Humble and Kind, Meanwhile Back at Mama’s, Highway Don’t Care, More Hearts Than Mine, Even If It Breaks Your Heart, Barefoot Blue Jean Night, Hard to Love, I Don’t Dance, I Drive Your Truck, Take a Back Road, Small Town Boy, Die a Happy Man, Downtown, Drunk on a Plane, Somethin Bout a Truck, American Kids, Girl in a Country Song, Redesigning Women
The Genre series in the 2010 for the 2010s project brings together individual tracks by artists who did not have ‘imperial periods’. I will touch on all kinds of music including jazz, r’n’b, soul, spiritual, easy listening, hiphop, alternative and mainstream rock, metal, Spanish-language, electronic and Eurovision, which I think is a genre in itself.
Here are 18 additions to the 2010 songs of the decade which all came from Nashville, home of American country music. There will be separate posts containing songs by the decade’s bigger acts: for males like Luke Bryan and Florida Georgia Line, and for females like Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris.
One of the anthems of the decade is Humble and Kind. The excellent version by Tim McGraw is excellent, but Lori McKenna’s version of her own song – music and lyrics written by her – is indispensable. A series of exhortations to her five children – ‘say please, say thank you’, keep cool when it’s hot, go to church and ‘always stay humble and kind’ – are intoned over three chords (and the truth). Lori’s vocal, which is more folk than country, is a magnificent instrument which she is allowed to show off in between writing smash hits for new and established artists.
Tim McGraw came up in the 1990s and, now in his fifties, he has a rich catalogue to draw from. In the 2010s he kept putting out albums, including one with his wife Faith Hill. Meanwhile Back at Mama’s is another down-home country song (starring Faith but not on that duets album) with a gentle acoustic guitar pattern and shuffling drums that has Tim pining for ‘a slow down, cos where I come from, only the horses run’. Stadium superstar Tim sells the hell out of a song about unwinding (with her indoors) and it’s a believable song, especially when Faith harmonises on the second chorus.
A female voice is also found on Highway Don’t Care, where Keith Urban takes the solo for good luck. As Tim drives around he hears a song on the radio singing ‘I can’t live without you baby’ sung by Taylor Swift (who had a song called Tim McGraw on her debut album); it reinforces his mood that Tim, not the highway, misses his beloved.
The key to country music songwriting is finding a new shape for old rope, new ways to say ‘I love you’, ‘I miss you’ or ‘I wish I hadn’t left you’. In her song More Hearts Than Mine, Ingrid Andress sings of taking a boy home to meet her family. There is plenty of detail in the song: ‘My dad will check your tyres, pour you whiskey over ice’ and ‘Walk you round the foothills of my town’ are vivid. The kicker comes at the end of the chorus: if they were to break up, Ingrid would be ‘fine’ but the boy would be ‘breaking more hearts than mine’. It’s a sleeper hit that will become her career song.
One of the top 100 hits of 2012, hitting 99 according to Billboard, is a track about being a musician written by Eric Paslay and Will Hoge and sung by country-rock act Eli Young Band. ‘I can hear the ringing of a beat-up old guitar…Keep on dreaming even if it breaks your heart’ is an anthemic line for garage bands who want to make a living in music, playing on stages. ‘Gotta keep believing’ is the advice in the song to those whose ‘fire got lit’ by a rock act on the radio; in a nice meta twist, Paslay has taken to mashing it up with Learning To Fly by Tom Petty (it has a similar chord progression) when he performs it live.
Paslay is also on the credits of Barefoot Blue Jean Night, the 79th biggest song of 2011, where a simple four-chord loop underscores a party song full of ‘woahs’ about being ‘caught up in the Southern summer’ with buddies and babes: ‘The girls are lookin’ hot and the beer is ice cold!’ is sung with gusto by Jake Owen, an anonymous pretty boy who was lucky enough to be given this earworm of a song.
Lee Brice has had three of the top country songs of the decade. Drummer Tommy Harden knew Hard To Love was going to be a massive hit even as he was playing on it; in it, Lee sings of how ‘I don’t deserve it but I love that you love me’, a man who knows his flaws (‘short fuse, a wrecking ball’) and has found a girl who is ‘full of grace, full of Jesus’. It’s a song of fidelity and devotion sung by one of the great contemporary county voices: ‘I don’t ever want to take you for granted’ is a wonderful line. Likewise, the wedding song I Don’t Dance (‘but here I am’) is best listened to with a loved one and is a well-produced country song that works as an ‘adult contemporary’ pop song too.
I Drive Your Truck, as featured in the documentary It All Begins with a Song, was inspired by an interview with the father of a fallen soldier. Country music is without artifice and is a direct method of communication, almost a eulogy in words sometimes; Lee Brice’s vocals do the story justice and it is a very stirring song without being patriotic or over-the-top. It reaches a climax in the middle eight as Lee, singing as the bereaved father, lets his emotions spill over: ‘I’ve cussed, I’ve prayed, I’ve said goodbye/ Shook my fist and asked God why,’ he sings over strings and a new set of chords. It’s his career song.
Rodney Atkins is another beneficiary of the fruits of a writers’ room. He was given the Rhett Akins/Luke Laird composition Take a Back Road, another fun song perfect for listening to while driving because it’s about driving: ‘May as well take the long way home/ Put a little gravel in my travel’ goes the chorus, sung by Rodney in the role of a man sitting in traffic just wanting to meander around some ‘two-lane’ country road with his beloved.
Rhett Akins was named Songwriter of the Decade (non-artist) by the Academy of Country Music. He is one-third of the great Peach Pickers, along with Ben Hayslip and Dallas Davidson. The trio had huge success with Small Town Boy, a song that is country from its very first line: ‘I’m a dirt road in the headlights’. Dustin Lynch was the man chosen to have a hit with the song, which he sings in a cowboy hat’; he boasts of having a girl who acts as ‘my cool…my crazy…my with me till the end’. Over three insistent chords it’s a song perfect for hugging one’s loved one when it comes on the radio.
I always refer to Die a Happy Man as Thinking Out Loud because it’s the same song: a devoted man sings to his beloved over acoustic guitar in the key of D major. That’s unfair on Thomas Rhett; this song, his career song that will bring his riches year on year, has a better chorus than Ed’s. He doesn’t mind not building a house in Georgia, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway or seeing Paris ‘if all I got’s your hand in my hand’. The woman is ‘a saint…a goddess…the cutest, the hottest, a masterpiece’, all in one line of the second verse. Marvin Gaye is referenced in the first verse to acknowledge that he is inspired by Let’s Get It On, as so many others have been. The difference is that not many country music stars have been.
In the 2010s pop and r’n’b have made their way into popular country tunes, as I’ll talk about when dealing with the genre’s A-list male artists. Lady Antebellum, a poppy trio whose singer Hillary Scott is the daughter of a country music vocalist, followed up 2009/2010’s massive hit Need You Now with a series of lesser songs. The two-chord Downtown is a fun ditty where Hillary complains that ‘I should be counting on you at my door’ to take her out; many bars on Broadway are now named after or owned by country stars, though Lady Antebellum are not one of them.
Dierks Bentley is one. He has popped over to the UK a few times with soulful, emotionally driven country songs. In the 2010s Dierks hit big with Drunk on a Plane: ‘Buying drinks for everybody but the pilot…It’s Mardi Gras up in the clouds’, and prompting country fans to hope they were placed in ‘seat 7A’ on their trip over to Nashville. Kip Moore, another US act with a big UK following, announced himself with the fun and dumb Somethin Bout a Truck (‘in a farmer’s field’), which goes on to praise ‘beer sitting on ice’, ‘a girl in a red sun dress’ and ‘a kiss that’s gonna lead to more’. With a strong beat which you can line-dance to, the song is still Kip’s best-known song among plenty of rocky numbers which transfer his wild personality.
Behind Garth Brooks, who plays multiple dates in the same city when he tours, Kenny Chesney is still the number two live country act. He brings good-time vibes and a humanity to his shows, which are full of songs like the effervescent American Kids: ‘We were “Jesus saves me”, blue jean baby, born in the USA’ definitely locates the characters in the song as Americans, while the lyric ‘faded little map dot’ unites disparate communities across America whose people were ‘making out on living room couches/ Blowing that smoke on a Saturday night/ A little messed-up but we’re all alright’.
In the 2010s, women had a raw deal in mainstream country music. This was made clear when Maddie & Tae shot to number one with the cutting Girl In a Country Song, which took inspiration from a video by commentator Grady Smith that summarised how girls, in their words, were only good for ‘lookin’ good for you and your friends on the weekend…keep our mouths shut and ride along’. Namechecking old stars like Conway Twitty and George Strait, they sing gorgeously about how shaking their ‘moneymaker’ isn’t making them ‘a dime’ and use the familiar ‘yeah baby!’ hook in a mocking way. Aside from three or four women – Maren Morris, Carrie Underwood, Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert – there were precious few female voices on country radio and it was bizarre that it took an ‘answer song’ to get them there.
The future looks brighter, especially with more country fans ditching radio for streaming services. September 2019 saw the release of an album by The Highwomen, a project helmed by Amanda Shires who roped in Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby and Maren Morris. In the video to lead single Redesigning Women, the quartet were joined by many ladies in country music in the video to the first single, including Wynonna and Lauren Alaina, crossing the generational divide as they sang of how women were ‘breaking all the jello mould…If the shoe fits we’re gonna buy eleven!’ The middle eight concedes that women are ‘making it up as we go along’. Singing either unison or in sparkling harmony, it was a perfect way to announce a revolutionary project which, Shires hopes, will kickstart a wave of females in the mainstream.