Stereogum's 10 Best Country Albums of 2017

On her early albums, Lee Ann Womack made her home in the country mainstream, but her sound has grown increasingly idiosyncratic over the years. Here, she\'s closer to the bone than ever before. Sometimes she\'s downright ominous, on dark, gritty cuts like \"All the Trouble.\" Sometimes she taps her inner Bobbie Gentry on R&B-tinged tunes like the luxuriantly grooving \"He Called Me Baby.\" And when she leans those golden pipes into a spare, intense version of the country classic \"Long Black Veil,\" she shows she\'s holding her roots closer than ever.

Songwriter Margo Price spent nearly a decade struggling around Nashville only to have her debut, *Midwest Farmer’s Daughter*, hit the country Top 10. Spirited, sharp-witted (“Do Right By Me”), class-conscious (“Learning to Lose”), and deeply bittersweet, *All American Made* cements Price’s place alongside artists like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell—keepers of the flame but never slaves to tradition. “At the end of the day, if the rain it don’t rain,” she sings on the fingerpicked folk of “Heart of America,” “We just do what we can.” It’s a tale of blue-collar hardship drawn from her own life.

A few years into his 80s, and Willie Nelson’s touch is as light and comforting as ever. *God’s Problem Child* is a mellow, often reflective set of outlaw country and folk that finds Nelson wrestling directly with mortality—sometimes gravely (the touching “Old Timer”), sometimes not (the hilariously straight-faced “Still Not Dead,” as in, “I woke up still not dead again today”). It concludes with a salute to his old friend and longtime duet partner Merle Haggard on “He Won’t Ever Be Gone.”

Four years after RaeLynn stunned on *The Voice* and landed Blake Shelton as a mentor, the Texas singer delivers a debut album of contemporary country-pop that’s honest, gritty, and delicately defiant. She masterfully balances confidence and vulnerability, sending an ex to voicemail on “Lonely Call,” fending off jealousy on “Insecure,” and letting herself daydream on “Diamonds.” On the standout title track, she refuses to be tamed: “If you wanna love me, understand/You gotta be down with the way I am/All my flaws and all my quirks/All my glitter, all my dirt.”