This week is almost delusionally hopeful. The stomach drop of new love. A rush of nostalgia. Simulacra. A weirdly carnal interpretation of the phrase “Heartland.”
Drive safe.
Get the full 2023 playlist here.
“Love You a Little Bit” by Tanner Adell
This song is so country / so not country. It’s got all the right components: a twangy banjo, a guy in an old T-shirt, and a two-door Ford. But, bizarrely, this truck romance occurs “at the third red light on La Ciénaga1,” the famous SoCal boulevard that runs from Hawthorne up to West Hollywood. Sense of place — and particularly the evocation of place through geographical shorthand — is country music’s thing. Pop, for example, often seems to exist in a kind of ethereal and monolithic non-place. Anywhere and everywhere. Country music is of its place.
But what could be less country than setting a song in the glittering urban heart of the greater San Fernando Valley? Tanner Adell (LDS, btw!!!) grew up in Manhattan Beach but describes connecting to her country roots in Wyoming. This supports the emerging thesis of truck songs, that the America of country music is actually a hyperreality that exists in the collective national memory rather than any physical place. Or, more simply put, that Americans are country everywhere — almost equally so. And, in that sense, what could be more country than a song set on an “L.A. Freeway” like the one Guy Clark2 once described?
Truck count: 1. A Ford. No model given but she does specify that it has two doors. Deductive reasoning suggests an F-150 or F-250.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“This Town’s Been Too Good To Us” by Dylan Scott
Speaking of country hyperreality, this title track from Dylan Scott’s 2023 EP is composed entirely of clichés. A song about small towns written by someone who hasn’t necessarily lived in any small towns so much as he has consumed copious songs about small towns. “Old two-lane roads” and “good dirt that corn grows through” and “country stores to buy that beer.” Does this song contain one original image? (Don’t get me wrong though, I love it.)
There’s a blurriness to it. A country song that is a copy of a country song that is, itself, a copy of a country song. Each version more distorted and degraded than the last. So distanced from its source material that it becomes Jean Boudrillard’s “copy without an original.” An idea we instinctively recognize as America, even while it’s disconnected from reality, composed entirely of signs — the signs of rural America — which are themselves continually distorting. Bullet-riddled signs. Trucks on dirt tracks. Six-packs of beer.
Truck count: .5 — its existence implied by the line “Tore down them old two-lane roads.”
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Her Heartland” by Logan Mize
Ballad-adjacent. This is about as slow as a song can get and still be considered a truck song. More importantly, this song explores an age-old question, the one that has been keeping truck scholars up at night: “Can a truck song be sexy?”
The lyrics “She calls me back / back to her heartland” is giving “Crash into Me” by Dave Matthews Band and I can’t tell if I like it.
Truck count: 1. Chevy. A Silverado, presumably.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
The Spanish phrase la ciénaga translates into English as “the swamp,” which is vaguely southeastern-coded, no?
Yes, I know Jerry Jeff Walker recorded it first but Clark wrote it, mfs.
This is so interesting. I haven't spent a ton of time with country music, so seeing it framed in an academic way is pretty eye-opening. That connection to "place" seems like something that might make it actually challening for listeners, because it gives it specificity and a sense of identity (even if that place is sort of a fantasy or composite of ideas). Whereas pop music's "ethereal and monolithic non-place" (!!) is more universal, maybe even identity-less, so a more general audience can easily place themselves in that narrative? The mind reels.
Guy Clark! Heck yeah, good to see the torch carried forward.