This week, it’s a reminder to keep the faith. That sweet spot when heartbreak starts to change into a different and better feeling. The forward momentum of new love soundtracked to old music.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2023 playlist here.
“Make You Rich” by Noah Thompson
Someone once told me that rock music traffics in abstractions and country music is about stuff. A repurposing of William Carlos Williams’ “No ideas but in things” mandate. So much of the pleasure of country music is in the invocation-of-America-via-detail: trucks and cottonwoods and boots and beers. But this Noah Thompson track is almost pure abstraction, from top to bottom — and it works.
Sometimes the best part of a country song is how aggressively sincere it is, like a little respite from the economy of irony. “Make You Rich” has a banger, summertime chorus but mostly it’s a pick this week because it’s earnest. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded to give a damn, have a little faith, and “love your people like you you’re paid to / Like you ain’t afraid to / Like you were made to do.” All of those things are nice and worth doing, even if they are clichés. Sometimes a song can get away with saying something that would be trite in another context. So, country radio is here to restore feeling to platitudes about the importance of staying open-hearted.
Plus one for riffing on one of my favorite classic country tropes: giving financial advice.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Friends Like That” by John Morgan
Like a good country song should, this track stretches concrete specificity right to the breaking point with this slick little hook at the top of the chorus: “Waylon turned up on the JBL.” What’s a JBL? Oh, just the brand name of a speaker manufacturer. It’s not a speaker. It’s a JBL speaker. Bluetooth, presumably, because this is the Millennium. And “speaker” doesn’t rhyme with “going through hell.”
So, we’ve got two instances of synecdoche here. “Waylon” short for Waylon Jennings obviously (classic country trope alert: references to other country music), and “JBL” apparently trying to be the new “Kleenex.” If the juxtaposition of classic country name and technology product still isn’t sublime enough for you — old and new, analog and high-tech — then, well, does it help that John Morgan is kind of hot? And, according to this song, single?
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“You Me + Country Song” by Clayton Mullen
This song is insane because it takes the “reference other country songs” trope and absolutely overdoses on it. There are 67 words in the chorus and 16 of them are the names of other country songs. That’s 24% of the chorus!!! Twenty-seven percent if you include the words “George Strait,” which I didn’t because it’s an artist and not a song title!!!! It’s an even weirder version of the formula considering that, rather than referencing ubiquitous country classics, most of the songs he is namechecking here are really recent!!!!! Keith Urban released “Cop Car”1 in 2013 so it’s not even ten years old!!!!!!!!! And the Turnpike Troubadour’s 2009 “Diamonds & Gasoline” is great, but it’s real music and therefore kind of outside genre!!!!!!!!!!!!! This kid is breaking more unwritten rules than a Bachelorette contestant who didn’t come here to make friends!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Finally, I’m compelled to point out that Clayton Mullen looks incredibly Southern, like a clean-cut fraternity brother from the University of Georgia. Compare this to Morgan, above, who looks like he just got done wrenching on Mullen’s car and is now on his way to a 30A beach. Absolutely equal but opposite type of Southern guy. And that, my friends, is a dialectic.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
Sam Hunt has a co-writing credit on this song, and he re-released “Cop Car” on his own album — “Montevallo” — the next year. I could be persuaded by the argument that a song co-written by Urban and Hunt is an instant classic, but, come on folks, let a good track marinate.
And no one's under a cowboy hat!