truck songs of the week #37: let's go back to the country
new music featuring barbed wire, holy water and sunset taillights
It’s been a rainy spring in Texas, and overnight the neighborhood exploded into leafy green. It’s already been a good year for driving home from the pool as the sunlight fades: hair wet, hand out the window, milkshake between my knees.
I’ve been discovering music again. Somehow, I listen to less in the winter — maybe a side effect of seasonal affective disorder. Even in Texas, with its mellow winters, I find myself becoming myself again every spring. I start moving, leaving the house, reaching for the radio dial.
Country radio is summer music. There’s no debating it. That’s why it felt like the right season to bring this project back.
If you’re new here: welcome. This newsletter and playlist explore what country music reveals about the mythology of America. It’s bangers for driving with the windows down. It’s also for critical theory nerds.
Come for the Blake Shelton, stay for the Jean Baudrillard.
A little housekeeping: the annual playlist was getting long and unwieldy, so I’m switching up the format. Below, you’ll find a weekly playlist that rotates. Expect some standbys, plus a few new bangers every week.
If you want the whole enchilada — hours of uninterrupted twang — you can find the full 2025 archive here, or dig through playlists from previous years here.
Drive safe.
Find the weekly playlist here.
“Small Forever (feat. Brantley Gilbert)” by George Birge
This ode to barbed wire fences and “buck knife hearts in the pines” is a great entry into the category of what I’m coming to think of as “gentrification country” — all anxiety about the development reshaping small town America. It’s the “Where did my small town go?” panic of “Everything Is Changing” by Billy Currington — not the politically pointed “Gentrification” by Austin’s own, beloved socialist country band, Croy & the Boys.
But either way, it’s human nature to complain about a place changing (see: small talk at any cocktail party in any semi-major city from Austin to San Francisco). Of course, god willing, your hometown is always changing and growing1. Anthropology 101: Change is constant. In real life, authenticity is a myth!
But this is country music. Looking backwards is key to the form, which has always been nostalgic. But songs like this George Birge track fixate on city planning as a metaphor for values. They aren’t simply celebrating the goodness of rural life — they are preoccupied with its possible loss.
There is, of course, a political read here. But when I think about how big-money development alters the texture of small towns, I find myself intrigued by development as a metaphor for death. Growth threatens the town, but what’s really being grieved is the passing of youth itself. So much of the lyricism here evokes vitality and the rituals of adolescence — “I hope the grass stays green, and the corn grows tall” and “I hope them Friday night lights stay on.”
How very American to lay claim to eternal youth — and the underdog position.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Prodigal Daughter” by Hailey Whitters
On a Venn diagram, Hailey Whitters is the rare artist who lands in that sweet middle spot between “windows down listen” and “legit music.” Molly Tuttle lends a little musicianship cred.
Tuttle recently announced she’s leaving bluegrass, but you can’t miss that twangy influence here, layered in with Whitter’s country pop sound — a winning formula when The Chicks did it, of course.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“3,2,1” by Tucker Wetmore
There’s so much weird stuff that’s happened in this genre since I last sent one of these newsletters that it was hard to choose what to say. Gwen Stefani tacitly endorses Tucker Carlson and appears on a Blake Shelton track? Megan Maroney makes her new brand “emo cowgirl”?
But honestly, I just really like this new album from Tucker Wetmore. Every track flies off the record like a bullet from a gun. These are the kind of radio-friendly, probably-ultimately-forgettable-but-who-cares songs that make you feel glad you’re alive — and that’s really what a truck song is, at the end of the day.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
Put The Chicks in the Country Music Hall of Fame, cowards! By yours truly. [The Barbed Wire]
Are tariffs coming for your cowboy boots? [Texas Monthly]
“The Cybertruck is nothing but a baking sheet on wheels.” [High Country News]
I ordered seven copies of Alice Bolin’s new essay collection, Culture Creep. Her 2018 book Dead Girls is on my favorites shelf. [Amazon]
Thank you so much for being here. This is a reader-supported publication, and you can support “truck songs” by becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with a friend.
Consider the alternative… hint: it’s Detroit.