Stereogum's 10 Best Country Albums of 2022

*Humble Quest*, Maren Morris’ third major-label album, is a window into her mind during two of the most unpredictable, cathartic, and life-changing years she’s experienced to date: She gave birth to her first child with her husband and “Chasing After You” collaborator Ryan Hurd; mourned the loss of busbee, one of her dear friends and closest colleagues; and weathered the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic without knowing when, or how, she and her band would return to the road. “We were stuck in the house for two years—not just from COVID, but our baby was born at the beginning of 2020,” she shared with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in a conversation about *Humble Quest* and the process that shaped it. “Both being songwriters, after a few months of learning to be new parents, it was like, ‘Should we start being creative again? I don\'t know, what are we doing this for? There\'s no touring.’ It was sort of this free fall of not being able to tour or write towards a direction, and I feel like that freed us up to write about whatever we wanted.” The path between her 2019 album, *GIRL*, and *Humble Quest* was one of extreme highs and soul-crushing lows, and it was important to her that the full emotional spectrum was represented in each of its songs. Deafening rock anthems (“Nervous”) and fun, flirtatious jams (“Tall Guys”) follow up sage ballads (“Background Music”), determined motivational anthems (“Humble Quest”), and tear-jerking tributes to gone-too-soon friends (“What Would This World Do?”). In spite of the sadness and grief that inspired some of these tracks, Morris finds peace and contentment in where her *Humble Quest* leads. “It\'s two sides of a coin, and darkness is there to make us see light a little bit better,” she said. “When I was listening to all of these songs, I just felt happy. I felt like \[the album\] was healing me in whatever I was drowning in. Ultimately, you can scream in an echo chamber as long as you want, but eventually the songs have to be heard by somebody besides you. I guess my hope is when people hear this, it will feel therapeutic and light.”

As longtime Nashville stalwart Joshua Hedley declares on one of *Neon Blue*’s decidedly down-home standouts, the man is a bona fide “singing professor of country and western.” On his sophomore album, the singer, guitarist, and fiddle player eschews the glitzy sound of 2020s country-pop for the glorious heyday of ‘90s honky-tonk, evoking the likes of Alan Jackson and Garth Brooks with the electrifying chicken pickin’ of the title track or the raucous hard-times anthem “Broke Again.” And in the same tradition, Hedley offers a master class in songwriting about getting dumped (“Old Heartbroke Blues”), going on a bender (“Bury Me with My Boots On”), and offering his own take on a country icon’s work with a devotional cover of Roger Miller’s “River in the Rain.”

S.G. Goodman’s 2020 debut album *Old Time Feeling* announced the Kentucky singer-songwriter as one of roots rock’s finest new voices. Its follow-up is no sophomore slump, further showing the depths of Goodman’s talents as a writer and performer. Recorded in Athens, Georgia, alongside co-producer Drew Vandenberg, *Teeth Marks* is an immersive listen and often surprising, with Goodman eschewing genre confines in favor of a sonic world big enough to suit her larger-than-life songs. Goodman has a knack for finding the universal in small details, as on standout “Dead Soldiers,” which was (its title slang for empty beer bottles) inspired by a friend’s battle with alcoholism. A pair of songs at the album’s center—“If You Were Someone I Loved” and “You Were Someone I Loved”—tell twin tales of the devastating effects of a lack of compassion, with particular regard to the opioid epidemic. Mixed emotions abound, too, like on “Work Until I Die,” which pairs a jaunty beat with a decidedly less playful take on labor.

Grammy and Americana-award-winning singer-songwriter and violinist Amanda Shires has pushed the reset button with 'Take It Like A Man', releasing a record that is so unlike anything she has ever recorded that you would be tempted to think it’s her debut album instead of her seventh. Shires, who also plays in The Highwomen, worked with producer Lawrence Rothman (Angel Olsen, Kim Gordon) to make a fearless confessional, showing the world what turning 40 looks like in 10 emotionally raw tracks.

Country music has a long-held tradition of narrative music, though the commercial side of the genre has strayed away from such character- and story-driven songs in recent years. Zach Bryan is here to change that, though, on his sprawling, ambitious triple album *American Heartbreak*. Across 34 tracks, the Navy veteran and cult favorite envisions bull riders, long-lost lovers, wandering road warriors, and more, telling their stories over simple arrangements and with an emotionally potent voice that recalls Tyler Childers or early Jason Isbell. “There\'s plenty of characters on *American Heartbreak*—some of them I know, some of them I don\'t,” Bryan tells Apple Music. “Sometimes I\'m just in a breakfast place and I see someone doing something and I\'m like, ‘It\'d be crazy if that person was a bull rider.’ And then I\'m like, ‘Oh wait—that would be a cool story.’” Album highlights include the massively successful “Something in the Orange,” which crackles with brooding intrigue, and “From Austin,” a heartbreak song that avoids the tropes and clichés of similar country tracks in favor of more poetic lines like “Babe, I’ve gotta heal myself from the things I’ve never felt.”

Miranda Lambert hits the road on *Palomino*, her eighth solo album and the follow-up to her 2019 Grammy-winning LP *Wildcard*. Across 15 tracks, Lambert treks all over the United States, spinning colorful yarns of a rambling life out on the road. “We go to 36 different locations in this record and meet all kinds of characters that we made up,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “Or it might have been characters we have all met in our travels, put into these songs. I\'ve never written with that much purpose.” Lambert sets the freewheeling tone with opener “Actin’ Up,” a swampy ode to bad behavior. Tracks like “Scenes” and “Tourist” are some of Lambert’s most image-rich material yet, while “Music City Queen”—a collaboration with pioneering New Wavers The B-52’s—is easily one of her most fun. Some songs, like standout “Geraldene,” previously appeared in demo form on Lambert’s critically acclaimed *The Marfa Tapes*, a 2021 collaborative LP with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, and take on new life thanks to thoughtful production from Lambert, Randall, and frequent collaborator Luke Dick. Below, Lambert shares insight into a handful of tracks on *Palomino*. **“Geraldene”** “She\'s everyone. I feel like we\'ve all known one or been one at one point or the other. I just had that title because I was watching *Heartworn Highways* like a million times, and in that movie, Townes’ dog is named Geraldine. And Geraldine\'s this German shepherd, and I was like, ‘That\'s a cool name.’” **“Country Money”** “Aaron Raitiere pulls me in on a write one day. He\'s like, ‘Hey, come write with me and Mikey Reaves.’ I had never written with him before, and I was like, ‘Okay, cool, that\'d be different,’ and we wrote ‘Country Money.’ It fit right into the vibe of this road trip we were taking. So it all just happened easily, which makes me a little nervous because I\'m like, ‘Okay, when\'s the other shoe going to drop?’” **“Carousel”** “That is a real feeling. We joined the circus in one way or another, and we\'re so lucky to be part of it. I mean, I\'m like, ‘If I ever lived before, I think I was either best friends with Calamity Jane or riding an elephant somewhere.’ Truly, that\'s what I was doing, because this is as close as I could get to those two things, what I do for a living. I miss so many weddings and funerals and baby showers and important moments of people that are important to me, and of my own, just because I\'m rolling. But I think ‘Carousel’ puts this romantic spin on it where it\'s like, ‘It\'s okay. There\'s this whole other life that can happen, too.’”

Recent years have seen a surge of progressive artists find their footing in country music, bringing new and necessary perspectives to a genre traditionally dominated by those of straight white men. Adeem the Artist is one of the finest of that bunch of up-and-comers, introducing their clever, compassionate, and often complex take on country songwriting via 2021’s breakout hit *Cast Iron Pansexual*. *White Trash Revelry* follows that LP, marking Adeem’s first release on their own Four Quarters Records label and building upon its predecessor’s exploration of identity, class, and marginalization. Opener “Carolina” offers Adeem’s origin story, doing so with a level of nuance rarely heard in the genre. “Heritage of Arrogance” and “Redneck, Unread Hicks” both challenge stereotypes of the uneducated Southerner while admitting the region’s many sins. And closer “My America” caps the project with a weary but quietly hopeful vision of the country, though one imbued with a sense of loving skepticism and concern. “It was really important to me that I have a record that had bold, unapologetic representation but also had real characters from my family and my community,” Adeem tells Apple Music. “I wanted it to feel like these are not mutually exclusive characters or ideas. This is the only way we have of moving forward—to allow these voices to live alongside of each other and find some way to get along.” Below, Adeem shares insight into several key tracks on *White Trash Revelry*. **“Carolina”** “My dad named me after Kyle Petty. He’s a NASCAR driver. He’s a songwriter, too—pretty good songwriter. But he’s not the best NASCAR driver. No disrespect. His dad, Richard Petty, was the best NASCAR driver. They call him The King. So, my dad, with no sense of irony, named me after the son of the best ever. I saw that Kyle was playing Johnson City, and I called the owner of the venue, and I was like, ‘Look, I was named after Kyle Petty. I will sell tickets to this show. I will promote my ass off. You don’t have to pay me. Please let me open.’ That was a pretty good deal, so she gave me the gig. So, I wrote this song as I was imagining getting up in a room full of NASCAR fans at The Willow Tree coffee shop in Johnson City, Tennessee, on Bristol race weekend.” **“Heritage of Arrogance”** “I have this memory of being in Charlotte in the early ’90s, and I don’t know if it’s implanted. I don’t know if it’s a true memory or not because everything gets a little muddy back then. But it’s a memory of seeing the Klan gathered on one side of the road, and a bunch of Black activists on the other side of the road, with their fists in the air, all pissed off. And my dad just kind of being like, ‘Yeah, they hate each other.’ I had this idea for this song, and I was trying to remember if it was real or not, or if it was just a story I heard somebody in my family tell or something. And so, I googled to see if the Klan was still holding rallies in Charlotte in the ’90s. And they were. A lot. Probably a true memory.” **“Middle of a Heart”** “I wrote the song mostly for my friend Bob. He was a retired Knoxville police officer and a Navy veteran. He worked on boats. I would go have breakfast with Bob and make him bacon and eggs. And he’d be like, ‘Make some for yourself, buddy.’ We’d watch the birds outside and eat bacon and eggs, and that’s what we did. All of his kids had died and \[his wife\] Carlene died. And we would just sit there and watch TV and watch the birds. He was a good friend to me. He was a dude who disagreed with me about politics more than anybody I’ve ever known, but he put his humanity first. And, yeah, that song’s for him.” **“Redneck, Unread Hicks”** “It becomes really easy to, I don’t know, kind of view the South through a very myopic lens. It’s all white supremacists or bucktoothed rednecks, yada, yada, yada. And it’s endowed with a lot of classism, and it’s a really dangerous form of erasure, too. It’s true that Bill Lee, the \[Tennessee\] governor who ran on dismantling gay marriage, is from this area and that those are his values. But it’s also true that Martin Luther King, Jr. is from this area. Amelia Parker’s from this area; she helped found Black Lives Matter here in Knoxville and now works for the city council. There are a lot of queer folks who have fought hard and a lot of Black folks who have fought hard. There’s a lot more diversity here and a lot more nuance than people want to give it credit for.” **“My America”** “There’s this guy named Aaron Lewis, and he\'s kind of a shithead. He wrote this song called ‘Am I the Only One.’ And in this song, he has lyrics like, ‘Am I the only one willing to bleed for America?’ This guy’s not a fucking veteran. I listened to this song exactly one time, and I felt so annoyed by it that I parodied it in a silly way on Twitter. I said things like, ‘Am I the only one who’s a self-centered child? I’m only mad because my kids won’t call.’ And people told me I should put it on the record, which was really silly. But it did make me think, ‘Man, what if Aaron Lewis had enough compassion and sensitivity and care that he tried to articulate the perspective of the people he was trying to capitalize on? What if he actually loved them? What if he actually tried to understand them?’ And that song became that for me.”

I was born in Gastonia in 1988 a few months after my grandpa Booge died. He no longer remembered dad because of the Alzheimer’s and I can't imagine how painful it must've been for my father. I don't know what their financial situation was like, to be honest. I know that my grandfather had his little garage and that he didn't charge people very much to work on their cars. I know that he worked his daddy’s farm and then as a machinist, then managed an auto-parts store, that they owned a house in Mecklenburg County. Booge was blue-collar and my dad was blue-collar. I can't say if we were ever people of means. I just don’t know. My dad dropped out, got his GED, and started running the lathe when he was a teenager. One time he told me about running away to the beach with a girl he’d pined over. He described it wistfully as a teenager’s dream. She soon grew lackluster, though, and one day she was just gone. I don’t think he ever told me her name but I remember it as Tiffany. My parents were young. Dad was 23 and mom was 19 when they found themselves expecting me. They couldn't afford me. They didn't know each other. They did the Christian thing and we became a family- a package deal. The first place I can remember is the trailer on Thomas Fite in Belmont. I must've been a little over a year old when we moved in there. I played Power Rangers in the yard. Their friends would come ‘round still in the early years. I remember nights of drinking and partying and I remember these as the fondest years. There is warmth there in the trailer. In Locust, our driveway is lined with Pecan trees. Sarah & I, that is my sister, collect them and crack them when it gets cold and we fill bags and we leave them for the postman and the waste workers and Grady & Dessie who lived next door. We eat them too. Pecans are good. At night, I stay up late with my mother and we watch La Femme Nikita on the television together, fawning over Roy Dupuis. It’s a callback to the trailer where we sit snuggled close on the couch with Days of Our Lives flickering on the tube television. Marlena is possessed by a demon and I mention it over dinner. Dad gets so angry about it- me, cozied up studying the drama. Sometimes, my Grandpa- mom's dad- comes over and he smells stale. I can remember the scratch of his beard and the fullness of his laugh. He is mischievous and jovial. Sometimes Uncle Dave stops by, grandpa's brother. He's loud and raucous and funny and full of contagious joy. My uncle Richard lived with us in the trailer- moms brother. Richard has a laugh like grandpa's, like moms- sometimes, I hear it in my own throat if I'm lucky and I try to recreate it like it'll get me closer to grandpa. It's a kind of hiccupping laugh that rises from the gut like a horse, galloping. Richard is some kind of witch or Satanist- I remember through a fog- and he is reading anarchist theory. He tells me that there are demons and teaches me to see spirits in the sky; gives me a charm. It is a silver wolf with red gems for eyes. He likes good music. Mom is smoking Mexican dirt weed on the other side of the trailer. She has two friends in the neighborhood that she spends time with. Mostly we go over to their houses and I am forced to play with her kids. Lucinda is a good friend to my mother. They are bonded by their survival; victims of extreme trauma. Lucinda has bipolar disorder. She lives up the lane in a cul-de-sac. I grow up knowing her as my aunt. Faye is the other friend & alternative neighborhood aunt. Faye lives in a house on the corner that turns down our street. To me, this is the upper echelons of Belmont in my childhood imagination. She lives with Joel who is the first musician I ever meet. Joel plays Dungeons & Dragons. He has long, beautiful hair and very empathetic eyes. He always smells like weed & speaks softly. My mother told me that he was in love with her and asked her many times to leave dad to be with him. Cannot verify. He gives me my first guitar pick- it is 2mm and dark purple. Joel & Faye have been together for several years but they are not married. This is tough for me to understand at this age. When he died, I was in my teenage years. It was an overdose. Faye was devastated. She gave me a CD of his songs. I still have it. He was a beautiful songwriter. I'll never forget giving him his Dungeons & Dragons books back and explaining how they were wrong because they were against the bible. My father was truly proud of me, I think, in that moment though it brings me great shame now. Given the chance, I'd sure like to see him one more time. I’d tell him that while I’ve never made it above level 8 with any character that I’ve still learned a few spells of my own over the last thirty years. In the trailer, dad and I play games together. We wrestle like the fighters on the TV and we line up army men and throw bouncing balls to see who can knock over the most. My dad would take me to hockey games back then and sometimes we would pick up a box of tacos on the way home if the Checkers scored enough points. I loved Chubby and the cold games with my dad. We had souvenir Checkers cups and a brown food processor. Dad would toss ice cream, milk, and peanut butter in that food processer and we would have peanut butter milkshakes on weekends. We'd drink them out of the Checkers cups. Mom is obsessed with Collective Soul and Nine Inch Nails. We play it on the boombox while they take turns playing Final Fantasy III. One day, mom is so scared by a level that she calls dad and asks him to come home and help her & he does. The building where my dad works looks like a castle and it smells like the metal that is cut and milled by the big machines. His work shirts stink of aldehydes & ketones & even now, I sometimes catch a faint taste of it and I’m instantly transported back. These are some of my favorite memories. Cigarette stained memories. Alcohol scented memories. Everyone is loud. Everyone is profane. Every callous exchange imbued with irreverent humor. Aunt Peggy & her twin sister Daphne’s harmonious, boisterous laughter. Marty’s Budweiser breath, gravel voice full of slurred words and his childlike demeanor, soft & sad & pitiable like a wounded bird. Even now I can almost hear Aunt Peggy singing with her breathy, mournful soprano. My grandma tells me that my parents are lying to me and that there are monsters under the bed. She says if I get up in the night, they'll eat me. Also, I'm getting very fat. I can't say if Booge's Alzheimer’s and death severely wounded her but from stories I'm told, I surmise she was always a little evil. But she feeds me chicken skins and vinegar and buys me action figures from the dollar store. Absolute elation. In the yard at her 700 sq. ft house, I play with uncle Porter’s old toys. Po was a card, my dad tells me. He died on the lawn and nobody did anything. My cousin reminds everyone in the family of Po and for many years I looked up to him as one of the few to get out okay. I still do. Po’s boy made himself a family now. Married his dream girl and they worked together on a pair of sons sweeter than a cobbler. He comes to pick me up from school before the bell rings and I am enraptured with this vicious, frenetic energy. In the parking lot, he asks me what the safe word is and I tell him. “You were supposed to ask me!” He says. “Did you bring the Sega?” I have these power ranger action figures- a whole mess of them- and Ninja Turtles too. The power rangers’ masks pivot into their chests to reveal their natural faces. The pink ranger is in love with me. I am in love with the white ranger (formerly green) and the way the sun sets on the trailer park adjacent to our lot in reds and oranges and purples. Out in the yard, I am assembling a circus of slugs. They have assigned roles but they are underperforming and I am conducting their torpid, enervating movements with a loblolly twig and a hint of mischief. I am enamored with slugs the moment I discover them. The ignominious love affair is short-lived but oft-recalled in pleasantries and hindsight. Mom has met Jesus at a Baptist Church, though. She’s crying when she comes home and has repented from her life of sin. She tells me about him in hurried, urgent breaths. Later, she tells me that upon my birth she offered me up to God as a gift to him. Cannot verify. Certainly, though, I was born into the faith of my ancestors. Christianity was my birthright and though I try to reimagine, it will always stain the pages of my moral guide. I am twenty-two years old when I leave my parents’ house for the first time, out into the infinite unknown. In a flurry of symbolism and rage, my unconscious exorcises the first large, looming specter of my childhood trauma & I am thrust towards the truest parts of myself uncomfortably, armed with a watered-down accent and an arsenal of potato chip casserole recipes. My entire childhood is white trash revelry. Big Dave, the biker my grandfather is friends with, who is on the run from the Hell’s Angels’ pops by the trailer for a meal. Richard brings his girlfriend by and they smoke a joint and we rent a film from the blockbuster in Gastonia. I wish I could slip back inside. I wish I could visit the trailer and see my parents in their youth, still full of hope and playing video games. I wish I could make my grandpa pizza. I'm proud of the way I resemble him when my beard is full and I bet he would love my pizza. I feel so far and away from all of the people who were pillars of my youth. Hardly a one remains. I am just this lost villager from a forgotten & abandoned people; a punchline in some white liberal's social media diatribe. A white trash wanderer- living ghost of my ancestors. ++++++++ This record was funded largely through $1 contributions via Venmo, Cashapp, & PayPal from people who believed in me or thought it was a quirky fundraising idea. It was an impossible dream to create this album that meant so much to me manifested by the kindness of others. The above essay was written 2 years ago and the songs on this record largely fell out of it. The players on this record were folks I had dreamed to be able to pay well to perform with. The studio we recorded in was a block or so from the first apartment I ever lived on my own. A lot of meaningful pieces came together for this and it all began with a phone call to my friend Kyle on October 30th, 2021. I said, "I want you to do something on my new album yet but I haven't decided what yet." He said, "Why don't you let me produce it & my buddy Robbie Artress can engineer?" I said, "Well, we'd have to raise at least 5k by the end of the week to hire the folks I'd want to hire and all that." Kyle said, "Maybe you can, I don't know." So, that night I posted a silly Tik Tok saying all I needed was 15,000 people to donate $1 each for the album to be funded. That included a budget for production, mastering, publicist, radio, & the whole shebang. By Tuesday, we had $5,000. I paid for the studio time and started asking people if they'd come. By the end of December, all the parts had been tracked & I was slack jawed. I threw a little party at my buddy Troy's tattoo shop. We got tattoos and ate barbecue & listened to the first mixes and took photos for the album cover & accompanying lyric book. What a rush, the whole thing. A whirlwind.

Iowa-born, Nashville-based country artist Hailey Whitters broke out in 2020 with her sophomore album *The Dream*, a colorful, ambitious record that introduced her as one of the genre’s more formidable songwriting talents. *Raised* picks up where that album left off, upping the ante on its predecessor’s vivid narratives and traditional country soundscape with a loosely conceptual, creatively structured collection of songs about home, family, and belonging. The title track is something of an origin story for Whitters, serving as a love letter to the place that made her who she is. “Our Grass Is Legal” and “Beer Tastes Better” play with country tropes like drinking and smoking, but reveal themselves to be multilayered stories with roots in Whitters’ family history. And the whole thing is bookended by the instrumentals “Ad Astra Per Alas Porci” (Latin for “to the stars on the wings of a pig”), lending the LP a cinematic vibe. “The music feels very Midwest, so I think the scenery is probably a little different,” Whitters tells Apple Music. “But I hope that everyone can find something that is universal or reminds them of where they came from.” Below, Whitters shares insight into several key tracks on *Raised*. **“Ad Astra Per Alas Porci”** “That is actually super influenced by John Steinbeck, who\'s a writer that I just absolutely adore. Back when I was putting out *The Dream* and I was fully independent, I named my record label Pigasus, and it was kind of a nod to Steinbeck. And it\'s also a nod to my roots, where I come from in Iowa, the Midwest. Iowa\'s the biggest pork producer in the country. So I grew up around a lot of pig farms, and it reminded me of my roots, and also the saying \'when pigs fly,\' which was a little bit of the sentiment I was feeling when I was struggling in Nashville and couldn\'t get anything going.” **“Raised”** “That song is my first love song. I really have never had a love song, and that song took on a whole different life than I thought it would when I originally threw out the title to Nicolle \[Gallyon\] that day. I think it\'s sweet, vulnerable, and it feels like a little love song to not only the love interest, but also to the town that I came from. It felt representative of the whole record, I think, just because when we started to piece all these songs together, it felt like the concept: where I came from, my roots. I consider it a ‘thank you’ to the place that raised me. I\'m so proud to be where I\'m from. And I know I wouldn\'t be where I am today without it, and without the people that I grew up with.” **“Big Family”** “I come from a giant family—I\'m one of six. My mom and my dad, both one of nine. My grandpa, one of 15. So I am very close to second and third cousins and we all still get together on holidays. Christmas Eve is always a big one. We all go over to my Aunt Tina\'s house and it\'s just loud and people are drinking and eating food. Everyone\'s welcome in the door, and we love pretty hard, pray hard, drink hard. I was sitting around the kitchen table once with some of my great-aunts and we were all just sharing a bottle of wine and they were talking about husbands and ex-husbands and boyfriends and the word of God, and that kind of inspired that song.” **“Middle of America”** “That song came from driving around western Iowa one day and seeing all of these signs that were up that were saying ‘Stop the airport, save the farms.’ I guess that was the first time I\'d ever heard of eminent domain, where the state could just take someone\'s farm. It seemed absolutely crazy to me, because not only are farms such a direct source of the food supply, but it seemed wild to me that they could just take away a farm that\'s been in generations for forever. And so that was the little mustard seed that started that song.” **“Pretty Boy”** “I was thinking a lot about the boys that I grew up with. I grew up with three brothers, a bunch of boy cousins and uncles, really wild boys that turned into strong, tough, hard-working men. And I was just thinking about some of the ways in which the expectations we put on boys and men to be tough, to not cry—‘crying’s weak,’ ‘man up,’ things like that. I think that to expect that boys aren\'t supposed to cry or show emotion or anything like that, I think that can be a little destructive. So I wanted to write that song to speak to them and tell them that I actually feel like vulnerability is a strength and to let them know that it\'s okay and it\'s actually really cool to be yourself.” **“Our Grass Is Legal”** “My grandpa had a sod farm when I was growing up, going back to the ’70s, ’80s. My dad and my uncles all grew up working in the fields for him. He sold grass and he called himself ‘the Grass Man.’ And people from surrounding towns started calling him, asking for pot. They thought he was selling weed. So he made his business motto ‘Whitters Turf Farms: Our Grass Is Legal.’ And I just felt like that had to be in a song somewhere.” **“Beer Tastes Better”** “When I go home, I have the bar that I always go to. I was in one and I saw an old friend from high school that I hadn\'t seen forever, and it was kind of a trip to see her again. She was bartending. To see her again and to just think how much has changed, and also, at the same time, how so much hasn’t—that was the inspiration for that song. I absolutely love that song, because I think, on the surface level, you see that title and you think, ‘Okay, this sounds like a stereotypical cliché country song about beer,’ but it\'s a lot deeper than that to me. It\'s been 14 years since I\'ve been home, and I\'ve been all over, and beer still, to me, just tastes so much sweeter when I\'m sitting at my hometown bar.” **“In a Field Somewhere”** “When I say I\'m from Iowa, people kind of laugh and roll their eyes and say, ‘What\'s up there, corn?’ And there\'s a lot of corn. I grew up in a cornfield, and it\'s so much more than that to me. I learned how to drive in a field. I used to go out streaking, drinking with the boys from high school. We\'d go cut through the cornfield and stay up all night. And I actually got engaged in a cornfield. So it felt really symbolic to me, just growing up and having all of my young life experiences in a field. And still to this day, whenever I go home, my holy place is to grab a bottle of wine and a lawn chair and go out back behind my parents\' house to the cornfield and just sit and listen to music and relax and take it all in and think.”