Kacey Musgraves – Follow Your Arrow, Merry Go Round, Butterflies, Rainbow, Golden Hour
Maren Morris – I Could Use a Love Song, My Church, GIRL, The Bones
Miranda Lambert – Automatic, The House That Built Me, Tin Man
Carrie Underwood – Two Black Cadillacs, Church Bells, Cry Pretty
Little Big Town – Girl Crush
Brandi Carlile – The Eye, The Joke, The Mother
Ashley McBryde – Bible and a .44, Girl Goin’ Nowhere
I came out for Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves as the GRAMMY Album of the Year after I started crying while I listened to the final track Rainbow. ‘Let go of your umbrella…There has always been a rainbow hanging over your head’ was Kacey’s counsel over gorgeous piano; matching the symbol, gay folk have embraced the song just as Kacey embraced her gay fanbase. Golden Hour was the coronation in the mainstream for an act who didn’t play by Nashville’s usual rules, even being accused of being too mardy and glum.
In the UK, however, and outside the US, Kacey is able to play huge venues like The Royal Albert Hall. The songs from her first two albums – Same Trailer, Different Park and Pageant Material – are rooted in her upbringing in Texas and include country instrumentation: steel guitars, banjos, brushed drums and, at the end of the latter album, Willie Nelson’s voice.
I remember being really impressed with Merry Go Round, which denigrates small-town life, ‘this broken merry-go-round and round and round we go’. The wordplay in the chorus – ‘Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay, brother’s hooked on Mary Jane, daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down’ – is backed up by the bridge after the second verse: ‘Same checks we’re always cashin’ to buy a little more distraction’ is an astonishingly mature line that recalls Dolly Parton or Loretta Lynn, her foremothers.
In a just world Kacey would be a Miranda Lambert-type star but she made the mistake of including the line ‘or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into’ in the middle of the chorus of the bouncy Follow Your Arrow. She also alludes, in ‘roll up a joint – I would!’, to her own drug consumption. Country music is still very conservative and a song otherwise about small-town life (‘If you save yourself for marriage you’re a bore’ is the opening line. The middle eight contains sage advice: ‘Love who you love…you only live once’, showing that Kacey can be a sensitive songwriter too.
Golden Hour is an album about being in love. Butterflies soars, suitably, as Kacey sings of how ‘I remember what it feels like to fly’, brought out of her ‘chrysalis’ by husband Ruston Kelly. The title track contains a beautiful middle eight (‘you make the world look beautiful’) and guitar solo, which makes it a contender for a first dance at a wedding. Tucked away at the end of the album, it can be plucked out for a Wedding Playlist on any streaming service. In the 2020s Kacey should consolidate her stardom and become a pop artist who, like Taylor Swift, outgrew Nashville.
Maren Morris is well on the way to doing so. Coming from Texas, she started as a staff songwriter in Nashville, where she met husband Ryan Hurd. Teaming up with Mike Busbee to write a song that linked country music to ‘holy redemption’, which namechecked Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, Maren broke through with My Church. I remember hearing her play it in 2016 and could feel something change in the room. I was singing along, Maren was crying because the audience were singing along, there was an ovation and Maren announced herself to the UK. She got both ‘a hallelujah’ and ‘an amen’
When I heard My Church I knew it would be a modern standard; UK acts routinely cover the song live, it’s easy to play and sing and contains a chorus for the ages. The performance at the 2016 CMA Awards, with a full horn section, is amazing and the definitive version of the song.
The following two years saw her play to bigger crowds and grow more successful thanks to singles like 80s Mercedes (‘I’m a 90s baby in my 80s Mercedes’ went the fun hook, which is coupled with a poppy ‘woah-oh-oh’ post-chorus), the P Diddy-namechecking and Steve Miller Band-quoting Rich and I Could Use a Love Song. Only the last of these was a number one, which is a damning indictment of country radio programming; it’s a lush tune written on a bad day in which Maren wants to hear music rather than have another drink to ‘take the edge off’ another break-up.
She returned in 2019 with the album GIRL, preceded by the track of the same name which was a dig at those country radio programmers who would be forced to playlist a song called GIRL. The tune itself is perfectly fine, but live the reaction is extraordinary, with her core fanbase of young women yelling ‘I don’t feel myself right now…Everything’s gonna be okay’. Like Kacey, Maren fell in love and got married and, on The Bones, pours her feelings into song: ‘The house don’t fall when the bones are good’ takes an architectural term and turns it into some shimmering pop music driven by a reverberating soft guitar lick.
Both Kacey and Maren come in the wake of fellow Texan Miranda Lambert, an underrated songwriter who is still best known for having been Mrs Blake Shelton.
The broadcaster and critic Grady Smith admires nouns, and often gets pulled towards certain tracks through details. Miranda’s song Automatic is all details: ‘quarter in the payphone’, ‘suntea in the window’, ‘record the Country Countdown’, ‘Rand McNally’, ‘that ‘55’ and ‘Easter dress’ all appear before the chorus, where Miranda Lambert’s vocals amp up to ask ‘hey, whatever happened to waiting your turn, doing it all by hand?’
Nicolle Galyon, who co-wrote this, sang this when I saw her at a CMA event at Country2Country, and laid bare the plain-speaking narration. The third verse is about sending mail and the recipient getting it ‘three days later’; tenderly, boys would have to talk to girls and, if they secured their hand, ‘staying married was the only way to work your problems out’. The strength of the song is in the rural nature of things being ‘so good the way we had it’.
Musically the song is driven by a chugging acoustic guitar and I love the layered harmonies, especially in the chorus. It is both a fine song and a fine recording.I particularly loved a performance by Miranda at the Grand Ol Opry, with backing vocals from Gwen Sebastian, which I would watch for weeks on end as I fell for country music in the middle of the 2010s.
The House That Built Me, not written by Miranda but nonetheless her career song, became the ACM Song of the Decade in 2019. Tom Douglas and Allan Shamblin’s tune is set in the singer’s old house to where she ‘had to come back one last time’; her ‘hand prints’ are there on the steps and her ‘favorite dog is buried in the yard’. The colloquialisms in the first verse – ‘ma’am’, ‘up those stairs’ and ‘I bet you didn’t know’ – are conversational and set the mood for a tender, confessional chorus. The singer cannot heal ‘this brokenness inside me’ as she returns to the place where she could be the person she was before heartache: ‘I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am’ can only be a country music lyric, which makes it a valid art form worthy of critical discussion rather than one to be ignored as ‘for those folk’.
By 2017 hardly any women were heard on country radio and timeless tunes would be anomalous amid the ‘baby girl get in my truck’ songs that dominated. Tin Man, written by Miranda with the great Jon Randall, takes inspiration from the character who wanted a heart; Miranda, whose own ‘is in pieces now’, gives him her own, since love has been so unkind to her. Musically it is mournful and tender, conversational (‘by the way Mr Tin Man’) and an extraordinary vocal. It was the highlight of her double-LP Weight of These Wings, warmly produced by Jay Joyce and featuring plenty of fun uptempo songs and meditative ones.
Ahead of even Miranda in the ‘girl-singer’ stakes is talent show winner Carrie Underwood, who continued her 2000s momentum with a series of songs in the 2010s that enabled her to headline Madison Square Gardens in New York in 2019. She co-wrote many of them, for which she (like Miranda) does not get enough credit. Carrie is the All-American sweetheart who came to fame on American Idol, has hosted the CMA Awards – the Oscars of Country Music – the entire decade.
Her story songs are particularly excellent. The revenge tragedy Two Black Cadillacs opens with the image in the title and over real strings and huge drums tells the tale of a dead man whose funeral is attended by two women who ‘didn’t bother to cry…He’s not the only one who had a secret to hide’. Similarly, Church Bells tells of a girl called Jenny who meets a high society guy and becomes a Stepford wife (‘hosting junior league parties and having dinner at the country club’). The guy is violent and, in revenge, Jenny poisons his whiskey; the chorus is set in the church with the great image ‘fold your hands and close your eyes’. Oddly it was Miranda Lambert who was best known for revenge songs, while Carrie sang pretty songs early in her career.
After two successful pregnancies, Carrie transitioned into the role of a young mum who had suffered miscarriages and also a nasty fall at home. Returning in 2018, including international dates, she began her album Cry Pretty with the title song whose first line was ‘I’m sorry but I’m just a girl’. The final minute of the song contains some world-class vocalising (‘ooh’ etc) as Carrie hammers home the point that ‘you can’t cry pretty’.
The song was written with the famous trio who wrote Girl Crush: Liz Rose, Lori McKenna and Hillary Lindsey. That song, given a boost by radio DJ Bobby Bones, has become Little Big Town’s most beloved song, as Karen Fairchild sings tenderly alongside lush harmonies from the rest of the band of being jealous of a man’s girlfriend: ‘I want to taste her lips because they taste like you’ is a novel twist on a familiar theme, one which naturally shocked conservative listeners who didn’t listen to the words. Awards disprove their pig-headedness and the song will live on into the 2020s.
As should songs by Brandi Carlile. Grafting is essential in the music industry if you don’t want to be a Carrie-style talent show winner. Brandi Carlile was plugging away for years before her big break in 2017 which meant she was invited to be a quarter of The Highwomen. An openly gay mother and wife, Brandi is a star of the Americana genre, an offshoot of country music. Recognised with awards for her album By The Way, I Forgive You (which Kacey pipped to the Album of the Year at the 2019 GRAMMY Awards), her song The Eye broke through in the middle of the decade.
Over rootsy acoustic guitars and no percussion, three voices sing in perfect harmony of how ‘you can dance in a hurricane but only if you’re standing in the eye’. I feel this is a metaphor for making the best in the worst times, where one may be driven to drink or despair. Instead the listener should be ‘a sturdy soul…find the urge to run for another day’, keeping on keeping on.
There is a performance of Brandi’s song The Joke at Studio A, the hallowed studio in Nashville, which chilled my spine. Helped by the Hanseroth twins on guitar and harmonies (as on The Eye), Brandi sings a series of abstract images and portraits that draw the listener in, her voice breaking like Chrissie Hynde or Sheryl Crow. ‘Don’t ever let them steal your joy and your gentle ways’ is Brandi’s advice for someone bullied because ‘they hate the way you shine’. It is maternal and perhaps told with experience. As on the album version, the string section swells to a crescendo that cannot help but move the listener, especially when she hits the high note on the song’s title (‘The joke’s on them’).
The second verse of The Joke, addressed to a girl, includes some gender politics; Brandi is an out and proud lesbian whose song The Mother is a comfort for all mothers to their daughters, even as it is about her own daughter Evangeline. ‘She filled my life with color, cancelled plans and trashed my car,’ Brandi sings, adding: ‘You’re nothing short of magical and beautiful to me.’
Like Ashley McBryde, it is difficult not to fall for Brandi when the standard of performance is so high. Simon Cowell might call it The X Factor. Like Brandi, Ashley plugged away in dive bars where bikers would bellow over her songs. By 2019 she was playing London’s O2 Arena and Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Her uptempo tunes like Fat and Famous (‘You got fat and I got famous’) and Radioland are good, but her softer ones are great.
When Ashley finally got the eyeballs of the likes of Eric Church, Garth Brooks and viewers of the Opry Youtube channel, she made the most of it. Born in Arkansas to a preacher dad, Ashley rebelled, falling in with a crowd that loved music, drinking and the life of an itinerant musician.
As a child, Ashley was lampooned for her dreams: ‘Don’t waste your life’ are the first words of the song she performed at the Opry, which brought her into thousands of lives. I caught her in London in 2019 playing at the O2; when she sang ‘the lights come up and I hear the crowd’, we knew what to do and cheered to the rafters. ‘Not bad for a girl going nowhere,’ Ashley sung, as she had done through tears at the Opry.
Her career song, the one which Eric Church asked her to perform on stage with him, is Bible and a .44. Over an acoustic guitar in 7/4 time, Ashley sings of her late father, ‘the kind of man it feels good to be around…I miss that man and I always will.’ At the climax of the song she says she is ‘holding more than strings and wood’, referring to her dad’s hands that used to grip her guitar.
Country music, passed down to the next generation, is in (pun alert) good hands with the likes of Ashley, Kacey, Carrie, Miranda, Maren and Brandi.