Stereogum's 10 Best Country 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.’”

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.’”

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 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.’”

“I had never seen myself as an activist-artist,” Mickey Guyton tells Apple Music. “I was just trying to be like every other woman in country music: I just can write and sing cool songs and get recognized for it and move forward.” Since the early 2010s, the Texas-bred country-pop performer had been striving to build a Nashville career as an expressive vocalist and the sole Black woman signed to a major country label, in an industry that she came to recognize offered little room for either. “Seeing that it\'s still so hard for women in country music—you can look at the charts now—it\'s just been that much more important for me to write with women, push for women, push for what is right, and to sing about what is right,” she says. By early 2020, Guyton had found trusted collaborators, like her co-writers Victoria Banks and Emma-Lee and writer-producer Karen Kosowski, and figured out how she wanted to put her voice to use. “I was on my way to putting out this material,” she explains, “but the crazy thing is, with the turn of events and the social unrest and the pandemic, it actually inspired me that much more. I was already writing on social issues and life issues, and this just helped continue that conversation.” Guyton wrote and recorded the remainder of her six-song EP virtually, while holed up with her husband in their LA home, and here she tells the stories behind each track on *Bridges*. **Heaven Down Here** “I had watched the video of George Floyd. Then I saw the video of Ahmaud Arbery running in the streets and these men hunting him down. Just treating them so inhumanely and like they don\'t matter, like they\'re disposable. And Breonna Taylor. I\'m a very empathetic person. I didn\'t even want to write that day because I was so emotional. I was writing with some of the most amazing songwriters in Nashville—Josh Kear, Gordie Sampson, and Hillary Lindsey. We wrote the song on Zoom. I looked at these sweet faces that were taking the time to write with me, and I just started sobbing. Being in country music, I didn\'t feel like I mattered. We were like, ‘How do we write this in a way that\'s not just devastating? How do we make this to where people can hear it and receive it?’ We were like, ‘What if we\'re asking God, \"If you\'re listening, if you hear anything we\'re saying, can you help us out?\"\'” **Bridges** “That is Karen Kosowski and Emma-Lee and Victoria Banks, the magic of those women. I came up with the concept: ‘Y\'all, instead of tearing everything down, what if we built bridges and started reaching out for the other side?’ Oh my god, it gets so frustrating watching the news. I can\'t even. But that was the motivation for me, because I was watching all of this. I wanted to sing a song like ‘Build That Bridge.’ I said, ‘It needs to be tempo, and there needs to be angst.’” **What Are You Gonna Tell Her?** “I had a conversation on Instagram with a girl from the Philippines. She was trying to decide if she wanted to actually sing or if she wanted to work in the music industry. She asked me, ‘Is there anything I have to look forward to? Do you think I have a shot?’ I just had to be honest. I didn\'t have anything really too great to tell her about the industry. Then she told me that her musical director in one of the school plays that she was in told her that she needed to get whiter makeup so she would look whiter on stage. How do you tell that to somebody, to a girl with hopes? It reminded me of myself, what I\'ve gone through and how I\'ve tried to alter myself to make other people comfortable with me being present and making sure I can fit in and they can see me. It was like PTSD. I\'m being dramatic, but I felt that I instantly wanted to fight for her.” **Rosé** “I wrote that song two and a half years ago because I was like, ‘Women don\'t really have drinking country songs. Well then, why don\'t we have our own?’ I cannot believe that nobody had ever written a drinking country song called ‘Rosé All Day.’” **Salt** “There\'s always male-bashing songs, but I wanted it to be like a cautionary tale to men. Like, ‘Look, there\'s a lot of pretty women out there, but you got to remember what you got at home.’ I think that\'s something that so many women relate to. We\'re sitting at home, and I trust my man, but I can\'t imagine being a wife of a lot of these producers that are around all these cute women all the time. That would drive me nuts.” **Black Like Me** “I had been in this town for a long time. I\'ve felt overlooked for a long time. I felt unconsidered for a long time. I was showing up for other artists, but nobody would ever show up for me. It was really hard. That reminded me of my life growing up. I was always the only Black girl in spaces. I always felt a little like I didn\'t fit in. I was called the N-word, as a child. I wanted to save that song for last, because that is the song that is the most important to me. Telling my experience through country storytelling, I think, was one of the most beautiful things. Country music started with Black people, and this song, to me, bridged that gap.”