Stereogum's 10 Best Country Albums Of 2019

In the 1980s, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson came together to record as The Highwaymen, one of the most successful supergroups in country music history. Now, like the Pistol Annies before them, four of the genre’s most powerful women—Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires—grab the torch. Their name is more than a play on words: “\[The men\] were able to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other as equals,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music’s Brooke Reese. “This is a difficult time for women to do that because there are so few spaces for us on country radio, and in the industry in general, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we form a straight line? A shoulder-to-shoulder women’s country group?’” Their eponymous debut album puts female stories front and center—mothers, daughters, witches, lesbians, cowgirls, and more—in a celebration of American women who refuse to choose between success and family, power and love. “Making bank/Shaking hands/Driving 80/Trying to get home just to feed the baby,” they sing on lead single “Redesigning Women,” a toast to ambitious ladies “breaking every Jell-O mold.” But underneath those winking lyrics and warm, absorbing harmonies is a serious message aimed directly at Nashville’s old guard: *Hear us*. “I want to get in the door, and I want our band to get played on country radio,” Shires says. “And once we get in the door, I want to hold it open.” The songs here are daringly vulnerable (“Old Soul”), tough (“Don’t Call Me,\" “Loose Change”), and, at their core, unifying. The album standout “Crowded Table” calls for a more inclusive world: “If we want a garden/We’re gonna have to sow the seeds,” they sing in unison. “Plant a little happiness/Let the roots run deep.”

In the middle of writing her seventh album *Wildcard*, Miranda Lambert hit pause. “I took the first long stretch I’ve ever had off in my entire career since I was 17,” she tells Apple Music. “Finally you realize how much you need a breath.” During that break, the country superstar made some big life changes, surprising the world by announcing that she’d secretly gotten married and was moving part-time to New York City—a switch-up that she says revitalized her creative energy and breathed new life into her sound. “Oddly enough, on my seventh solo album, I feel like I approached it more like my first album than any other record I’ve made,” she says. In many ways, *Wildcard* feels like a new beginning. It’s full of frenetic, uptempo rock (“Locomotive”), propulsive power pop (“Mess With My Head\"), and clear-eyed confidence (“It All Comes Out in the Wash”). The newfound edge is partly a reflection of producer Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Zac Brown Band), with whom she works for the first time here after years with Frank Liddell. Lambert says it was time to mix it up: “Country is what I do, it’s who I am…but I love rock ’n’ roll.” Her country devotees will delight in “Way Too Pretty for Prison,” a deliciously clever breakup song in which Lambert and Maren Morris fantasize about killing an ex before ultimately deciding prison sounds unappealing (not enough boys, beauty parlors, or Chardonnay). And on “Pretty Bitchin’,” a similarly rowdy send-up, she rolls out a series of flexes—fine wine, a new guitar, a kitted-out Airstream—and makes no apologies about relishing her success in a world that is often unkind to women entertainers. “I use what I got/I don’t let it go to waste,” she sings with the remorseless air of someone who has endured their fair share of tabloid headlines. This song is about winning in spite of all that: \"I’m pretty from the back/Kinda pretty in the face/I hate to admit it/But it didn’t stop me, did it?”

Yola’s sound conjures a moment in the late \'60s when country, R&B, gospel, pop, rock, and the lighter side of psychedelia mixed together so freely—and so seamlessly—one remembered they all came from the same distinctly American well. Produced by The Black Keys\' Dan Auerbach, *Walk Through Fire* is expectedly long on style: “Faraway Look” is Dusty Springfield refracted through Phil Spector; “Walk Through Fire” is a slow folk thump so studiously offhand that Auerbach keeps the count-off in the mix; “Lonely the Night” captures the pop-lite poise of Petula Clark, and “Love All Night (Work All Day)” the catharsis of Rod Stewart. Really, though, it’s a testament to Yola’s writing and voice—smoky and deep but never smothering—that the album manages to cohere as the sound of a single artist.

Tanya Tucker was already singing in a voice that conveyed grit and experience when she scored her first hit at age 13. In the half-century since, the veteran country star has released roughly two dozen albums. But *While I’m Livin’*, arriving on the heels of an extended quiet spell, is the first full-length she’s recorded that reflects—or, more accurately, magnifies—her life experiences and brassy persona. Shooter Jennings and Brandi Carlile, who both grew up with Tucker’s music, made it their crusade to produce an album that would present Tucker as an artist whose undiminished edge and seasoned wit qualify her as a legend. They selected songs, several of them written by Carlile and her frequent collaborators Tim and Phil Hanseroth, that dramatize Tucker\'s headstrong, hard-living ways and the pride she took in weathering hardship. She makes loping outlaw epics like \"High Ridin\' Heroes,\" \"Hard Luck,\" and \"Mustang Ridge\" her own, and sounds more unvarnished than ever delivering soft, sentimental tunes like \"The House That Built Me,\" \"The Day My Heart Goes Still,\" and \"Bring My Flowers Now.\"

Kelsey Waldon works in the country, folk, and bluegrass songwriting tradition of depicting rural life—but has zero interest in romanticizing or simplifying her subject matter. On her third full-length—and first for John Prine’s Oh Boy Records—the Nashville singer conjures the rustic places and resourceful people of her upbringing in all their complexity. “Kentucky, 1988” and “Black Patch” are tales of stubborn self-reliance—one autobiographical, the other historical. In the title track, “Anyhow,” and “Lived and Let Go,” she locates enlightenment in plainspoken country wisdom, and in “Sunday’s Children,” she draws a connection between many kinds of people dwelling at the social margins. The album’s sinewy, down-home, occasionally rocking folk-country arrangements revolve around the vinegary stoicism of Waldon’s singing and the plaintive potency of Brett Resnick’s steel guitar playing.

Twentysomething East Kentuckian Tyler Childers is the latest standout in a lineage of serious-minded singer-songwriters who’ve chafed at portrayals of their native Appalachia as a boorish, backward place. The nine vignettes on *Country Squire* continue the plainspoken but keenly perceptive storytelling from his 2017 breakthrough *Purgatory*, offering humanizing sketches of struggle, disappointment, and resilience. Some of his loosely autobiographical numbers wryly measure the distance between the modest aspirations he harbored back when his following was merely regional and the more encumbered reality he’s living now. In the title track, he recalls splitting his time between poor-paying road gigs and renovating an old camper trailer: “And when I ain\'t out playing on my six-string/With the nickels I acquire/I’m trying to fix her up a castle/It\'s called the Country Squire.” Childers’ wiry mountain wail and sparing use of keyed-up country vocal curlicues lend songs like “House Fire,” “Creeker,” and “Peace of Mind” a focused emotional intensity. Though this album marks his first partnership with a major label, he kept the producers who steered *Purgatory*—kindred spirit Sturgill Simpson and storied Nashville engineer David Ferguson—and they’ve once again framed Childers with lean, loping performances from bluegrass and country session vets. It suits a searching mind like Childers’ that some of the most down-home grooves melt into mildly psychedelic transitions between tracks.

After Maren Morris released her blockbuster debut album *Hero* in 2016, she embarked on a series of unorthodox cross-genre collaborations that, at a different time in country music, could have easily ended her career. Instead, she scored near-simultaneous hits in dance, country, and pop, and established a new breed of Nashville superstar. “It’s a testament to how much the city has changed,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s become an exciting melting pot.” She is being modest: Much of that change is thanks to Morris. Her free-spirited sophomore effort continues to push the limits of contemporary country-pop, infusing it with energy and texture from hip-hop, R&B, and psychedelic rock. \"I wanted to be braver with production and get really weird with it,” she says. \"The lyrics were becoming really assertive and independent and sensual, all these empowering elements. I wanted the music to amplify that.” As the title suggests, womanhood is a theme, but the album steers clear of rallying cries and hear-me-roar tropes; these songs are more about learning to embrace all sides of yourself. By singing about her conflicting emotions and life experiences, she frames her complexity as a kind of power: She can be both romantic and in charge (**“The Bones\"**), pissed off and poised (**“Flavor”**), successful and uncertain (**\"To Hell & Back”**). The latter was the first song she wrote on *GIRL* after wrestling with the explosive success of *Hero*. “It was the bitter and the sweet going on in my head,” she says. “I opened up to this other person and felt like they accepted all my broken pieces. They didn’t try to fix me.” At some point, Morris’ independence and progressive point of view caught the attention of Brandi Carlile, a fellow disrupter in Americana and folk. “She wrote me a note about how she’s got two daughters and she’s proud to know they look up to me,” Morris says. The exchange led to their duet, **“Common”**—a pleading, impassioned ballad about setting aside our differences—and eventually, a supergroup with singer-songwriter Amanda Shires called the Highwomen. (Morris has gently tackled politics before, most notably on “Dear Hate”, her response to the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.) The album’s other collaboration, **“All My Favorite People”** featuring the Brothers Osbourne, is Morris off duty. “It’s a slapping, trashy party song but has all these descriptive, intricate lyrics,” she says. “It’s my favorite kind of song to write: airtight and very country.” She co-wrote the song with her husband, musician Ryan Hurd, who gets a playful tribute on **“Make Out with Me,”** written to mimic a drunken voicemail. “That\'s one of my favorites,” she says, \"because it’s *so me*.\" Just when you think you’ve got Morris figured out, she serves up R&B curveballs (**“RSVP”**), pop-ified love songs (**“Gold Love”**), and lighters-in-the-air sing-alongs that hat-tip her influences, which include Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry (**“A Song for Everything”**). No song packs as much zing as **“Flavor,”** a growling send-up Morris has dubbed \"an F U to your haters.” In her case, they’re mostly online. “This is my middle finger to the trolls, the body-shamers, the slut-shamers, the women-haters, the people who rain on my parade,” she says, pointing out that despite her fame, she still manages her own social media accounts. \"I wanted to tell them: You know what, I\'m cooking up my own flavor, and you don\'t have to like it, but I promise you\'ve never tasted anything like it.\"

Full of lush, sweeping arrangements and deeply vulnerable self-examination, ‘Desert Dove’ is Michaela’s most expansive work yet. The album, produced by Sam Outlaw and Delta Spirit’s Kelly Winrich, is still very much rooted in the classic country she’s come to be known for - but the record represents something of a sonic shift for Michaela, incorporating more modern production elements than ever before in pursuit of a sound that owes as much influence to indie rock as honky tonk. Despite the bolder, more adventurous arrangements, Michaela’s crystalline voice remains front and center, as do her subjects: complex, three-dimensional characters who, through Michaela’s empathetic portraits, revel in exploring the gray areas between good and bad, joy and pain, love and regret. In the end, that vivid grounding in real experience coupled with outstanding songwriting and musicianship is what makes ‘Desert Dove’ such an incredibly powerful record.

Kalie Shorr released a handful of tracks, mixtapes, and EPs before arriving at her confessional country-pop approach, distinctly influenced by emo and ’90s alt rock, which fits her well. She teased that direction on last year\'s *Awake* before going all in on *Open Book*, her full-length debut. True to the title, she’s said that the songs’ confrontational, diaristic details are her way of processing her own family tragedy and romantic betrayal, and she co-produced the album with Skip Black, merging spiky guitar sounds with energetic acoustic instrumentation. “Messy,” a piano ballad postmortem of the breakup, is bewildered and biting, but the pop-punk-leaning “F U Forever” is especially savage and clever: “Now I’m wearing your stupid ring on my pretty little middle finger,” she gloats, “so I can say F U forever.” “Escape” surveys varieties of self-medication, “Gatsby” pinpoints the dishonesty bound up in likability, and “Angry Butterfly” has the swagger and youthful intensity of someone who’s newly harnessed the power of her feelings.