truck songs of the week #36: more than one way to skin a breakup song
new music featuring hindsight, a radio tuned to 79.4 and two long months
This week is a taxonomy of breakup emotions. Yes, country music is about loss, but loss, like hope, is a many-feathered thing. There are at least five stages of grief—with a whole feeling wheel of country song potential.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2024 playlist here.
“20-20” by Ella Langley
The powerhouse vocalist behind 2022’s “Damn You” is back with new breakup bangs and a new breakup anthem. In most country canon, "I still remember you moving in / My mama saying we’re crazy ‘cause we’re way too young” is an opening premise with a happy ending but, here, reckless, young love only precedes a crash.
There are a lot of strong tracks on the album, including the rollicking “cowboy friends,” which feels like it could be a Gram Parsons cover. There’s radio-friendly swagger on “better be tough.” Finally, “girl you’re taking home” is a flawlessly executed torch track, the trickiest kind of song to get right.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“What In The Truck” by Belles
A little playful truck wordplay on a song that evokes the bubblegum pop of the early 2000s—this song would have been perfect for a Disney Channel Original Movie about a country girl who spends a summer finding love, America and herself.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Getting Over You” by Eric Van Houten
If “20-20” is the liberation of a breakup and “What In The Truck” is righteous and necessary anger, “Getting Over You” is total hopelessness—the depression stage of grief. Appropriate then that it feels inflected by some mid-2000s emo sound as if Eric Van Houten’s subconscious is still deeply moved by Dashboard Confessional.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
Chappell Roan gave us the lesbian twang we needed, debuting a new country single, “The Giver,” on SNL. “Queer country” isn’t new, but what Roan seems to get is that country has long been camp, and I’m sure Dolly Parton would approve of the way she’s made the drag explicit. [US Today].
I wrote about the semiotics of Tesla in a piece I pitched as “the column Roland Barthes would have written if he lived to see the Cybertruck.” [Dispatches]
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