This week is messy. It’s a friend breakup. It’s smeared mascara. It’s a precarious network of levees, jeopardized by the two-headed devil of privatization and climate change. It’s a little Southern Gothic, a little corn-fed, a little wild. Just not crazy.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2024 playlist here.
“Kiss My Boots” by Brian Kelley
It’s starting to look like all is not well in the Florida-Georgia borderlands. Both members of Florida Georgia Line have been at work on solo projects since the band announced a “hiatus” in 2022. Tyler Hubbard is already at work on his third solo album1. Meanwhile, Brian Kelley (AKA the hot one) released this middle finger of a song.
I do not exaggerate. Chorus lyrics: “Here's a middle finger to you through a song.”
God bless the absolute swagger of releasing a song about talking shit after a little too much Jack Daniels and then titling that album Tennesee Truth.
FGL was one of the acts supporting Taylor Swift on her 2013 Red tour, and in an interview with CMT, Kelley namechecks her, claiming she influenced his approach to the new album: “As a songwriter, as an artist, you always want to put your truth into songs. You always want to leave a little bit of yourself and as much as yourself in these songs.”
That’s PR code for thinly veiled celebrity gossip masquerading as songwriting. And I’m here for it. Being messy and fanning the parasocial flames is the original Swift marketing strategy. I love to see a man smashing gender roles.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Cowboy Kind of Love” by The Castellows
The spiritual successor to modern country standard “Cowboy Take Me Away.” The lyrics, the harmonies, plus a hot girl playing the banjo.
I’ve written before about the binary representation of men in country music. For women, the dialectic might be more along the lines of “corn-fed homecoming queen” (think: Lainey Wilson, Natalie Maines, Carrie Underwood) and “redneck wild child” (think: Miranda Lambert, Jesse James Decker, Kellie Pickler). Somehow, The Castellows toggle between both, with a neo-traditional sound that draws on alternative influences and plays nicely on country radio.
See: This cover of “Hurricane.” The original was recorded by Austin-based rock act The Band of Heathens but The Castellows’ cover is slower, softer, almost eerie, Southern Gothic.
Meanwhile, a Google search for the “Cowboy Kind of Love” single art led me to this literary gem, which I will obviously be reading as “research.”
Choose your fighter. I’m partial to number four but number three looks way familiar.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“I Ain’t Crazy” by Erin Kinsey
There is a lot to love about this new single from Erin Kinsey but my favorite part is how the bridge is structured around a fishing metaphor, lest you forget this girl is country.
Rhyming “fishing” with “intuition?” No notes.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
I wrote an article about Jean Baudrillard and the commodification of the cowboy for Haloscope Magazine. You can read it here.
Very funny to me that The Standard bills a third solo album from Tyler Hubbard as a “devastating update” but c’est la vie.
Some initial thoughts:
--Is it just me or does it seem a little risky to get love rolling with either a cowboy or a cowgirl?
Erin and Brian deserve each other now that the sting of done wrong reality has taken its bite and they're both wiser...
--As for the Castellows, calls to mind (that is, my mind) the Lawrence Welk show: same color "do's" and outfits and swishy sentiments, standing to one side of a stage prop buckboard...
--As for those creamy cowboy delights...what's with the black hat? (Donna only wrote four???)
--And, yep, the whole truck as an icon of the open road may just run off, kickin' up its wheels, shed free of dogs, fishing poles, horizons awaiting notice, love to be found and lost, and victimized by pissed off GFs slashing seats, tires, and keying-up custom paint jobs.