesses just disappear because of gentrification. So that’s a theme here, as is racism, health care, and poverty. I always insist on telling people that this isn’t a political record, because I don’t want them getting stuck on thinking that I\'m pushing my agenda onto them. To me, this is a humanitarian song. It’s about the struggle of American life. This country is so divided that it’s ironic we\'re called the United States. But when I look at the majority of people in this country, no matter if they\'re blue or red, everybody wants a lot of the same things: a safe place to raise a kid, food on the table, shelter over your head. This song is Jeremy and I reassuring each other and our families that despite all the chaos around us, we can hold on to each other.”

On July 10th, Margo Price will release That’s How Rumors Get Started, an album of ten new, original songs that commit her sky-high and scorching rock-and-roll show to record for the very first time. Produced by longtime friend Sturgill Simpson (co-produced by Margo and David Ferguson), the LP marks Price’s debut for Loma Vista Recordings, and whether she’s singing of motherhood or the mythologies of stardom, Nashville gentrification or the national healthcare crisis, relationships or growing pains, she’s crafted a collection of music that invites people to listen closer than ever before. Margo primarily cut That’s How Rumors Get Started at Los Angeles’ EastWest Studios (Pet Sounds, “9 to 5”). Tracking occurred over several days while she was pregnant with daughter Ramona. “They’re both a creation process,” she says. “And I was being really good to my body and my mind during that time. I had a lot of clarity from sobriety.” While Margo Price continued to collaborate on most of the songwriting with her husband Jeremy Ivey, she recorded with an historic band assembled by Sturgill, and including guitarist Matt Sweeney (Adele, Iggy Pop), bassist Pino Palladino (D’Angelo, John Mayer), drummer James Gadson (Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye), and keyboardist Benmont Tench (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers). Background vocals were added by Simpson on “Letting Me Down,” and the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir, who raise the arrangements of “Hey Child” and “What Happened To Our Love?” to some of the album’s most soaring heights. Margo Price and her steady touring band - Kevin Black (bass), Jamie Davis (guitar), Micah Hulsher (keys), and Dillon Napier (drums) - will perform songs from That’s How Rumors Get Started at dozens of shows with Chris Stapleton and The Head & The Heart this spring and summer, in addition to festival appearances and more to be announced soon. Find all dates here and below. That’s How Rumors Get Started follows Margo’s 2017 album All American Made, which was named the #1 Country/Americana album of the year by Rolling Stone, and one of the top albums of the decade by Esquire, Pitchfork and Billboard, among others. In its wake, Margo sold out three nights at The Ryman Auditorium, earned her first Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and much more.

“I knew that everything that came my way, either I was going to have to learn more about the game and take it as a learning experience or I could let it dissuade me from going after my dream, and I just wasn\'t going to let that happen,” Caylee Hammack tells Apple Music. The singer, songwriter, and producer got an early start on the small-town Opry circuit, studying iconic country singers of earlier eras so that she could win over crowds her grandparents’ age, only to be immobilized by a two-pound tumor. After recovering, she secured a college scholarship to a premier music program in Nashville, but gave it up for a boyfriend who cheated. Hammack moved to Music City anyway, starting from scratch, and was just getting her foothold with a songwriting contract when her rental home burned, and her belongings in it. She animates tales of those events with wit and warmth on her 13-song set, building bewitching pop drama out of down-home sensibilities with her co-producer Mikey Reaves. “This is me,” she affirms. “All of this is sounds and things that have happened in my head that I put forth and tried to translate sonically. I am a maximalist; I\'m not a minimalist in any capacity.” Here she goes through the stories behind each song on her hard-earned debut. **Just Friends** “I love too easily, I think, and I love too intensely for me to be able to just date on and off and it not really affect me emotionally. Music has never let me down, but boys and love have. This boy was like, ‘No, I\'m going to prove you wrong.’ So he did, and we had this whirlwind courtship and then he was like, ‘Maybe we should have stayed just friends.’ It was like the goal was to let me be vulnerable and open up just enough to really hurt me, and then he\'s like, ‘Okay, I\'m done.’ I love that the song is definitely a bait and switch. I loved it how it showcased the two different sides of emotions I was feeling. I also wanted a nod to my mom, like, ‘I should have listened to my mama.’ My mama knew from just the way I talked about this boy that I didn\'t need to date him.” **Redhead (feat. Reba McEntire)** “My grandmommy had red hair—a lot of women in my family do—and when she died I was like, ‘I want to be more like you. I want to literally emulate you and your strength.’ With ‘Redhead,’ I thought about when I was four or five years old and my older cousin Jennifer was going into nursing school, the fiery redhead, and she needed a place real cheap to live. So Mama and Daddy were like, ‘Well, just live back there in the single-wide trailer. You don\'t have to pay anything.’ So I just wanted to write something for her because she always hated her hair and I was like, \'That\'s a gift from God. You\'re the rarest breed there is.\' Having Reba on there was a fluke of a situation. Her manager mentioned to my manager that Reba liked my stuff, and my manager let her manager hear ‘Redhead’ and Reba liked it. Then I said, ‘Well, can you just ask her if she\'d sing on it?’ It was unreal. She definitely has inspired me.” **Looking for a Lighter** “It was the morning of my 23rd birthday and all I wanted was an idea. I went to get a cup of coffee and a lighter, and I went into my kitchen junk drawer. I yank it and everything just shuffles to the front. It\'s a little army figurine, a little button from senior year, and a fake ID that I moved to Nashville with. Right behind that fake ID are a big bundle of letters, and I didn\'t remember what they were from at first. I started going through them and I realized it was all the letters from the boy that ‘Small Town Hypocrite’ is about, the first true heartbreak of my life. For some reason—man, I\'m a sentimental fool—I held on to them. Anyways, instead of smoking what I wanted, drinking coffee, and just having a good relaxing day, I sat down against the counter underneath my kitchen sink and just cried and read those letters again and I started getting mad. I was like, ‘I haven\'t seen you in years, and still I can run into you in the back of the kitchen junk drawer.’ I went back to my little \[recording\] rig in the corner and started writing about all the memories I seem to rifle through, and I\'m looking for a lighter.” **Preciatcha** “I think love is always a learning lesson until you find the right one. The song was really based off of a saying my mom had: ‘Every hand you hold is a blessing or a lesson, and you got to figure out which one it is you got.’” **Sister** “Me and my sister were so close growing up, and then life has just ripped us apart in different ways and pulled us away from each other. That song is really about me addressing how me and my sister both kind of felt like we\'re out alone in the world. It\'s like we forget we had each other the whole time. I knew I wanted strings on it, but I didn\'t know if the budget would allow it, and heaven worked it out for us.” **Just Like You** “That was the first time I ever got to write with Jarrod Ingram or Blake Hubbard from The 720 production crew. They started making up a cool track and I just sat in the corner and started venting in diary form. I was just like, ‘I\'m mad at you. You don\'t get to treat people like this and think that they\'re going to treat you better. If you want to do this to someone, you need a little bit of your own medicine.’” **King Size Bed** “I was writing with Troy Verges, Gordie Sampson, and ‘Tawgs’ Salter. We kind of went through all these different ideas, but nothing had settled, and I told them that I had a lyric that I wanted to start a song with. I wanted to say, ‘We’re just a bomb ticking in a king-size bed. This is all going to blow up in our face in the end.’ Talking about a tumultuous relationship that was passionate and fiery but something that could burn us up in the end. When I said that line in the room, Troy and Gordie were just like, ‘Uh, that’s not the first line of a song—that’s a title.’” **Forged in the Fire** “At 23, going through that \[fire\], I had my family and also I had my friends, and I realized so much about that. I put a lot into ‘Forged in the Fire,’ because you don\'t realize how much you put your worth into the things around you. I realized how much I loved my little things, because it was almost like visible proof of ‘You\'re on your own. You have your own couch.’ Yeah, it was hand-me-down, but that\'s your own couch. All of a sudden that was all gone. I had good friends that just showed up out of the woodwork, and we went through everything and found a bunch of different little things that meant the world to me, like my grandmother\'s quilt that inspired the first verse. A piece of Sheetrock fell over it right before the fire came through that part of the attic. I realized how little that meant in comparison to people showing up to help you. It\'s funny, it was so hard at the time. Everyone kept telling me, ‘Oh, you\'re like a phoenix. You\'re going to rise from this.’ And I was like, ‘How? Who builds the wings, buddy?’ It was frustration, but also me trying to desperately find some hope.” **Family Tree** “It was kind of funny to send to my family. It really just came from me saying, ‘I finally know about my sister smoking cigarettes. I\'m the only person in the family that knows that she goes out back past the shed and smokes every day.’ When I said it, I was like, ‘That sounds Sammy Kershaw or Joe Diffie,’ like, some weird, very colorful insight on this Southern country family. \[Mikey Reaves and I\] spent probably 50 or 60 hours recording that song. It was like a love child of our brains on a $500 demo budget. We added a few little things—we mixed it, obviously—but what you heard on the radio is what we made together that first time.” **Mean Something (feat. Ashley McBryde, Tenille Townes)** “When we sat down for track listing and we were going through all these songs, \[artist manager\] Mary Hilliard was like, ‘Who would you want on the record?’ and honestly I hadn\'t even thought about it. The first two names that came to my mind was Ashley McBryde and Tenille Townes. I was like, ‘These are two people that I feel like are genuinely creators for the purest reasons. They just want to make something that means something.’ I want to always surround myself with people like that. I had gotten inspired for the verses and stuff by watching Chance the Rapper\'s performance at the 2017 Grammys. So I just started writing, ‘Don\'t we all just want to mean something?’ It all came together.” **Small Town Hypocrite** “Honestly, when I wrote that one, it wasn\'t really about the cleverness of it all. I was just venting. ‘Small Town Hypocrite’ started with hand-me-down dreams. I was talking about how I was the runner-up to the homecoming queen kind of thing. \[The winner\] was one of my close friends, and at a young age, it hurt me. It was about me feeling upset about that, and meeting the boy that I was talking to secretly that night after the football game. He’d had a cancer scare, I’d had a cancer scare. We didn\'t have tattoos, but we talked about if we\'d get them, we\'d get them together. I tried to just put in different little parts of my story. I felt like my town was always considered a one-horse town and we just found each other, these two different broken in different ways, but similarly put together people. I loved him, and I think maybe he loved me. I just don\'t think he knew how to be faithful at the time. I didn\'t know how to handle that, and I don\'t think I ever will, but I gave up the Belmont scholarship. I stayed in my hometown for a year wandering around and I was very bitter. When I recorded it, I wanted it to feel like a diary entry.” **Gold** “On the drive into the studio, I was having my morning talk with God. Finally, this line just came out of the sky and it was like, ‘If pain is art, you have given me gold. You have truly given me gold.’ As a kid I used to pray, ‘Just give me a life that I would read about. Give me a life that\'s exciting on every page.’ I feel like that\'s exactly what he kind of did, and it made me laugh that morning. I just walked in and asked Mikey, ‘Will you just record me?’ I sat down and started playing an old guitar, thumbing around on it. It was a very odd tuning that is so hard to find again every time I play it, but I started just singing, and that first take is really me just ad-libbing through. That\'s the take we kept. I just wanted one on the record that was no production, no Auto-Tune, no tongue-in-cheek thing I\'m saying.” **New Level of Life** “One of the boys I dated was all about money. All he ever wanted to talk about was money. That\'s why at one point he\'s like, ‘Well, you can\'t go there without me.’ Like, ‘I\'d be paying for that trip.’ Finally I was like, ‘Oh no, honey, if I want it, I\'ll get it. I don\'t need you.’ I like to pay my own bills. It was the first breakup that I went through that I could do that. I also felt like, ‘Wow, I really am on a new level of life. This boy broke me, but now I\'m an artist getting to have creative control over her entire project. I am living the life I wanted.’”

The Cadillac Three already released one album in 2020—the freewheeling, rough and rowdy *Country Fuzz*— but one album wasn\'t enough for the rule-eschewing country-rock trio. The band explores their funkier side on surprise album *Tabasco & Sweet Tea*, an 11-track outing that has more in common with Bruno Mars and Chic than it does boots or barstools. Frontman Jaren Johnston\'s twangy rasp sounds right at home over spacey, syncopated guitar and deep-pocketed grooves, as on standout tracks \"Sweet Southern Spirit\" and \"Turn the Radio On.\" \"I had really started thinking about working on this record and taking a bit more funky, laidback route this time, rather than trying to sit down and write a damn country hit,\" he tells Apple Music. \"I was just kind of trying to explore different things.\" Lyrically, Johnston and company chronicle late-night smoke sessions and the end of the work week with laidback, good-natured humor, resulting in an album that was likely as fun to make as it is to listen to. Below, Johnston shares insight into the creation of *Tabasco & Sweet Tea*. **Tabasco & Sweet Tea** “I was trying to come up with something that I hadn\'t heard before, like lyrically, as far as a title. Because you\'re always trying to find the new \'sex, drugs, and rock \'n\' roll,\' or \'Back in Black,\' you know what I mean? And I was like, man, we need to do something like \'Tabasco & Sweet Tea,\' two things that are just really bizarre together that you normally wouldn\'t hear, but could also explain my wife. Because she has her moments of being just as hot and fiery as Tabasco, but then other times she\'s as sweet as sweet tea.\" **Stop That Girl** \"I\'m a big Bruno Mars fan. And it\'s funny, I\'ve seen a lot of my country star friends try to go down that road a little bit in the last couple of years. Thomas Rhett kind of dabbled in it on more of the pop side. Growing up and hearing James Brown, and then seeing that kind of thing come to life again in the last couple of years with what Bruno is doing, I just wanted to incorporate that, less on the pop side and more of the actual soul side.\" **Head Over Wheels** \"I was going down an Eagles rabbit hole. Throughout our whole career, I\'ve really tried to write our version of \'Life in the Fast Lane\' or \'Those Shoes,\' like one of those just badass, classic, timeless things. So that\'s kind of where that came from, as soon as I had that riff and those lyrics comparing the girl to the car.\" **Sweet Southern Spirit** \"A lot of \[the album\] is made to be jokes and stuff, but there\'s some really sweet sentiments in there. Like falling in love with a girl who can quote every lyric from \'Free Bird.\' That\'s me jumping down a road that\'s kind of Hitsville-ish, almost. Like really accessible, but then pulling it back because I want us to keep our cool. So \'Sweet Southern Spirit\' was definitely one of those where I\'m writing about my girl.\" **Road Soda** \"I remember hearing, I don\'t know, Johnny Paycheck or somebody say that, \'I ain\'t no chauffeur, but I can keep it in the road.\' And so I always thought that was pretty funny, and so I was like, well, what if we tack on \'soda\' on the end of that and make this whole song about how you\'re taking the girl out. And the main point of the whole fucking thing is you don\'t want to spill your beverage while you\'re riding in the back of this car. And I mean, that song in particular, that one and \'Devil\'s Lettuce\' are great examples of why it\'s so fun to be in this band. You can pretty much say whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want, in whichever style you want.\" **Bridges** \"Frank Rogers and me and Neil Mason, our drummer, wrote that, and \[Rogers\] had that title. Then we started talking about a story and how it could be about life and love and all this stuff. And then I was like, \'Well, with a title like \'Bridges,\' it\'s got to be the funkiest shit you\'ve ever heard in your life.\' It almost leans into, like, *Midnite Vultures*, the Beck record when he went that route. That story unfolded really quickly and we had a lot of fun. I think we drank about 15 beers each while we were writing that song.\" **Devil\'s Lettuce** \"I\'ve always been a fan of the movie *Dazed and Confused*. When I was in high school, that was a huge thing. Believe it or not, that was very similar to me and Kelby \[Ray\] and Neil\'s and all our friends at the time, because we all went to high school and grew up together in that little world in the late \'90s. I\'m a huge Butthole Surfers fan and Cake\'s one of my favorite bands of all time. And so I think \'Devil\'s Lettuce\' was me jumping down the Cake road. You know, \'Looking at the clock and there\'s a four and there\'s a 20\'—it\'s a chronological progression of the night. It\'s basically a normal night that could have and probably did happen when we were kids. And probably honestly very similar to what happens to these days when we\'re on the road.\" **Crispy** \"I\'ve worked all week and it\'s time and I\'ve got a $100 bill. You know what I mean? I think it was me and Tyler \[Hubbard\] and BK \[Brian Kelley\] from Florida Georgia Line, we were down at our beach houses down in 30A, and we were actually writing at the time. Originally this track was supposed to be on their record, and they didn\'t end up recording it, so we did. And I remember Tyler, we were ordering lunch or something, and Tyler was like, \'I got it. I got a crispy.\' And I was like, \'Holy shit, I don\'t know what that means, but I love the way that sounds.\' It fit so perfectly with the vibe and the funk thing that we were chasing.\" **Money Ain\'t Shit** \"That one was the turning point of the record, where I needed three more songs. I had just gotten a Fender Strat guitar that I really was digging the sounds of and I\'d never used before. So that riff kind of came out, and then we had \[songwriter\] James \[McNair\] on the bus and he wrote it with us at the beginning of this year. We didn\'t have a hook for it, but we had all the rest of the song. And I was like, \'Why don\'t we just say money ain\'t shit?\' And then sure enough, I looked at my phone and I\'d had that written down as a title.\" **Turn the Radio On** \"We\'ve had some success at country radio, and we have a lot of friends in country radio. It\'s just it\'s a hard game for somebody that\'s not willing to play like they want to play sometimes. And so I think that song just kind of came out of me. I think we\'d had a situation the night before, and I didn\'t really like the way that it went as far as the way a radio person handled something. And so I was like, \'What are we doing? Why are we doing this shit? They\'re not playing us anyways.\' I was irritated about it and wrote a song about it the next day.\" **Sabbath on Cornbread** \"We were in the UK. They always asked, \'How would you describe your sound?\' or some bullshit question like that. And then the one guy from the back of the room goes, \'Oh no, mate, it\'s like Sabbath on cornbread, yeah?\' And I was like, \'Holy shit, that\'s brilliant.\'\"

For his eagerly-awaited sophomore album, songwriter William Prince begins with single word, Reliever, which informs a collection of exceptionally rendered explorations of what, who and how peace is found. Relievers come in all forms; for Prince, it is song. With its emphasis on words and confidently unfussed accompaniment, Reliever puts Prince's gift for sparking powerful emotions of both personal and communal relevance at the fore. A masterclass in skillful simplicity, Reliever works a generous and profound kind of magic. Prince's influences and references, from the gospel of his childhood to the pantheon of classic outlaw country singers, baseball and the great beyond, shape Reliever into a collection that approaches the big questions with humility and curiosity. At the edge of the ocean, between father and son, from stranger to lover, the album flows through the places and moments where real connections and healing happen. To make Reliever, Prince reconvened with producers Dave Cobb in Nashville and Scott Nolan in Winnipeg, the team behind his JUNO Award winning debut and subsequent Glassnote Records reissue, Earthly Days. With the song "Breathless," which found audiences worldwide and reached the B List at BBC's Radio 2, Earthly Days introduced Prince's poignant philosophy and rich baritone to the world. Prince's trajectory from Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, Canada, to opening for Neil Young, has seen the relative newcomer find esteem and career-changing opportunity wherever he performs.

“I was a total idealist,” Cam tells Apple Music. The Nashville country singer, who’s also one of the city’s most sought-after songwriters, says the five years she spent writing her sophomore album were some of the hardest of her life. “I had this Disney idea of how the world worked, and at some point that just...broke.” Tracing a string of major life changes—breaking up with her old label, inking a new contract, marrying her husband, and welcoming her first child—*The Otherside* reflects a dramatic shift in thinking, or her journey through disillusionment into clear-eyed realism. That evolution unlocked a new side to her sound. “My songs have always pulled from my psychology background, but I had this filter on and didn’t even know it,” she says. “Once I took that off, I could be so much more honest. I could see the world, and myself, for exactly what they were.” Read on as Cam tells us the inside story behind each song. **Redwood Tree** “I grew up in the Bay Area with a redwood tree in my backyard, and I did a lot of thinking up there. I wasn’t raised in a specific religion, but the most magical, awe-inspiring experience I can think of is being in the redwoods, feeling so small. It’s like a cathedral in that it reminds you of your place in everything. Fallen redwoods have rings that represent the thousands of years that they lived, and you’re like, ‘Oh, we’re just flies buzzing around.’ We wake up one day shocked to realize our parents are suddenly old. Like, when did my dad\'s beard get so white? I had watched the movie *Arrival* around the time we wrote this song, and I loved the idea of time not being linear. The soundtrack has these voices that go ‘Da, da, da, da,’ and we nod to that in the production. I hope time isn\'t linear. I hope I get more time with my parents.” **The Otherside** “Tim, or Avicii, came to Nashville a few years ago to write for one of his albums, and we were in the studio with Hillary Lindsey and Tyler Johnson. He started playing this piano melody over and over and over again, and I don\'t smoke cigarettes but when Hillary took a cigarette break, I was like, ‘I\'m going, too.’ It was just so intense. He was really stuck on this thing. While we\'re out on the back porch, she and I came up with an idea for the chorus, and he loved it. But he fiddled with it for hours. He was thinking about cadence, about how we speak, about code-mapping it onto a melody, and about the actual phonetics. Tim never wound up releasing that song, so I was like, ‘Ooh, maybe that means I can.’ Even though it’s such a heavy thing not having him around for the final edits, I did feel this great responsibility to work my ass off to get it right. Because I knew that’s what he would have done.” **Classic** “On the other side of the spectrum, this is one of those songs that just magically fell into place. I went up to New York for a few sessions with Jack Antonoff at Electric Lady Studios, and it was so fun. Creatives tend to beat themselves up a lot, but Jack and I sat there jangling around on this 12-string guitar and writing a song that had this nostalgic Simon & Garfunkel ‘Cecilia’ vibe. It’s about how there are people in your life that outlast everything else—technology, fashion trends, swings in politics, whatever. Nothing\'s a constant in life, but a few people are. It was inspired by this moment when my husband and I were in Argentina and he found a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He doesn\'t smoke anymore, but he goes, ‘I’ve got to smoke these because they don\'t make ‘em like this anymore.’ And then he looks at me and goes, ‘That\'s a country lyric.’” **Forgetting You** “I was writing with Lori McKenna, Tyler Johnson, and Mitch Rowland, and we’re all pals from working on various projects together. Still, I always get nervous when I go write with Lori, even though she\'s so humble and chill, because I’m like, ‘Don\'t embarrass yourself in front of the poet of our generation!’ Which is to say, I knew I needed to bring in something cool. I had this line, ‘I\'m getting older/But you never change.’ The song is about holding on to the concept of someone from the past, and measuring everyone up to them even though it’s no longer real. That\'s why you keep moving forward but they never seem to age.” **Like a Movie** “Before we were married and had a kid, I’d come home from tour and my husband and I would have this tiny bit of quality time together. And the truth is, we’d usually get high and go to Walmart. One day, we were unloading all our groceries and I was like, ‘How did you know it was me? How did you know not to settle for someone earlier or wait for someone else?’ And he just smiled and said, ‘Because when I met you, it was like a movie.’ Now, I can remember when we met. I was a mess. It did not look like a movie. But it was so, so sweet. I wrote with the love junkies—Lori McKenna, Liz Rose, and Hillary Lindsey—and the strings are David Campbell, who’s actually Beck’s dad. Jeff Bhasker wanted a ’50s movie soundtrack vibe with strings that swelled like an orchestra, and David immediately got it. Apple Music did a teaser video for the album, and if you watch it, there should be video footage from that string session.” **Changes** “I usually write all my own music, but this is the first of a couple songs on this album that I didn’t. I guess I feel like it\'s cheating. I\'m supposed to be digging all this personal stuff up and figuring myself out, so taking someone else’s song feels like a shortcut. But I trust Harry \[Styles\]’s writing. I feel like he tries so hard to be himself in his music, and he doesn\'t take it lightly. That pursuit resonates with me. The demo had Lori McKenna singing with Harry on background vocals and his whistle, which is still in the track. It was amazing to hear a song that someone else wrote that clicked so much with me personally. It’s about feeling like you’ve outgrown where you\'re from, and you don\'t really want to admit that. It’s kind of an uncomfortable thing to say, but I love when things are uncomfortable. That means it’s important.” **Till There\'s Nothing Left** “This song has steamy sexual energy... Like, ‘I\'m giving you my whole heart but also my body and a quickie in the back seat.’ While we were recording my vocals, I was trying to sit back and make it cool and sexy, and I realized I was blushing. I was blushing because society tells us that sexuality is a private thing. If you want to be respected as a woman, if you want to be considered intelligent, you can’t be sexual. But then I was reminded of my grandmother who was raised Baptist on a farm in Saskatchewan. She\'s the one who gave me the sex talk, unbeknownst to my mother. She said, ‘Sex is like a milkshake. Once you have it, you\'re always going to want it.’ She was comfortable with her sexuality without it being the main *thing* about her. So I thought, ‘If a woman born in the 1930s on a farm in Canada can own it, I can own it.” **What Goodbye Means** “A friend of mine was going through a divorce. It was pretty ugly, but he was being so kind. I asked him, ‘How are you being so nice right now? I don\'t get it.’ And he said, ‘Because she might change her mind.’ I still get goosebumps thinking about it. We\'ve all been there, not quite ready to accept the reality of something, and that\'s okay. You\'ve got to take it at the rate you can take it. This song has such a classic melody. It’s warm. For some reason it feels like a summer evening in New Mexico to me.” **Diane** “This song is a response to Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene,’ and man, it really seems to resonate with people. Crowds sing it back to me in this emotional, over-the-top, theatrical way. I suppose most people have had infidelity affect their life one way or another, but it’s hard to watch people you care about go through it. There\'s so much shame around it that you don\'t get to talk about what you need or how to heal. And you almost never get to hear the other party’s side. So ‘Diane’ is my moment to role-play, I guess. I\'m the other woman and I slept with your husband and I didn\'t know he was married, but you’ve got to know the truth. Parton\'s lyrics to the other woman include the word ‘please,’ and that just killed me. She\'s so humble and human, asking someone to please not take the love of her life away. Immediately, I was like, ‘That\'s the narrative. That\'s what is so often left unsaid.’” **Happier for You** “This is the other song that I didn\'t write, and it’s from Sam Smith and Tyler \[Johnson\]. Sam and I have a great relationship because I helped write the song ‘Palace’ for their album and then they brought me out on tour. We have a lot of trust. When Lindsay \[Marias, Cam’s manager\] and I first heard this demo and Sam came in singing, our jaws dropped. The emotion was so raw and honest and real. I love the juxtaposition of saying something very loud and publicly—to the point where it almost feels proud—but actually it’s something that makes you want to curl up in a ball.” **Girl Like Me** “This is the author\'s note at the end of the book. Natalie Hemby had come over and started playing a verse on the piano, and I was like, ‘Oh god, that is so sad.’ And she\'s like, ‘It\'s your story. This is your comeback story.’ It’s funny how sometimes you can’t recognize your own self. Writing this song was uncomfortable but in the best way, trying to pull lyrics out in the chorus (‘They’re going to give up on you/You\'re going to give up on them’). You can’t just become jaded. You have to push through. It’s a gift to be able to see life for what it is, and to see yourself for who you are. I think anyone who has been through that phase of disillusionment will think, ‘Oh, yeah, tough. But this side is better.’”

Any young musicians who wanted to establish themselves as guitar phenoms during the 2010s faced an uncertain path. Long gone were the days when shredding was a mainstream rock draw. Third-generation guitarist Marcus King veered toward the jam scene first, finding an early advocate in Warren Haynes, but King’s singing and songwriting define his debut album just as much as his playing. He made the dozen-song set with Dan Auerbach, whose approach to production often involves crafting material in collaboration with the artist and a small circle of songwriting veterans. In King’s case, that meant getting the assistance of Nashville fixtures Pat McLaughlin, Ronnie Bowman, and Paul Overstreet. A few tracks, like “The Well” and “Say You Will,” feature tuneful, red-blooded riffs front and center; during others, King applies an elegantly earthy and still youthful touch to time-tested forms. “Sweet Mariona” is his slice of country sentimentality, “One Day She’s Here” is his version of silken, discofied soul, and “Break” is his chance to delivery pillowy melodies in a woolen, wistful falsetto.

“In my opinion, part of creating a song, it\'s not just about lyrics, even though those are extremely important to me,” Colorado-bred Nashville newcomer Ingrid Andress tells Apple Music. “It\'s also sonically setting the right tone for what you want, how you want the listener to feel.” Andress translated her country-pop vision to her full-length debut, *Lady Like*, through her writing, vocal performances, piano playing, and production ideas alike. She bypassed the familiar arrangement where new artists place their projects in the hands of big-name producers, instead working with collaborative peers like Sam Ellis and applying her years of formal training and genre-spanning professional songwriting experience to the recording process. The results stand out for their sharply articulated vantage points and fresh sonic palette. She’s the sort of singer equally versed in conversational inflections and full-voiced projecting, and she built her tracks around piano more than guitar or beats, using string arrangements to supply added rhythm and motion and bolster hooks. Andress admits to being “really picky about drum sounds” and “obsessed with string quartets,” she says. “I was able to express what I wanted.” Andress talks through each of the songs on her debut below. **Bad Advice** “Production-wise, it was fun to get creative on it, because I did want to do a nod to Western just because I\'m from Colorado and that\'s kind of the country that I personally enjoy. But then I also wanted to make it modern and relevant to what I\'m listening to now. So there\'s an 808 in there, which I thought was fun. I put it at the top of the album because the strings play like an intro almost. I also wanted to set the tone, as far as just showing a bit of my personality straight out the gate. Sure, the rest of the songs are going to be heartfelt, but at least you know me as a person, \[I’m\] not taking myself super seriously.” **Both** “This was actually the only song on the album that started with a melody and not a lyric. Normally, all the other songs start with a concept that I want to write about. \[Writer-producer\] Jordan Schmidt was playing me tracks that he had premade. And I heard this one and I was like, ‘Wait, that\'s the one.’ A lot of the songs, we never really went into the studio to cut live instrumentation. This is the only song where we went in and did it properly, quote unquote, where we got a Nashville band and they just went hard on it. And it was pretty cool to be leading a session like that with musicians that are really awesome. And they added their own sauce to it that made the whole process super easy.” **We’re Not Friends** “I definitely wanted it to be as conversational as possible, which is why I wanted to start it intimate. Actually, when I was writing it, I didn\'t think I was writing it for me, which definitely freed me up and made the phrasing a little different. Normally I\'m more focused on trying to keep something like a classic countryish kind of sound, but for this one I used more pop phrasing. After we got done writing it, I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I think I need to sing this, because this actually happened to me and I feel like I wrote it about me without even realizing it.” **The Stranger** “It started as just a piano thing. Building this song was really fun because I wanted it to be driving; you could easily get really sad on the piano. The whole point of the song is acknowledging that it\'s kind of a tragic thing, but there\'s still hope, because I think love is a choice. Most love songs don\'t talk about how it does get a little stale if you don\'t work at your relationship, and that it\'s a completely normal emotion to feel. Adding all the vocal stuff and the dynamism of it, and having it build and grow, it sounds more like a story that you\'re moving forward.” **Anything But Love** “It\'s a guitar-driven song, and I only know four chords on the guitar; I\'m not planning on being a great guitar player anytime soon. Zach Abend was on guitar and taking the musical lead on this one, which was nice because normally I\'m at the piano starting things. So this let me fully focus on the lyrics and the phrasing. And I think this song is probably one of the more poetic ones on the album, with the metaphors. I feel I was really able to get into a deeper headspace and not so much think about chords and movement. So it was like a different way of writing for me that I also enjoy.” **More Hearts Than Mine** “I feel like this song kind of encapsulates why I gravitate towards country music; it\'s because you do have that time in the song to paint such a vivid picture for people. I feel like this story could not have been told in a catchy pop song. The canvas of country music is very open and allows you to go into that detail. I just wanted to get as specific as possible, drawing from my own life. The song hook is a very traditional way of writing a country song, which is why I wanted the production to not be over-the-top country. I wanted it to be relatable outside the genre as well.” **Life of the Party** “I wanted it to sound like a party song, but really it\'s like a sad girl party song, and I love the irony of that. It\'s hard for me to write a happy, uptempo song, because that\'s not how I feel. So this is probably as close as I will get, really, to something like that.” **Lady Like** “The whole concept of ‘Lady Like’ and it being the title track, it\'s really just the message that I want people to take away from the album. It\'s a statement that I really think needs to be heard, especially in country music right now. I needed to write about my experience from moving from Colorado to Nashville, because I felt Western and Southern were the same thing, and they\'re not, it turns out. When I first got to Nashville six years ago, there were mostly male songwriters. I would experience a lot of people telling me that I wasn\'t very feminine for being a girl, which I thought was so funny, because I didn\'t realize people were still putting women in a box of what female songwriters should be writing about, or how you should be dressing, or \[that you\] shouldn\'t be swearing. So this song really came from feeling that pressure, and then finally just letting it go and being like, ‘I\'m blatantly not following your rules on purpose.’ That was my moment of freeing myself from whatever stereotype people felt like I needed to be. I really want people to feel empowered to be who they are, and not have to feel like they fit into any box, which is also kind of what the album represents as well.”

“This go-round, I was thinking more about my friends than I was thinking about my issues,” Nashville-based singer-songwriter Lilly Hiatt tells Apple Music. Equally steeped in alt-country and indie rock, she thinks this is the difference in theme, feeling, and tone between her 2017 breakthrough *Trinity Lane* and her new album *Walking Proof*. “I\'d had so many experiences with such creative, vivacious, and inspiring people that I wanted to talk about them a bit. I related to them and learned a lot about my capacity for love through them.” The daughter of American songwriting hero John Hiatt, she is practiced at capturing natural conversation and detail in her lyrics, but she’s also zeroed in on melody, adding a bit of spun sugar to the pensive hooks she delivers in her delicate timbre. “Part of the reason that I wanted to work with \[producer\] Lincoln Parish is that I knew he had been in a rock ’n’ roll band, but I also knew he made pop music,” she says. “I wasn\'t trying to make a pop record, but I know that he\'s refined in that way, making a really polished sound. Melody has always been my guiding light, and I wanted to take the time to acknowledge that a bit.” Here Hiatt walks through the tracks on *Walking Proof*. **Rae** “My sister is such a part of me, and we\'re so different yet so alike. I\'ve always felt a deep strength that I\'ve not found anywhere else in the same way with her. We\'ve been through a lot together and apart, and we\'re at this point in our lives where we\'re both in our thirties, we\'re both doing well. We got to do a little traveling together that year that I wrote this song, just celebrating her and all that I admire about her and have learned from her in my life.” **P-Town** “There\'s a sense of humor to that of ‘This is not going as we thought it would, but what can we do but just have a good time, and scream and shout and get through it?’ So, I can look back at that particular time with a smile. When I was writing about it, I had enough distance from the situation to find it funny really, because Portland is an incredible city, and to go there and have a crappy time with somebody is hilarious, almost.” **Little Believer** “That song shows the duality of the two people that are me, which is ‘home me’ and ‘road me.’ Sometimes they fight. ‘Little Believer’ just kind of popped out of my head. One day I just started singing, ‘I want to be your little believer,’ and it seemed to make sense. Something bright and not too self-important about that phrase, you know?” **Some Kind of Drug** “I had been riding with my sister. She had a job where she was working with homeless people and going to different camps, taking them stuff. We had picked up a guy named Corey, and he didn\'t know his age because he grew up on the streets. I had already been feeling a bit closed in on in the city, and just seeing my neighborhood completely changed in the last four years, and the positive and the negative that has come with that. The disregard for some sacred parts of the city and some of the community here has been heartbreaking, but there\'s been progress as well, and just trying to come to terms with that in a way where I don\'t walk around angry and jaded.” **Candy Lunch** “That was a fun song to write. It\'s meant to be gentle, but also a bit of a statement, like, ‘Hey, don\'t tell me what to do. I got this. I always have done my thing. And I\'m not about to change it for you, but I want you to do your thing, too.’ There\'s a lot of love in that song, too, just learning how to let the guard down and let things be what they are. That\'s definitely my style: It\'s lighthearted, but with attitude.” **Walking Proof** “I wrote that song at the end of a tour, right before I had to go the airport late at night. I have all these little beautiful children in my life, and that song is for my friend\'s daughter. I was thinking about her and I was like, ‘Man, she\'s in for a lot in life. That girl\'s going to just have so many experiences.’ And I want her to know she can call me. But also, I was thinking about my bandmates, and all we\'ve been through together. I was thinking about musicians I knew, and my family, and my people I love. I just knew that Amanda Shires was somebody that would understand that completely, because in ways I feel like we\'re cut from the same cloth, and we\'ve made a lot of sacrifice to do what we love to do. But it\'s painful sometimes to be away from your family and your people. I heard her on that, and I think she really took the song to another place and gave it this Appalachian sound almost with her fiddle and her voice.” **Drawl** “I love people so much that I see that are misfits, and that feel like they have to hide a little because they\'re awkward, and they don\'t know how to completely show themselves to the world. I find it so endearingly beautiful when people are unaware of just how vibey and awesome they are. I know a lot of people like that, and that\'s why I love them—because they\'re humble in that way. But self-defeating can come into that too. And I get that. I\'ve beaten myself up like that too before.” **Brightest Star** “That\'s a song straight-up for the underdog. My favorite artists, they\'re definitely underrated, but that\'s what makes them great. And that\'s just how it goes for some of them. Some of them, it\'s like, ‘You\'re too smart for the masses to even get it. So, do your thing.’ When I was writing that song, I thought, ‘This is a little more singsongy than I usually do.’ I\'ve written a lot of sad songs, you know? And I was like, ‘No, just let it be bright and catchy. Let it be what it is.’” **Never Play Guitar** “When I get really down, I remember that it doesn\'t matter how my work is perceived or who hears it ultimately, although I want so many people to hear it, because it\'s one of my greatest missions to spread my music through the world. But one of the deepest, most peaceful feelings I get comes from just writing a song with my guitar. And I remember that nothing can stop that, and it doesn\'t have to even be for anything. I can always do it. I wrote that song at a time when I was really busy and I was being told, ‘Hey, things are going good, so keep it up,’ but I couldn\'t get away from anyone for any time. So I was like, ‘If I\'m going to write, I got to shut the door for a second and shut it off.’ And that\'s enough for me, honestly, just writing songs quietly by myself. That brings me a joy that nobody could really take.” **Move** “That\'s the troubadour’s tune, I think. Even though I\'m talking to somebody else, there\'s a lot of me in that song, and I\'m looking at a lot of that in that song. It\'s like that adage ‘Spot it, you\'ve got it,’ which is something I\'ve heard in AA meetings and stuff. When you\'re looking at some other idiosyncrasies about somebody else and fixated on them, a lot of the time it\'s like, ‘Yeah, you have those too. That\'s why they\'re eating at you.’ That’s a real thing, learning how to love through that.” **Scream** “I thought, ‘Wow, this is a dark ending to a bright album.’ But such is life, and it ebbs and flows in these eras of highs and lows for me. I wanted that to be a \'to be continued,\' because I think there\'s a comfort in the unsettling uncertainty of life. And that song, to me, is a bit unsettling. But it also makes one of the most bold statements on the record, in my opinion, by saying, ‘I\'m done being quiet for that guy.’ I wanted to end on that note.”

Sturgill Simpson may be known to many as a savior of country music, but the Kentucky-born singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, and producer has deep roots in bluegrass. Simpson spent his early days living in Nashville cutting his musical teeth at the famed bluegrass venue the Station Inn, where the city\'s best players come together for virtuosic weekly jam sessions and sightings of bluegrass royalty like Sam Bush or Jerry Douglas are regular occurrences. On this surprise-release album, Simpson revisits those string band roots by rerecording some of his best-loved material as all-acoustic bluegrass numbers, helmed by frequent Simpson collaborator David Ferguson at his Nashville Butcher Shoppe recording studio. Reimagined tracks included span most of Simpson\'s catalog, including 2013\'s *High Top Mountain* (including \"Railroad of Sin\" and \"Old King Coal\"), 2014\'s breakout *Metamodern Sounds in Country Music* (\"Living the Dream,\" \"Long White Line,\" and fan favorite \"Turtles All the Way Down,\" among others), and 2016\'s Grammy-winning *A Sailor\'s Guide to Earth* (including \"Breakers Roar\" and \"All Around You\"). The stripped-down tracks remain faithful lyrically and melodically, but are made all the more lush by expert arrangements from some of bluegrass\'s best players, like Sierra Hull on mandolin, Tim O\'Brien on guitar, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, and Scott Vestal on banjo. Simpson\'s voice, which can reach a low growl or a high, lonesome wail in the matter of a single measure, is especially suited for bluegrass, so much so you forget these songs ever existed in previous incarnations.

A common way to maximize the reach of a pop song, including one of a country-pop variety, is to release a big remix on the heels of the original. Half a dozen years into her Nashville hitmaking career, Kelsea Ballerini is no doubt familiar with this practice, but she chose an entirely different approach. On her March 2020 album, simply titled *kelsea*, she applied sheer, sprightly rhythmic production to acutely confessional material, but this companion piece, dubbed *ballerini* and recorded during quarantine, presents those same tunes with subdued, largely acoustic arrangements. In the new version of “overshare,” the singer-songwriter dials back her wryness to bring insecurity into focus. With its beat-driven energy stripped away, “needy” no longer sounds blissful, but a little uneasy at being in the grip of such emotion. Backed by string band accompaniment, Ballerini’s disgust for an untrue lover takes on a more plaintive quality in \"love and hate.\" Together, the two sets, both of which she co-produced, are her artful way of laying her effervescent persona and embrace of vulnerability side by side.