Stereogum's 10 Best Country Albums of 2021

Allison Russell has long been a fixture of the roots scene, crafting melodic roots-pop as part of the duo Birds of Chicago and inventive, socially conscious folk with the acclaimed supergroup Our Native Daughters. The Nashville-based, Montreal-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist steps out on her own on her debut album, an expertly rendered and powerfully delivered collection that proves Russell to be just as adept a solo artist as she is a collaborator. (Though, in the spirit of collaboration, Russell invites friends and fellow musicians like Yola, Erin Rae, and the McCrary Sisters to join her.) Thematically, *Outside Child* navigates difficult terrain—such as abuse, neglect, and racism—though it does so with an undercurrent of healing, transformation, and compassion. In an album full of standout moments, it’s hard not to point to “4th Day Prayer,” a brutally frank recollection of Russell’s sexual abuse at the hands of her adoptive father, built atop a soulful, gospel-adjacent arrangement that suggests empowerment rather than victimhood. Russell is one of roots music’s finest musicians in any form, but with *Outside Child*, she stakes her claim as one of its finest visionaries too.

“I always want to engage the listener in a question instead of an answer,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music in a conversation about her new album and its provocative title. “That\'s why it\'s *In These Silent Days*. It\'s a question: What did you learn? What did you make of yourself? What did you lose? What happened to you in this time? I want to invite people to reflect, because it\'s such a pivotal time in human history, and a real spiritual upheaval for so many people in really positive and really negative, complicated ways.” Carlile herself was in a deeply retrospective—and stationary—place when she started working on her seventh album. After the resounding success of 2018’s *By the Way, I Forgive You* (which earned her three Grammys), the folk-rock singer-songwriter and her collaborators Phil and Tim Hanseroth (affectionately known as “the twins”) spent much of the two years following its release on the road, pausing only to record the 2019 debut record from The Highwomen, Carlile’s country supergroup with Maren Morris, Amanda Shires, and Natalie Hemby, and for Carlile to co-produce *While I’m Livin’*, the comeback album for outlaw country queen Tanya Tucker. The pandemic forced a slowdown in 2020, and that’s when Carlile started writing—the songs that would eventually wind up on *In These Silent Days*, but also her memoir, *Broken Horses*. “Writing that book gave me this really linear understanding of ‘here\'s how I started and here\'s how I am, and these are the things in between that made it so,’ and it was such clarity,” she says. “This was the first time that I knew what I was writing the songs about while I was writing them. I had so much more to pull from, so much more sensory material, than this abstract half-truth.” *In These Silent Days* meets the standard Carlile has set for her own songwriting: Piano-laden power ballads abound, from the sweeping grandeur of album opener “Right on Time” to the Elton John-channeling “Letter to the Past” through to “Sinners, Saints and Fools,” which gives any rock opera climax a run for its money. Fingerpickin’ folk anthems (“Mama Werewolf”), acoustic meditations (“When You’re Wrong”), and straightforward rock (“Broken Horses”) round out the album and recall the intimacy and intensity that have come to define her live shows. It’s both a companion piece to her memoir and a separate musical autobiography: This is how Carlile spent her silent days, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way. “I realized how much affirmation I get from strangers—that life-affirming response that you get from an audience when you perform,” she says of her new perspective gleaned from this transformative time. “If everybody could just have a job where they just go to scream and stomp all the time, I think they would probably find themselves a little more well-rounded.”

It’s not uncommon for debut artists to navigate a circuitous route to releasing their first full-length project, but few have traversed paths as long and arduous as Mickey Guyton’s road to *Remember Her Name*. The Nashville-based singer-songwriter first signed a record deal in 2011 and, 10 years later, is finally releasing her debut album. “This whole album really is my life, and my learning self-acceptance, over the last 10 years,” Guyton tells Apple Music. “The ups, the downs, the back and forth, the impostor syndrome that we all tend to get because of the downs—all of that is wrapped up in one album.” *Remember Her Name* opens with the powerful title track, which was inspired both by the murder of Breonna Taylor and by Guyton’s own reclamation of the sense of self that 10 years in the music industry mercilessly eroded. Empowerment is a recurring theme throughout the LP, but Guyton rejects schmaltzy clichés in favor of nuanced, often painfully personal stories of working through internalized racism (“Love My Hair,” “Black Like Me”), embracing the inherently imperfect nature of a marriage (“Lay It on Me”), and fighting for space in a white-dominated industry (a particularly moving rerecording of her 2015 track “Better Than You Left Me”). “I hope people walk away from the album feeling seen,” Guyton adds. “I tried to put my life on display in an honest way, showing the good and the bad. And I hope people can hear that in that album and find hope within their own lives from it.” Below, Guyton walks us through several key tracks on *Remember Her Name*. **“Remember Her Name”** “I wrote ‘Remember Her Name’ in the pandemic. And I was actually watching what happened with Breonna Taylor. Whenever someone is wrongly murdered, a lot of people say, ‘Say their name. Remember their name.’ So, I was inspired by that. And then, as I was writing the song, it turned into my own story as an artist. When I first started music, I had so much excitement and confidence in myself, and then life happened and I lost every ounce of confidence that I ever had. No matter what life did to you, that person, that fire is still in you, and you have to find that person. And the reason why I called it ‘Remember Her Name’ for the album was because it took me so long to get to this point of releasing my first body of work, ever.” **“All American”** “I also wrote ‘All American’ in the pandemic while very, very pregnant. And the funny story about that is, when I tried to record the song, if I ate, I couldn’t sing because I had no room left. My baby was taking over. So, I would have to come back another day when I didn’t have any food in my stomach to be able to record it. I wanted to write a song showing that our differences make America great. I think so many people have forgotten that. And in this genre—this predominantly white genre—I wanted to sing a song that was true to me and all the different parts of America, whether it’s the Texas sky or the New York City lights, whether it’s James Brown or James Dean or Daisy Dukes and dookie braids. All of that is American.” **“Love My Hair”** “I wrote that song after I watched this video on YouTube of this little Black girl with braids crying to her mother because she got sent home from school because they said her hair was distracting. I couldn’t even finish the video because it took me back to my own struggles, as a little girl, with self-love and being in predominantly white spaces in school and just being different. I had those experiences and it’s taken me a long time to get over that and to learn self-acceptance. And this song was a step in that direction.” **“Lay It on Me”** “My husband and I have been together for a long time, almost 11 years. At one point in time, he was really, really sick and he almost died. I just remember, at the time, I was broke and I was working on this album; I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. He wouldn’t let me quit. Even when I wanted to just give up my apartment in Nashville and move to LA, he wouldn’t allow it. And he was giving everything so that I could pursue this dream. It’s watching someone that I love struggle and me wanting to take the load off them for a second.” **“Black Like Me”** “A lot of these songs I’d written two, three years ago. And ‘Black Like Me’ was kind of the one that helped me focus on what, exactly, I was trying to say in this album. I was chasing after acceptance, and chasing after acceptance in a predominantly white genre. And that was a tough pill for me to swallow, but I took it on the chin and had to take a minute and look at myself. As I was looking at myself, I was looking at everything that I was doing in this industry and trying to just get a chance. And it broke me a little bit. ‘Black Like Me’ was that moment of me being like, ‘Hey, it’s hard. It’s really hard for Black people.’ Some have it easier than others, and I’m definitely on the easier side of the spectrum. But there’s a lot of people that it is not easy for, and I wanted to sing about that.” **“Better Than You Left Me” (Fly Higher Version)** “I don’t know what came over me, but I knew that the anniversary of that song was coming up and I was like, ‘I need to do an updated version.’ It has a totally different meaning now, and I needed to put that on the album. When I first wrote the song, I wrote it about an ex that I was so brokenhearted over and that I’d moved on from. But that was forever ago, and that guy is not even a thought in my head anymore; he doesn\'t matter to me, but the song does. I pulled myself out of that with the help of a small group of people. I wanted to include that because I’m just so different and I am better than the town left me. I’m stronger. I love deeper. I fly higher. I’m all of those things.”

Morgan Wade’s road to her debut album has been a winding one. The Virginia-born artist is only 26 years old, but the songs that make up the album reveal a depth of life experience—including heartbreak, addiction, and sobriety—typically only heard from older, more seasoned songwriters. After devoting herself in earnest to songwriting in her freshman year of college, Wade began playing shows and festivals locally and regionally, eventually landing on the radar of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit guitarist Sadler Vaden, who co-produced *Reckless* with Paul Ebersold (Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, The Weeks). The resulting 10 tracks are fringe country at its finest, recalling the spitfire sass of Miranda Lambert and the hard-earned wisdom of Ashley McBryde. Though Wade’s wildest years are behind her, she tells Apple Music that making *Reckless* helped her bridge the gap between her rowdier younger days and her future as a professional musician. “I felt like it summed up these songs, whether it was referencing me being reckless or someone else being reckless, or just life in general feeling reckless sometimes,” she says. “So I think that it’s the perfect title for that chapter of my life.” Below, Wade tells Apple Music what inspired each song. **Wilder Days** “Sadler and I co-wrote that together. And it was just the concept of meeting an older guy who has cleaned up his act a little bit. He still has that side to him, but you know that if time would have allowed it, you guys would have gotten into some trouble and been more of a Bonnie-and-Clyde-type thing. So it’s not a depressing song but more of a ‘This isn’t going to work, but it could have worked.’” **Matches and Metaphors** “I had drank way too much coffee that day and I remember I stayed up all night. And I was actually putting a puzzle together at two in the morning, and I don\'t know why I remember that. So, just a ‘late night, miss you, where are you at’ kind of song.” **Other Side** “We were actually recording the record and I was at my hotel. And I woke up one morning and I had that thought in my head of my boyfriend knowing me before all of this. It was like, he\'s the one that\'s been there the whole time, before I had the tattoos. He remembers me before I was sober. He\'s seen all of that.” **Don’t Cry** “I was in the studio and Paul had this track and I was like, ‘You know what? Just keep playing it on a loop.’ And I just sat down with a notebook and listened to it for an hour straight and wrote ‘Don\'t Cry.’ I\'m thinking it was December or January, something around there, which is always a pretty difficult time for me mentally. Just the weather, the time change, everything. And then, of course, it was a good time that we put it out the following year, 2020, and that December was when it came out. For me, it was a big deal to put it out then, because it was like, ‘You know, it\'s been about a year since I\'ve experienced that and I\'ve grown from that.’ And it was just nice to reconnect with that song myself.” **Mend** “That\'s the only song on the record that I wrote before I was sober, and I\'ve been sober for almost four years, and that was the first song Sadler had heard of mine. And Paul and Sadler were very adamant about me putting that one on the record.” **Last Cigarette** “It’s just that idea of, like, ‘Just one more time. I know it\'s bad for me. I know this is not helping me, but just one more time.’ And I feel like we do that a lot with anything in life. And then your last time\'s really not your last time.” **Take Me Away** “I picked up my guitar one day, and it was early morning. And, with the idea of being this person that can be cut off and short and keep things to myself, it\'s just about being vulnerable and letting somebody in.” **Reckless** “Sadler had the idea for ‘Reckless.’ And when we were writing it together, he was like, ‘Man, *Reckless* would sound like a cool album title.’ And that was about it, that\'s all we\'d said about it. And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And then we never brought that up again. And then, when it came time to be like, ‘All right, what are we going to call this thing?’ I was like, ‘Well, that fits it.’ And I felt like it summed up these songs, whether it was referencing me being reckless or someone else being reckless or just life in general feeling reckless sometimes. So I think that was the perfect title for that chapter of my life.” **Northern Air** “We wrote that one about somebody moving away, and the character being in the same place, like, ‘What\'s it like where you\'re at and what can I do to get you to come home?’” **Met You** “I\'m a big Ernest Hemingway fan. There\'s a book written about him \[*Hemingway in Love* by A.E. Hotchner\] and it was just talking about how he never got over his first wife, Hadley. And he started getting fame and his books were picking up and everything good was going on for him when he was living in Paris. He ended up falling in love with another woman and leaving Hadley and breaking her heart. And there was a part where he was in Paris and he saw her years later and told her, ‘Any true thing I write, any true woman I write about, is you.’ And he just never did let go. In this book, he was older and his health wasn\'t great and he was still sitting there and just saying, ‘I regret that.’ And for him, it was just never over.”

Sturgill Simpson has made several sonic detours over the last few years, sharply veering away from the cosmic country of his breakout 2014 album *Metamodern Sounds in Country Music*, particularly into prog rock on 2019’s *SOUND & FURY* and revisiting his bluegrass roots on the 2020 releases *Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 1 (Butcher Shoppe Sessions)* and *Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 2 (Cowboy Arms Sessions)*. *The Ballad of Dood & Juanita* falls more squarely in the latter’s territory, pulling from bluegrass, gospel, traditional country, and mountain music. Thematically, *Dood & Juanita* is a concept album, telling a continuous narrative throughout, something Simpson flirted with in the past but had yet to fully explore. And while Simpson has plenty of his own bona fides, tapping Willie Nelson to join him on “Juanita” sweetens the deal, offering a direct connection to the very lineage Simpson sets out to celebrate.

Eric Church’s *Heart & Soul* was the most ambitious work of the country star’s career—a triple album showing off his depth, versatility, and chameleonic nature as an artist. Originally a fan club exclusive, the six songs making up *&* complete the trilogy, rounding out what was already an impressive showing from the Chief. *&* opens with “Through My Ray-Bans,” an emotive, image-rich illustration of how Church sees the world. “Do Side” is a slinky, stuttering jam session, sure to become a staple of Church’s fiery live shows. “Mad Man” is a breakup song as only Church could write one, with lines like “His thumbs-up has been grounded/Now it’s that bird he loves to fly.” Closer “Lone Wolf” caps off the record in grand fashion, complete with a gospel choir and one of Church’s finest vocal performances.

“I\'ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song\'s life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we\'re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there\'s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.” That *isn\'t* what happened with *Heart & Soul*, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina\'s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I\'m going to bring in some different players on this album,’” he recalls. “And he goes, \'Man, we\'re kicking ass. If it\'s not broke—\' And I stopped him, I said, \'You break it. We have to mess this up.\'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let\'s write the song that day,” he says, thinking back to their first conversations about *Heart & Soul*. “Let\'s record the song that day. And let\'s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favorite project for that reason, because I\'ve never really put it all out there like we\'ve done on this one.” Though they’re three separate albums, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs,” he says. “We’d finish them by two or three o\'clock in the afternoon, and then we\'d go in the studio and we\'d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I\'m not going to walk in there with anything that I\'m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.” Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off,” he says. “Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.” Fans will recognize the Chief’s intensity throughout *Heart & Soul*, but one single stands out as a telltale track. “Stick That in Your Country Song” is a snarling and somber look at modern American life and the conflicts it entails, one that follows a pattern Church says has followed him from his early days as a recording artist. “If you look at our career, it\'s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive,” he says. “\'Stick That in Your Country Song,\' that\'s aggressive, but the next one\'s normally a pretty big hit. I know that\'s my best chance.”

“I\'ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song\'s life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we\'re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there\'s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.” That *isn\'t* what happened with *Heart & Soul*, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina\'s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I\'m going to bring in some different players on this album,’” he recalls. “And he goes, \'Man, we\'re kicking ass. If it\'s not broke—\' And I stopped him, I said, \'You break it. We have to mess this up.\'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let\'s write the song that day,” he says, thinking back to their first conversations about *Heart & Soul*. “Let\'s record the song that day. And let\'s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favorite project for that reason, because I\'ve never really put it all out there like we\'ve done on this one.” Though they’re three separate albums, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs,” he says. “We’d finish them by two or three o\'clock in the afternoon, and then we\'d go in the studio and we\'d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I\'m not going to walk in there with anything that I\'m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.” Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off,” he says. “Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.” Fans will recognize the Chief’s intensity throughout *Heart & Soul*, but one single stands out as a telltale track. “Stick That in Your Country Song” is a snarling and somber look at modern American life and the conflicts it entails, one that follows a pattern Church says has followed him from his early days as a recording artist. “If you look at our career, it\'s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive,” he says. “\'Stick That in Your Country Song,\' that\'s aggressive, but the next one\'s normally a pretty big hit. I know that\'s my best chance.”