Who's Writing This?

Well I'm just a simple country chicken…

Futurama? Anyone? Not a lot of crossover with country music folks and Futurama fans? Cool, cool.

So who am I? For the purposes of this project, I'm a country music listener. Have been since I was a kid, and that never really changed. Secondarily related, I'm also a classic rock fan, a folk music fan, a filk fan, a heavy metal fan, etc, etc. I like a lot of different kinds of music, and I listen to a lot of different kinds of music. My Spotify playlists are an absolute mess if you're looking to have a coherent genre experience. They're very…vibey.

Or they're related to one of my books. Because in the third-most important aspect of myself to this project, I'm a professional author. Why does that matter? Because it's a damn blog, so I better be able to write if we're going to have a decent time together here, right?

If you're a fantasy reader, you can check out those books here.

If you like the sound of men falling in love with other men, those books live over here.

Other minutiae: too many dogs, live in Washington, foodie, screaming leftist, gay, millennial.

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Week 4: The Band Perry

This week, I want to do something of a postmortem. Not on an actually dead artist, although there are plenty of them I can cover in a genre with as long of a lifespan as country. I want to talk about a group that is still alive and kicking, but isn’t making country music anymore: The Band Perry. Why do this? Why talk about them? And why is this band that is ostensibly still around getting a postmortem out of me? The Band Perry hit the Nashville scene like fucking napalm. There was no one who looked like them, no one who sounded like them, no one with lyrics like them. When your first single gets certified platinum six times , there’s some kind of magic there. Something that’s happening, and is worth paying attention to. During their country tenure, they could basically do no wrong, cranking out hit after hit after hit, and building a rabid fanbase. They brought this pop-punk meets country meets Americana sound and aesthetic, very different from the plaid crop tops and butt-huggin...

Week 6: The Chicks

So this week was supposed to be about the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Rhiannon Giddens, and it was supposed to come out on Saturday. But I've been on deadline for a writing project and I just wasn't able to pull it off. I want to be able to do CCD their proper due, because they're amazing. So I'm dusting this one off. It was supposed to come a little later, on, but I already have it written up, so I'm not going to make this any later than it already is. So let's talk about The Chicks . And you can't talk about The Chicks without A: talking about how they dropped "Dixie" from their original name and B: talking about the Iraq War. Yeah. I know. I thought we could move past it too, but it's integral to The Chicks and any conversation about them, because they are one of the very select, very few actual victims of cancel culture. You can find much more detail about this from other places, but the short version is: The Chicks opposed the Iraq War,...

Week 3: Reba McEntire

So last week, we talked about TomatoGate and women in country , and that wasn’t an accident. I did absolutely want to cover a sort of “foundational situation” in the country music industry as it exists today. But I also know myself, and I know that I like a lot of female country artists. Especially if folks are looking for something a bit more mainstream, women are usually the first names off my lips for folks looking for examples of good country. Miranda Lambert, The Chicks, Carrie Underwood, Brandi Motherfucking Carlile. If female country artists are the tomatoes, then let it be known: I love tomatoes. I mean, in country music. I’m gay as a drag queen sniffing poppers at White Party while lip syncing to Cher. But I love female-sung country, so I knew that I wanted to open up the gate rather quickly to me discussing female artists. And at least for me, there’s one who comes to mind before anyone else. Reba McEntire has been a staple of the country music industry since 1980, aft...

The One Year Country Music Appreciation Guide

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