Darius Rucker – Wagon Wheel
Blake Shelton – Boys Round Here, Sure Be Cool If You Did, Mine Would Be You, Over You
Sam Hunt – Cop Car, Come Over, Take Your Time, House Party, Body Like a Back Road
Luke Bryan – Country Girl (Shake It For Me) That’s My Kind of Night, Drink a Beer, Most People Are Good
Jason Aldean – Dirt Road Anthem, Don’t You Wanna Stay, Burnin It Down
Florida Georgia Line – Cruise, Meant To Be
Luke Combs – When It Rains It Pours, Beautiful Crazy, Even Though I’m Leavin
Wagon Wheel is the country music equivalent of Whipping Post or Free Bird. It’s a song with a chorus by Bob Dylan and a verse by Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. Originally put out by the latter in 2004, Darius Rucker brought it to the country charts in 2013. A road song which climaxes in the line ‘rock me, mama, like a wagon wheel’, it is the song Darius will be able to leading stadium singalongs for until the day he can’t rock any more.
The bloke off of The Voice, Blake Shelton, had one of the biggest country hits of 2013, according to the Year-End Billboard Hot 100 (number 60. Wagon Wheel came in 54th). Blake is a superstar, and he wouldn’t have become one without having a killer voice and a knack for picking or writing a hit song. Boys Round Here was from the triumvirate of Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson and Craig Wiseman, who between them have written hundreds of hits.
The track was a collaboration (or ‘event’ as the award shows had it) with his then wife Miranda Lambert and her Pistol Annie bandmates Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, who essentially provide backing vocals on a fun two-chord song about bros. ‘Talkin bout girls, talkin bout trucks’; it’s almost a satire!
The best line of the song is ‘chew tobacco, spit!’ at the end of the chorus, while there’s a fun reference to the dance craze the Dougie (‘no, not in Kentucky!’). A monster country hit that appealed to the ‘red-red-rednecks’! A slower song was Sure Be Cool If You Did, where Blake suggests that the lady he is speaking too, ‘looking like a high I wanna be on’, has a decision (‘no pressure at all’) to ‘keep on smiling that smile that’s driving me wild’ and end up in his arms. It’s a very forward-thinking pick-up song from Gentleman Blake, without the sleaziness of many other songs on the radio. After all, he was married to Miranda Lambert at the time.
A more suitable song was Mine Would Be You, a heartbreak song featuring the crashing drums of Nir Z in which Blake asks his beloved a series of question in the verses, which are in a hiccupping 7/4 time: ‘What’s your worst hangover, your best night yet…The craziest thing you ever did?’ The first two choruses are odes to fidelity (‘laughing til it hurts’) but the final verse and chorus reveal the lady to be a ‘regret’, one who left him ‘standing there like a fool when I should’ve been running’. Underscored by strings and a brilliant vocal from Blake, it is a sophisticated, adult song about love and stuff.
Far more serious is Over You, written by Blake with Miranda about his late brother who ‘went away, how dare you! I miss you!’ Blake’s words are given a terrific reading by Miranda, who recorded the song, and poignantly lingers on the gravestone: ‘It really sinks in, you know/ When I see it in stone’. A comfort for anyone who has lost a loved one, Blake doesn’t have many self-penned songs in his canon. He’s so busy inventing feuds with Adam Levine of Maroon 5 for ratings on The Voice that he can’t compose his own songs. He remains a top male act, especially with his support for the genre, as the 2010s become the 2020s.
Country music is always evolving at a slower rate than pop. These days Nashville is a music hub to rival New York City in the 1950s and Los Angeles in the last 60 years. It means pop and hip-hop are creeping into country music, with hilarious consequences(!) for purists railing against the genre.
Mainstream country music at the end of the 2010s is best summed up by Body Like a Back Road, written by three blokes and sung by one of those blokes. Sam Hunt spent a few years lying low after his debut album Montevallo came out in 2015, issuing a few singles in the interim period. A tune about a being with a girl whose every curve he knows like the back of his hand, it was the hottest country song for 34 weeks and a Hot 100 top 10 track in the States.
When a country song invades the pop charts, the questions start to get louder about the future of the genre. Purists want to keep familiar themes and instrumentation but this is always risks the genre losing a new audience. Zach Crowell’s production, full of fingersnaps and atmospheric noise buried in the mix, is immaculate and contemporary while Sam’s voice is like treacle. It helps that he is a hot, sexy guy but without the songs he’d be another one of the many hot, sexy guys in town.
I hated Take Your Time, Sam’s breakout smash. Every week when it was the Hot Country number one, Paul Gambaccini would play it on his BBC Radio 2 show and I would bellow at the radio: ‘Sing, Sam!’ Sam Hunt revived sprechtgesang, speak-singing, that was prevalent in the early era of commercial country – think A Boy Named Sue or Hello Darlin’ – but he added a pop sensibility. The verse didn’t do it for me – why does he rap one line and sing the next? – but the chorus is awesome as Sam seeks to take only a girl’s time and not ‘steal your freedom’.
This song was revolutionary and, as on the album as a whole, united pop, r’n’b and hiphop through the prism of a guy with a cap from Atlanta who had already written hits for Kenny Chesney and Keith Urban. Kenny knows how to pick hits from his pile of songs sent to him for each project and he leapt on Come Over (‘come over, come over’), an insistent song co-written by Sam with a nimble acoustic guitar riff running through it. Kenny is alone in his hotel room and pines for the company of a woman he no longer loves (but ‘climbing the walls gets me nowhere’).
Cop Car was even better, a story about doing something you shouldn’t which Keith Urban brought onto country radio. ‘Your daddy’s gonna kill me!’ is the key line before Keith sings of how he ‘fell in love in the back of a cop car’, drawn closer to his beloved. It’s one of the highlights of Keith’s live show, as he recounts the story of a guy being reckless with a girl. ‘By the time they let us go I was already gone’ is a great line to lead into a patented Keith Urban rocking solo.
Of Sam’s original songs I preferred House Party, a super song with a funky groove. In no way at all is it country; it’s pure pop music coming out of Nashville. The line ‘the roof is on fire!’ is thrown into the second verse, where t-shirts are thrown over lampshades to mimic the feel of a club. The bridge (‘I’ll be at your door in ten minutes…Gonna bring the good time home to you’) is contemporary and appeals to a young demographic.
That demographic lapped up Dan + Shay, whose inoffensive ‘Nashville pop’ brought them (and their manager Scooter Braun) untold riches. Their big, soppy number one From the Ground Up (‘we’ll build this love’) is a hymn to the strong bond between their grandparents, giving them instant country cred.
Their big third album brought them two big hits in Tequila and Speechless. The former, with an addictive ‘when I, when I’ post-chorus hook, is about how singer Shay can drink ‘whiskey, red wine, champagne’ all he wants but as soon as he tastes tequila, ‘baby I still see ya’. The presence of pedal steel guitar adds country instrumentation to a middle-of-the-road ballad saturated in production effects. Speechless, meanwhile, is a wedding song inspired by their wives. It’s basically Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton with Shay holding on to the ‘I’ before the chorus for extra oomph. The song sweeps forward, with the second verse both shorter and including quicker-paced lyrical delivery ending in a long, drawn-out ‘I’ across several beats.
To capitalise on the boys’ success and balladry, Justin Bieber was drafted in (after his recent nuptials) on 10,000 Hours, a song about love and stuff. In the music video, the three men kiss their wives as flowers blossom around them in a sort of magazine feature-cum-pop promo: ‘I’d spend 10,000 hours…if that what it takes to earn that sweet heart of yours.’ It’s another middle-of-the-road song from the boys who are pretty in face and voice, like Bieber.
And, indeed, like Luke Bryan. As Blake had done before him, Luke reckoned that he could sell more tickets outside of the south if he popped up on TV. In 2018 he became a judge on American Idol to cap off an incredible decade that saw him release a stream of songs which he could shake his tush to on increasingly bigger stages.
The first tush-shaker had a clue in the title: Country Girl (Shake It For Me) became the 81th biggest song on Billboard’s list in 2011; it is built on a groove and sounds huge on speakers. The setting is resolutely rural: there’s a truck in the opening couplet on whose ‘tailgate’ Luke ‘can’t wait’ to host a pretty girl whose audience includes ‘catfish…crickets and squirrels’. It’s the done thing to hang out by the riverbank, which seems the country music equivalent of ‘the club’.
Luke is a great salesman for country music. He croons love songs like Drunk On You, where rural elements include the ‘cottonwood’, ‘blue jeans’, ‘tied-up t-shirt’, ‘Crown in a Dixie Cup’, ‘Good God Almighty’ and the ubiquitous ‘tailgate in the full moon’. He bellows party songs like That’s My Kind of Night, where his ‘country-rock hiphop mixtape’ has a ‘little Conway [Twitty], a little T-Pain’ to soundtrack a night with a ‘pretty girl by my side…out where the corn rows grow’. Only in country music can the perfect night include ‘a little catfish dinner’ before the pair ‘get our love on’. It’s hard rock by the riverbank and millions went wild for it.
In between the party songs – I love Move and She’s a Hot One, which are both essentially Country Girl (Shake It For Me) Parts 2 and 3 – Luke can get philosophical. Drink a Beer is a reaction to hearing of a death of a loved one by finding the spot ‘on the edge of the pier’ where they used to drink together. ‘The greater plan is kinda heard to understand’ is a deep lyric written by Chris Stapleton and Jim Beavers. (More on Chris in another entry).
Most People Are Good, meanwhile, is a country boy’s credo to how ‘most mommas ought to qualify for sainthood’. Luke believes kids should ‘get dirt on their hands’, people should forgive other and ‘love who you love’ while watching less of the ‘nightly news’ because life’s not all bad. It’s a gentle acoustic song which outlines a useful way to live and was a pleasant alternative to love songs with programmed drums that swamped country radio in the 2010s.
If Luke is the good ol’ mama’s boy who can also dance a bit (a sort of Garth Brooks), Jason Aldean is a sort of George Strait of contemporary country, a salesman who sells whatever the backroom boys are putting together. I noticed that several songs were of a type: three or more can become ‘let’s get ready to rock!’ songs (Lights Come On, Gettin Warmed Up, Just Getting Started, Set It Off) while plenty more are ‘drive down the dirt road’ songs. Jason’s voice does sound rural and like a dirt road, while he performers muscular country music which is sometimes talk-sung in the Sam Hunt way.
Dirt Road Anthem is the best example of ‘hick-hop’, a genre that first made inroads into pop culture in the early 2000s with rap acts like Nelly and Bubba Sparxxx appealing to southern folk regardless of race or creed. White guys like Colt Ford broke through and encouraged Jason Aldean to record his take on the song, which he had a massive hit with in summer 2011. It finished as the 43rd biggest song of the year according to Billboard. People were attracted to the lazy chorus: ‘Chillin’ on a dirt road…Smoke rolling out the window’ made it a perfect driving song. The soulful chorus gives way to the familiar rap (‘all that small-town he-said-she-said’ in the first verse, ‘cornbread and biscuits’ in the second) which Aldean could expose to mainstream country fans familiar with his previous work.
Showing his diversity, his previous big hit was the duet Don’t You Wanna Stay (the 68th biggest song of 2011), where he was the bloke asking Kelly Clarkson to ‘stay here a little while’ to the accompaniment of soft-rock guitars and drums, real strings and a lovely diminished fourth chord before the chorus. Kelly takes the second verse, singing ‘Don’t just wanna make love, wanna make love last’ and elevating it to the status of a country karaoke duet for wannabe Aldeans and their loved ones.
Another love song, this time with an r’n’b feel and programmed drums, was a huge hit for Aldean and the 63rd biggest song of 2014. The writers of Burnin’ It Down included Tyler Hubbard (more on him shortly). The song is a slow jam in which Aldean wants to ‘rock it all night’. Country had never been so openly sultry and obvious, helped by the success of Florida Georgia Line.
The success of Tyler and his mate Brian Kelley came in the wake of Dirt Road Anthem. Florida Georgia Line peddled other dirt road anthems like Round Here and Get Your Shine On, produced by the man who gave Nickelback their rock sound, Joey Moi.
Cruise was the first Florida Georgia Line smash, with the effervescent chorus: ‘Baby you’re a song, you make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise!’ In the Year-End Billboard Hot 100 of 2013, only eight songs could outrank the version of the song featuring Nelly and a hiphop beat. The verses are each four bars long, while the chorus is double that, giving the song an odd shape.
The chorus was huge and very country: ‘This brand new Chevy with a lift kit would look a whole lot better with you up in it’ united the hiphop fetishization of women and the country domestic feel. Nelly’s rap is playful and elevates the song into a monster. It was a number 16 hit in its original form but, with an eight-month climb, peaked at four when Nelly popped up. Fun fact: the remix was produced by Jason Nevins who took It’s Like That by Run-DMC and made it a global smash.
Florida Georgia Line were lampooned as being urban kids in rural clothing, with immaculate haircuts and the same sort of product-line pop-country as Dan + Shay. It didn’t help that they surveyed country music from the highest summit, thanks to teaming up with Bebe Rexha on the most successful country song of the decade. 50 weeks was the run on top of the Hot Country charts for Meant To Be, a neat song about love and stuff (‘ride with me, see where this thing goes’) written with David Garcia and Josh Miller. Both Tyler Hubbard and Bebe take a verse, while the distinctive melody lines wrap themselves together in the final few choruses.
The production is phenomenal while the lyrical hook (‘if it’s meant to be, baby then it’s meant to be’) is alluring. Country purists lampoon FGL for being metrosexual bros but this song has some emotional depth and even uncertainty, as shown by the ‘middle bit’ where both parties sing four lines beginning with the word ‘maybe’. Grounded by the five-note piano riff and the despised ‘fingersnap’ percussion, Meant To Be is the sound of country music evolving beyond the heartland.
The key is to keep the heartland interested while lassoing in the rest of the world, as has been seen by the proliferation of Country2Country festivals across Europe and now, after taking over Ireland, the UK and Germany, Australia. As country radio pushed more traditional tunes at the end of the 2010s, inspired by ‘outlaws’ who will be discussed in another entry, Luke Combs entered the fray with direct, believable country music.
When It Rains It Pours begins with the line ‘Sunday morning, man she woke up fighting mad!’ before assuring the listener that his luck all came in at once (‘caller number five on the radio station/ won a four-day, three-night beach vacation’). Luke’s throaty growl was the necessary corrective and, like Jason Aldean, he could sing ballads like One Number Away and Hurricane and uptempo grooves too: set opener Honky Tonk Highway is particularly brilliant.
The simple wedding song Beautiful Crazy (‘her crazy is beautiful to me’) was a hit on country radio around Valentines Day 2019 and was part of an imperial phase which continued with Even Though I’m Leavin, a song with prominent mandolin united by the ‘daddy’ beginning each verse to choreograph what happens at the end of the song. Verse one is a boy going off to school, verse two going to fight for ‘Uncle Sam’, verse three watching his dad slip away. At every stage the father says: ‘Even though I’m leavin’ I ain’t goin’ nowhere.’ Craft is important to Luke Combs and his album sales demonstrate that hundreds of thousands of people like it. He can be a bridge for young fans between current sounds and the ones adored by their parents from the 1990s, which is strangely back in mainstream fashion, again as a corrective for all those programmed drums which have now grown stale as 2020 appears on the horizon.