Genre - Country in the 2010s: Mainstream Males

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.

Genre - Country in the 2010s: Mainstream Females

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.

Genre - Country in the 2010s: 18 Assorted Country Hits

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.

Imperial One - Taylor Swift in the 2010s

Mine, Mean, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, I Knew You Were Trouble, 22, This Is What You Came For, Better Man, Shake It Off, Blank Space, Bad Blood, New Year’s Day, Me!, You Need to Calm Down, Lover

Together with her great mate Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift has been one of the biggest white acts of the 2010s. Like Ed, she knows how to conquer territories; unlike Ed, she uses her femininity to sell concert tickets.

My mum went to see her show in Hyde Park and said there was too much talking. Around the 1989 era – which ended with a GRAMMY for Album of the Year – Taylor invited famous ladies onto the stage with her. They included Lena Dunham, Idina Menzel, Alessia Cara, Miranda Lambert, Charli XCX, Selena Gomez, Avril Lavigne, Lisa Kudrow, St Vincent, Alanis Morissette, Natalie Maines from Dixie Chicks, Ellen, Uzo Aduba, Mary J Blige, Joan Baez, Julia Roberts, Little Mix, Fifth Harmony, Lorde, Gigi Hadid, the US Women’s National Soccer Team and Serena Williams. For obvious Kanye-related reasons Kim Kardashian didn’t pop up…

Taylor is still known as the woman who beat Beyonce’s Single Ladies video at the MTV Video Music Awards which led to Kanye West storming the stage and ruining the moment. In 2009, when it happened, Taylor was already on her way to winning the CMA Entertainer of the Year award. She was a country starlet and her third album Speak Now was completely written by her with no co-writers. Mine was the first single, a nice bit of country-pop fluff about being young and in love, while Mean was addressed to the haters, specifically Bob Lefsetz, one of her more acerbic critics.

Come 2012 there was nothing to criticize any more. Outgrowing country music, Taylor went pop on her fourth album Red. Teaming up with Max Martin and Shellback, she put out the incredible We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, which has so many hooks a fish would wave the right flag and just chomp on. It remains one of the decade’s finest pop songs, and daringly includes as a middle eight the voicenote from the writing session. It is both defiant and melodic, which is the Swift sound.

Taylor began her Imperial Period with Red, from which I Knew You Were Trouble and 22 (both Martin/Shellback/Swift compositions) also came. The former is a slinky track with more hooks and a spiky guitar part, while the latter celebrates being young and having fun. Stunningly, Taylor was 22 years old when she wrote the song.

How did she follow up Red? With something even more successful. Albums do not go diamond any more but 10 million people bought 1989. Perhaps because Taylor decided not to make the album available for streaming, they were forced to pay for one of the pop albums of the decade. If Britney Spears hadn’t fallen by the wayside and suffered horrific mental agony, she would have made 1989; Max Martin was at the mixing desk while other top writers (Ryan Tedder, Jack Antonoff, Imogen Heap) helped Taylor with her artistic vision of making great pop music to dance to.

Shake It Off was the album’s first single, a fine pop song about dancing that again mentioned the haters (who are ‘gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate’). Next came Blank Space, another number one on the Hot 100, knocking Shake It Off from the top and meaning Taylor was the first woman to replace herself (The Beatles replaced themselves in 1964). Blank Space is a fine production and suitably it was nominated for Record and Song of the Year at the GRAMMYs. Only Thinking Out Loud and Uptown Funk could, and did, outperform Blank Space, which I think is her greatest moment in her great era. The pen-click sound effect before ‘And I’ll write your name’ is a smart production device. The middle eight is a piece of advice to ladies: ‘Boys only want love if it’s torture…’

Bad Blood was a video blockbuster, with several of her ‘squad’ defeating the evil men but letting Kendrick Lamar, of all people, take the verses on a remix which sent the song to number one. The chorus is infectious and syncopated, and the production is again unstoppable. The mood points to the doomy production of Reputation, of which more in two paragraphs’ time.

Like Ed Sheeran, Taylor was able to gift tracks to others. After using a pseudonym, it was revealed that it was Calvin Harris’ ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift who wrote Rihanna’s smash This Is What You Came For, a track that intersected pop and Calvin’s brand of dance music. Obviously Taylor had learned well from Max and Shellback, with the ‘you-ou’ post-chorus being particularly addictive and the melody being straight-up pop.

Taylor was inspired to write Better Man about her relationship with Mr Harris, and gifted the song to country quartet Little Big Town, whose vocalist Karen Fairchild delivers a song of regret suitably ruefully: ‘I just wish you were a better man’ goes the chorus, which has a real melodic kick that Taylor displayed in her country repertoire.

There’s a bit of a melodic kick in Reputation, an album for which Taylor did no interviews whatsoever. She let the music speak for itself, produced once again by Max Martin. I didn’t enjoy the album on first listen as it sounded too dark and claustrophobic, but over time I grew to appreciate the melodicism of I Did Something Bad, End Game (featuring both Future and Ed Sheeran), Delicate and the magnificent closing track New Year’s Day (‘hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you’). Taylor’s fans were able to stream this album, which meant there were no diamond sales. It’s like Fleetwood Mac following Rumours with Tusk, with one monster being bigger than the other.

In 2019 Taylor returned with a magical song called Me! With Brendon Urie from Panic! At the Disco. In 2018 she changed record labels, moving from Big Machine to Universal (to which the likes of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Rihanna are signed) and creating a storm when she spoke out against Scooter Braun, Kanye’s representative, when he bought her old catalogue from Big Machine. (Why Universal didn’t buy Big Machine, heaven knows, though it could have been due to the equally ugly saga of artists and their estates suing for loss of property after the reporting of the 2008 warehouse fire.)

The farrago over Taylor’s masters reminds the world that music is a business, as Taylor, the daughter of a banker, knows only too well. It rather took the sheen off the announcement of Lover, album seven, and the release of the album’s second single, You Need to Calm Down, which featured a video in which Katy Perry and Taylor kissed and made up while Taylor promoted equality for all, regardless of gender. The album’s title track, a sweeping triple-time love song whose middle eight is set at a wedding, has a sweet chorus with a proper melody, which makes it stand out on radio, which Taylor used to dominate.

With the 2020 elections for US President occurring during the promotional run for Lover, Taylor’s political views will be aired – she’s from Pennsylvania and lived in Nashville, so can speak for both sides of the aisle – but it should not detract from an impressive catalogue from one of America’s top artists this decade.

Imperial One – Lin-Manuel Miranda: Hamilton (and music inspired by it)

Alexander Hamilton, My Shot, Helpless, Satisfied, Wait For It, The Room Where It Happens, Dear Theodosia, You’ll Be Back, One Last Time, Burn, It’s Quiet Uptown, Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story. From The Hamilton Mixtape: Wrote My Way Out, Who Tells Your Story, Immigrants (We Get The Job Done)

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman

Dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean

By providence impoverished, in squalor,

Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

With those lines from the opening song Alexander Hamilton, sung live on CBS at the GRAMMY Awards 2016, beamed over from New York, the world had a musical theatre equivalent of Bob Dylan plugging in an electric guitar.

I often think to myself, on hearing a great song or seeing a great film, ‘This is dangerously good.’ What I mean is that the creator and the created thing have the power to win awards, influence other artists and become a yardstick for that genre. The musical’s name in full is ‘Hamilton: An American Musical’, and not just because it is about the Founding Fathers of the American constitution; it’s about hope, friendship, career opportunism, graft and dreams. And, for all of this, every character except King George was played on Broadway by a non-white actor.

I first read about the musical Hamilton in a piece written by author Zadie Smith in the New Yorker magazine that seemed to run to about 15,000 words, but felt too short. The piece was effusive in its praise for the writer, lead performer and maverick Lin-Manuel Miranda (henceforth ‘Lin’). Lin had created his first work as an undergrad. In The Heights updated West Side Story to incorporate Latin rhythms from someone in whose blood Latin music was. In the show, the characters are three-dimensional, rap and sing and dance all at once and drive the story forward with panache. It came to the UK in 2015 where thousands saw it in a tiny venue in Kings Cross.

Hamilton, at the time, had been off-Broadway but was due to move up to the main thoroughfare in August 2015. It was an immigrant’s story which seemed perfect to tell using the idiom of hip-hop, America’s peerless late-twentieth-century export. It might also prompt a slew of musicals inspired by weighty biographies of historical figures; the musical is based on Ron Chernow’s doorstop of a book which Lin took with him on holiday. Originally a mixtape, he spent six years working it into a stage musical, which won 11 TONY Awards and stands above any other musical in the 2010s, including The Book of Mormon and Come From Away. (These, and Moana, will be discussed in the project.)

It was when the musical’s soundtrack was released in autumn 2015 that the local phenomenon went global. The smallish theatre sold out its 1300 seats months in advance, but a nightly raffle ensured the proles could see it at a low price. While the queue formed, and before the cast got into costume, Lin and his cast entertained the crowds with Ham4Ham, a five-minute improvised or planned set. Filmed by keen punters, the world had a free show from the hottest ticket in town, which promoted the show around the world. In winter 2015 they brought the show inside to film Ham4Hams themselves; guests included Weird Al Yankovic, Barack Obama and Jimmy Fallon, and in ‘Groff Week’, Jonathan Groff (who was King George) took centre stage.

The story of Hamilton is actually three stories. In fact, it could easily be a trilogy split over six hours of drama, rather than condensed into three in one night: Alexander Hamilton is the man who founded the Treasury; Thomas Jefferson is the renowned President who succeeds George Washington; Aaron Burr is the scheming VPOTUS, the US Vice-President trying to influence things and win power for himself.

Burr and Hamilton are orphans. Both are educated, driven and hungry to be at the vanguard of this new nation. In an act of charity, Lin has written the score’s best songs – Wait for It and The Room Where It Happens – for Burr. The former, Lin has said in interviews, was written in a hurry after he had to excuse himself from a friend’s party; he got to the shindig, quickly said hello and goodbye, and wrote the line ‘death does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints’, which forms the basis of the song. In it, Burr tells his story – he’s a preacher’s son who is ‘inimitable, I am an original’ – to an r’n’b backing; Usher performed a version on 2016’s The Hamilton Mixtape. It is a sort of Salieri’s aria, with Mozart substitute Hamilton (‘he exhibits no restraint...changes the game’) on Burr’s mind while he plots his own path to success.

Later, in another a ‘behind the arras’ moment, Burr sings how ‘no-one else was in the room where it happened’ when the deal to award New York the Treasury and Washington the country’s capital is agreed. Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington are there, but Burr is locked out. Political machinations fit for a play are instead set to music, with a banjo poking out in the earworm of a chorus. Hamilton, meanwhile, wants to ‘build something that’s gonna outlive me’, a noble endeavour.

‘Burr hangs back while Hamilton charges forward,’ Lin said in the New Yorker profile. Ultimately the message is bigger than the characters, something Lin makes clear in his script, which is ‘sung through’ in the manner of an opera. The line ‘Immigrants, we get the job done!’ always gets applause on Broadway; ‘If you got nothing to stand for then what will you fall for?’ and ‘I am not throwing away my shot’ are motivational quotes rooted in universalism and ripe, in this day and age, for fitting in a small box on social media.

My Shot comes within the first ten minutes of the musical. The title puns on the inevitable duel that occurs at the end of the play where Hamilton throws his shot and Burr doesn’t. It’s a stirring summation of Hamilton’s aims with echoes of Lose Yourself by Eminem; it’s his ‘I Want’ song which also spells out his grievances with King George. There’s a three-bar soliloquy in the middle of the number where Hamilton fears he’s ‘talking too loud’, the orphan loner finally finding his crowd, and encouraging them to ‘shout it to the rooftops’. The second half of the number takes the theme of ‘Rise Up’, as Hamilton’s cohorts also realise anarchy and dissent is the way to change things. At all times, Lin is juggling wordplay, rhyme, melody, plot, character and subtext, all the while keeping the audience alert and foreshadowing any character flaws.

The show is driven by the brilliance of Hamilton. His passions for government and his wife Eliza and son are undercut by an affair which drags down his reputation. In the first act, Eliza wants him to ‘take a break’ but Hamilton seems on a mission. The pair’s ‘meet cute’ happens in Helpless, where Angelica Schuyler introduces him to her sister Eliza (‘Look into your eyes and the sky’s the limit/ Down for the count and I’m drowning in ‘em’) and they end up married by the end of the number.

Angelica gets an aria immediately with Satisfied, a wedding toast, in which she tells of her pride but also irritation that the one she spotted has gotten away from her. The song breaks into a rap halfway through which ends with a tender proclamation: ‘At least my dear Eliza’s his wife/ At least I keep his eyes in my life…’ At which point Angelica snaps back into the bridal toast. Eliza has her own aria in the second half: Burn is her lament at being let down by Hamilton, who is a worse husband than a statesman. ‘You build me palaces out of paragraphs’ is Eliza’s sorrowful words, as the letters she kept from him and her entire world are primed to be burned.

The show’s most beautiful song is the lullaby Dear Theodosia, in which Burr and Hamilton both sing to their children (‘I’m dedicating every day to you’, as Burr sings to his daughter). Placed just before the interval, it is a breath of calm air after some stormy warfare where the world is ‘turned upside down’. The most comic song comes from the fool, King George III. You’ll Be Back, with an addictive ‘da-da’ post-chorus, is a lot of fun that takes musical inspiration from British music from the 1960s; strangely, George is cheered on the West End (one of our own!) but hissed at in America since he plans to ‘kill your friends and family to remind you of my love’.

The narrative puts the audience through the ringer emotionally, as with It’s Quiet Uptown, where Eliza and Hamilton mourn the death of their son, Phillip. With a chorus of voices begging people to ‘have pity…He is working through the unimaginable’, Hamilton is a tragic figure who cannot ‘trade his [son’s] life for mine’. The strings and piano on the track, scored by Alex Lacamoire who arranges the soundtrack superbly, again offer peace amid the noise of the politicking.

Lin and the cast visited the White House to celebrate the continuation of Hamilton’s face on the ten-dollar bill; Obama’s patronage helped the reputation of Hamilton. The main cast entered ‘the room where it happens’ to deliver a spoken-word version of the famous Cabinet Rap Battle. At a visit to honour the Obamas in the final year of the Presidency, the cast performed four songs, one of which was One Last Time.

Chris Jackson as Washington and Lin as Hamilton performed it as a duet; in the musical it is sung when President George Washington announces he is stepping down as President to Hamilton’s dismay (‘The nation learns to move on, it outlives me when I’m gone’). As they read the words from real letters, the pair end up speaking in unison in a dramatic moment which sets up the musical’s third act, when Burr and Hamilton move to the inevitable duel.

After the duel comes the musical’s finale, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story. Eliza starts an orphanage while Angelica is a public servant too, wondering ‘Have I done enough?’ The audience can’t help themselves from reflecting on their own story, having seen a brilliant piece of theatre which has already run on Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre for four years and in London’s Apollo Victoria for two. It will go to Sydney in 2021, joining Chicago as a longterm place where Hamilton’s story is told.

The point of the show is legacy, though America as an immigrant nation is also a major theme. Two centuries on, the Treasury still holds strong and Hamilton’s face still adorns the ten-dollar bill which, amusingly, rappers refer to as Hamiltons. ‘He took our country from bankruptcy to prosperity’ are Washington’s words on him.

In 2016, The Hamilton Mixtape brought songs inspired by the musical as well as other versions (Sia doing Satisfied, Andra Day singing Burn, comedian Jimmy Fallon taking on You’ll Be Back). Wrote My Way Out has Nas and Dave East joining Lin himself (‘Oversensitive, defenceless…I’m relentless’) in taking personal verses about their own origin stories with Aloe Blacc singing the hook; Who Tells Your Story has Common and The Roots meditating on legacy while Ingrid Michaelson takes the hook.

K'naan, Snow Tha Product, Riz MC & Residente (a Puerto Rican rapper) take verses on Immigrants (We Get The Job Done), which is the most striking original track on the album. Feasibly Riz Ahmed, aka Riz MC, could play Hamilton in London; the Englishman of Pakistani heritage has been a stage and screen actor from humble beginnings at Merchant Taylors’ School, which also counts me as a former student (he left just before I joined).

This is a musical that will go hand-in-hand with history as documenting The Obama Years of America, a point hammered home when Vice-President Mike Pence was booed when he saw the production, since he was part of an administration that was very unkind to immigrants. ‘It is rare,’ said President Obama, ‘where a piece of art can remind us about what’s best in ourself.’

Books and articles will be written in future about The Hamilton Effect, if more sung-through musicals inspired by rap are staged in the post-Lin era of musical theatre. Someone has said Sondheim and Gershwin changed musical theatre and to those two Lin-Manuel Miranda should be added. In terms of the 2010s, however, there is no contest about the show of the decade.

Imperial One - Bruno Mars in the 2010s

Nothin’ on You, Fuck You, When I Was Your Man, Locked Out of Heaven, Treasure, 24K Magic, Grenade, Finesse, That’s What I Like, Uptown Funk

Peter Hernandez grew up idolising Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. When he teamed up with songwriter and entertainer Philip Lawrence and producer Ari Levine, the trio would boast of writing a smash, a ‘smeeze’, a ‘smeezington’. The name stuck and The Smeezingtons was the credit on the likes of Fuck You by Cee-Lo Green and Nothin’ on You: on the latter, Bruno sang the hook, drawing out his vowels on ‘girls’ and ‘world’, and B.o.B did a rap in which he praised his beloved for paying her taxes and being ‘the whole package’. It was a massive number one at the very beginning of the decade.

By 2013 the trio were one of the top producers in pop music, behind only Jeff Bhasker and Ryan Lewis and ahead of even Max Martin and Shellback, according to Billboard magazine. Their style took the best of funk, soul, r’n’b and pop, as evidenced on their enormous hits this decade.

Fuck You, or Forget You as the radio edit had, is a monster song. Cee-Lo ‘can’t afford a Ferrari’ and has been ‘hurt so bad’. The middle eight, where Cee-Lo moans ‘why?!’ three times, is the climax of the song (‘I still LOVE YOU!’) while the chorus is a mix of anger and sugar (‘hoo hoo HOO!’)

Grenade, from Bruno’s debut album Doo Wops and Hooligans, is a song I love. Bruno would do anything – catch a grenade, leap in front of a train, take a bullet through his brain – but his girl would do nothing. He’s a fool but the middle eight is extraordinary, probably Bruno’s best, ending in that ‘NEVER! NEVER!’ lyrical hook.

Locked Out of Heaven, the lead single from 2012’s Unorthodox Jukebox, is a monster too with a great and quotable title. ‘Your sex takes me to paradise’ is the bridge, while the chorus has those long held notes beloved of karaoke singers. Then there’s the intro, which doubles as the post-chorus (‘ah yeah yeah…oom!’).

Treasure was even better, an irresistible bit of pop, produced immaculately, with the perfect blend of funky guitar, soulful and syncopated delivery and a heck of a chorus: ‘Treasure! That is what you are!’ I realise a lot of these lyrics have exclamation marks after them, because that is how the song suggests they are to be transcribed.

When I Was Your Man – a song whose lyrics don’t come with exclamation marks but the dabbing away of tears – took Bruno’s mournful vocal and added a gentle piano line full of soulful chords. Often if a song becomes a hit you get ten worse ones entering the charts that ride its coattails (as with Adele’s Someone Like You), but I love the tenderness of Bruno’s delivery as he remembers dancing and being with the girl whom he has lost.

24K Magic was album three, released in 2016, and the title track became the lead single. The production is even better, though it is now Jeff Bhasker who hops on to the board to twiddle some knobs on the album. He didn’t work on the title track, which is credited to Shampoo Press & Curl, the moniker of Mars, Lawrence and newcomer Christopher Brody Brown. As with Locked Out of Heaven, the fun video was directed by Cameron Duddy, who spent the end of the decade in fake country band Midland.

24K Magic the song became the GRAMMY Record of the Year, which is awarded on the production and sound of a song: it takes elements of funk, disco, soul and r’n’b and sonically namechecks the likes of Zapp & Roger, Jam & Lewis and Chic. It’s basically the black American sound in four minutes with Bruno pratting on about how ‘so many pretty girls around me and they’re waking up the rocket!’. The lyrical hook of ‘pinkie finger to the moon!’ is fun, and the chorus has an irresistible synth(!) hook. It’s 24K hooks!!

Then came the second single from the album, That’s What I Like, the GRAMMY Song of the Year from the GRAMMY Album of the Year. 1.5bn Youtube viewers can’t be wrong. It helped Mars join Jewel and Ed Sheeran as an act who had two songs in the Hot 100 top ten for over half a year. That’s What I Like was ranked third in 2017’s Year-End chart, behind only Shape of You and Despacito. That’s what his accountant likes!!

I’ll note the remix of Finesse, which is a homage to the musical style known as New Jack Swing, pioneered by Teddy Riley in the 1980s. Cardi B, the most successful female rapper of the current era, adds a verse about her ‘money dance’ before Bruno sings about how ‘they don’t make no scent’ called Finesse. The middle eight, as is characteristic of Bruno’s work, is brilliant, as he exhorts the men to grab their lady and vice versa. Musically and in the production, Finesse is terrific and a good time party song to rival those of Prince’s band The Time (who once counted Jam and Lewis among their ranks) and any number of funk bands from the golden era.

Uptown Funk, meanwhile, was the monster of monsters.

Mark Ronson spent months fine-tuning the guitar part, which was given the blessing of his friend Nile Rodgers. Mark had risen to prominence in the mid-2000s with his album Version, taking songs like Valerie and Stop Me and bending them into new shapes with the assistance of the Dap Horns. He then worked magic with Amy Winehouse, whose album Back to Black was produced by Mark and again featured those horns.

Nobody could have predicted the success of Uptown Funk, which draws inspiration from Oops Up Side Your Head for its final few minutes. Jeff Bhasker helped write and produce it. The reason it works is because you can clap along to the beat, dance during the chorus (‘Don’t believe me? Just watch!’) and sing any number of lyrical hooks: ‘Michelle Pfieffer, that white gold!’, ‘stylin’, wildin’, ‘gotta kiss myself I’m so pretty!’, ‘too hot, hot damn!’, ‘call the police and the fireman!’, ‘make a dragon wanna retire!’, ‘stop! Wait a minute!’, ‘Julio! Get the stretch!’, ‘Harlem! Hollywood! Jackson Mississippi!’, ‘smoother than a fresh jar of Skippy!’ and ‘uptown funk you up!’ are 11 of them, again with the trademark Martian Exclamation Point.

As for the music, it is grounded by a bass voice scatting, as heard at the start of the song. The layers of gang vocals in unison match the harmony of the horns and guitar, with an infectious funk stab in the chorus. The last minute is pure joy as uptown funks you up, with Bruno playing the entertainer.

There’s an extraordinary performance of the song on Saturday Night Live from the end of 2014, two weeks after its release, which remains my favourite reading of the song and could conceivably go on for 20 minutes like some kind of James Brown wig-out. Seven weeks at the top of the UK charts and 14 on top in America makes it one of the most successful songs ever; only three songs have a bigger run at the top of the Hot 100, and one of them is the awful I Gotta Feeling by The Black Eyed Peas.

The video is another Cameron Duddy production, with Bruno and his mates dossing around outdoors, creeping up to a low camera for the ‘Too hot, hot damn!’ parts. Only three music videos have been viewed more times on Youtube: Despacito, Shape of You and See You Again. Uptown Funk even overtook Gangnam Style, though Baby Shark is hot on its heels.

In any reasonable review of the 2010s, Bruno Mars looms large.

Imperial One - Ed Sheeran in the 2010s

The A Team, Sing, Thinking Out Loud, Castle on the Hill, Perfect, Shape of You, Galway Girl, 2002, I Don’t Care

All Ed Sheeran wants is to make Damien Rice proud.

The lad from Framlingham who didn’t go to uni or even BRIT School (both little-known facts) has become perhaps the single most successful beneficiary of the streaming era. How has he done it?

Ed Sheeran is all things to all people. He’s a busker who can write award-winning songs about teenage drug addicts set to acoustic backing – The A Team won him the Ivor Novello award when he was only 21 – and songs you can walk down the aisle to, as my cousin did at his wedding. Both Perfect and Thinking Out Loud are love songs that are designed for Magic FM and Steve Wright’s Sunday show on Radio 2, even if one is Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton (‘you look perfect tonight’) and the latter is Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye (same chord progression in a different key). I remember messaging the co-writer of Thinking Out Loud congratulating her on her future GRAMMY award: I know a classic when I hear it. I also marvelled at how the song had a fine structure, with the ‘people fall in love’ bridge key to the song’s catchiness.

I also admire how Ed picks his collaborators. Pharrell Williams co-wrote the two-chord jam Sing, with its woah-ful chorus and percussive delivery that is Ed’s trademark, influenced by black music in the UK. In 2010 his Collaborations Project included duets with Wiley, JME and Ghetts, among others, while Stormzy contributed a verse to a remix of Shape of You.

That song, released in the first days of 2017, will go down as one of Ed’s biggest tracks. Knowing his way around the radio dial, he put out Shape of You to be promoted to pop radio and Castle on the Hill for rock radio for mature audiences. He’s no idiot; he and Taylor Swift trade spreadsheets and vie for the status of top pop dog.

The allure of Shape of You is in the 12-note bajon rhythm that starts in bar one and continues throughout the song; it’s a love song which starts at a bar and moves to a buffet over which the couple ‘talk for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour’, then they get in a cab and hear Ed’s song in a meta commentary on Ed’s ubiquity.

Castle on a Hill starts with Ed breaking his leg at the age of six and moves to a childhood of bliss in Framlingham, home of the eponymous castle. The third verse spins forward to see what his mates are up to now (‘one’s brother overdosed’) and the pull of nostalgia; Ed owns a house in Fram and all reports say he is a nice neighbour, although one keen to build a swimming pool which upsets some of the nimbys.

Ed fought for the inclusion of Galway Girl, a three-minute advert not sponsored by the Irish tourist board, on Divide. I’ve always loved the song, and it did folk band Beoga’s career the world of good. Even when Ed isn’t on the charts, he follows the Bee Gees route in giving his songs away. Hilariously he had forgotten giving Justin Bieber a song which turned into a big hit but Ed definitely remembers Love Yourself and 2002. The latter, a hit for Anne-Marie, features Ed on backing vocals uncredited; the Essex-born singer is signed to his record label and her delivery is very Sheeranic, which is the adjective I have just coined.

Come summer 2019, Ed finally had a Song of the Summer – Shape of You dominated winter into spring 2017, while Perfect was the 2017 Christmas number one – with the lead single from his new Collaborations Project. The cast list was like an Avengers film: Khalid, Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, Stormzy, Yebba (who popped up on Mark Ronson’s 2019 release), Eminem and 50 Cent, Travis Scott, Ella Mai, Dave, H.E.R., Skrillex and Chris Stapleton & Bruno Mars.

As the album rollout cantered on, I Don’t Care remained at the top of the UK charts, holding off Old Town Road. Funny how it topped the charts in the UK and not the US because of the subject matter of the song: both Justin Bieber (‘crippled with anxiety’) and Ed are at a party with their lovely lady, who makes it bearable. You can also tell Max Martin is involved because of the strongly melodic bridge part (‘don’t think I fit in at the party’) and the ‘ooh-ooh-ooh’ bit in the chorus sounds like a joke.

The same weekend in August 2019 saw Ed play to 40,000 in a park in his home city of Ipswich and, days later, be subject of a headline in the Sunday Times which casted doubt over the originality of his ideas. Shaggy had to be credited on the song Strip That Down because the songs had rhythmic similarities. Photograph and Shape of You were both subject of lawsuits, the latter prompted by Sami Switch. He had sent Ed’s team a song and alleged that Shape Of You unfairly stole elements of the 2015 song Oh Why; Ed countersued and the case is ongoing.

2010 for the 2010s

The ‘Twenty-Teens’ has been one of the scariest decades in the history of the world.

Though there has been no Black Death, flu pandemics or genocide, humans seem more frazzled and wired than ever before.

Through it all, live and recorded music has provided a soundtrack to the march of human life.

From January 1 2010 to December 31 2019, popular music has given people comfort, joy and companionship.

In the 2010s project, I hope to offer 2010 songs for those ten years. There are roughly 201 songs for every year, with all songs considered. Pop, rock, independently minded, major label, jazz, rap or hiphop, country, the blues, new age, soundtrack and syncs, African hi-life, Scandinavian power-pop, hardcore punk, reggaeton, electronic, lo-fidelity, soul, rhythm and blues, Kanye West…

Just as global events progress, and one Prime Minister or President follows another, so people dance, clap and sing along to popular sounds.

Join me on my journey to find 2010 songs for the 2010s!

Hello

Welcome to my website, JonnyBrick.com!

It’s a chance for me to show my work in one handy place. You can leap to another site from here, be it my collection of essays on pop music from 1984 to today at nowthatswhaticallnow.com or my country music criticism at countrywol.com.

You might want to fill your ears with podcasts about Watford FC, in which case you should proceed to Ronny and Ramage. If you want something more musical, there’s a host of originals and covers here.

If you are moved to commission me for your blog or publication, do not hesitate to send an email to jonny_brick@yahoo.co.uk, or slide into the direct messages section of Twitter.

The blog seeks to embellish the content on the website, as I update readers of my latest projects.

Happy reading!

Jonny Brick