The Curmudgeon: Too Country For Country Radio

I’ve interviewed more than a few aspiring artists who have bubbled with frustration over the business types in Nashville who have told them they were “too country for country radio.” This will seem like an oxymoron only to those who have never listened to contemporary country radio or who have only listened to that format. Contrary to what the industry’s apologists claim, country music is not just a marketing strategy. It’s an artistic tradition with a particular history and a specific musical vocabulary. Yes, it keeps evolving, but it does so with a continuity lacking in country radio’s decisive 1991 switch to ‘70s arena-rock.

You can hear that continuity, however, on Miranda Lambert’s latest album, Postcards from Texas, simultaneously the best major-label country album of 2024 and the second-lowest-charting studio album of her career. The pleasure of her soprano is only enhanced by her Texas twang, and the sharp focus of her songwriting is evident in both her wise-cracking jokes and poignant drama. These are classic, steel-guitar country songs about marriage, divorce and rebound love, with only the more muscular rhythm section and more feminist attitude distinguishing it from the 1950s.

Lambert wrote or co-wrote 10 of the 14 songs and co-produced the whole thing with Jon Randall, as she did on 2022’s Palomino. Like her role models—from Dolly Parton to Willie Nelson—Lambert knows that laughing at life can be as cathartic as crying over it. She’s not embarrassed by a good pun. When she warns a husband, “If you’re gonna leave me in San Antone, remember the Alamo-ny,” she twists the knife with details like these: “If you like livin’ at your mama’s house and drinkin’ Milwaukee’s best on a hand-me-down couch, you’re gonna love how this all works out, ’cause it all works out for me.”

Nor is she embarrassed by her own lust (“You’re looking good in the dark”) or her need for a bit of freedom even in the best romance (“Even when she’s in your arms, she’s in no man’s land”). On the album’s modest hit single, “Wranglers,” Lambert returns to the arsonist roots of her first Top 20 hit, “Kerosene.” Asked how long it takes to get over a broken heart, she explains: as long it takes a pair of Wrangler jeans from the affair to burn on her backyard grill. To appease country radio, this track comes with a loud rock guitar solo, but the emotions proved too mixed up, too adult (“If she didn’t need him, she’d a-left him long ago”) for the simplicities of country radio.

Lambert can afford to resist radio’s requirements; she has a long track record and a large fan base to fall back on. Mickey Guyton, an artist still trying to get traction despite glowing press, doesn’t have that luxury. On her new album, House on Fire, she tailors her sound to the microchip-driven, line-dance beats of modern country. It sounds like a lot of records coming out of Nashville these days—and that’s the point. She aims to differentiate herself with the hard brilliance of her soprano and the implications of her skillful lyrics. On “Make It Me,” for example, she paraphrases Whiney Houston’s hit, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” as a question, daring the person she’s addressing to take her out on the dance floor and home to bed, a brazen initiative that is validated by the singer’s total self-confidence. In “Little Man,” she’s in charge not just of a courtship but of a long-term relationship, where she’s tired of being the “bigger man.” It’s only on “Make ‘Em like You” that she finds a man with the “over-over-confidence” to match her own.

These hard-hitting, high-gloss tracks have more in common with Shania Twain and Beyonce’s version of country than with Charley Pride or Pride’s advocate, Willie Nelson. Guyton excels in the dance-pop lane, but she’s more interesting in the traditional country mode. “Scary Love” is a terrific song about motherhood, how it’s every bit as frightening as it is thrilling, a doubt-filled confession that fits the steel guitar, quiet verses and gospel choruses. “Still I Do” is a big profession-of-love ballad not unlike Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (made famous, of course, by Houston). “In Between” is framed by acoustic guitar as it tries to balance the bills piled on the kitchen table with the tangled sheets on the bed.

Charlie Crockett makes no concessions to country radio, but that hasn’t stopped him from attracting enough fans to headline Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium with his hard-core country approach. The title track from his new album, $10 Cowboy, looks back on his start as an acoustic-guitar, street-corner busker, glad to go home with $10 in his hat. He is now backed by a dazzling band that mixes honky-tonk steel with R&B organ, but his voice is still grinding between a heart full of yes and a world full of no.

This is the best of Crockett’s many albums on his own Son of Davy label, because his bassist Billy Horton has stepped up to co-produce, adding strings and horns with such tasteful restraint that they buoy the vocals and rhythm section without obscuring them. This fits the songwriting, which has grown in narrative and philosophical ambition. Like Hank Snow, Crockett had “been everywhere,” and he rattles off the cities of this nation–each with a quick example of why he’s so “Good at Losing.”

He digs in with more detail on “Spade,” the Tex-Mex-flavored tale of a poker game that erupts in gunfire, a quick getaway to Galveston and a surprise connection to the gunman. The old-fashioned shuffle, “Ain’t Done Losing Yet,” is set inside the El Dorado Casino in Reno, where the narrator and a woman compare their different ways of losing. “Midnight Cowboy” is a truck-driving song about a man who deserted his family in St. Paul; now the headlights shine the way to Omaha, but the shadows pull at him from behind.

Country music was once a music not for party kids but for working-class adults, and for Crockett it still is. On steel-weeping “Hard Luck & Circumstance,” he declares, “For folks like me, there ain’t no justice.” On the album’s high point, “America,” he addresses the whole nation, reminding us that “I just keep working, doesn’t matter how I feel,” adding that we made a promise, and he’s still “waiting patiently.” $10 Cowboy, Chapter Two: Visions of Dallas will be released the day after Thanksgiving.

Willie Nelson’s 91-year-old voice these days is a fragile, diminished remnant of the robust low tenor it once was. But on his latest album, Last Leaf on the Tree, he turns that fragility into an asset. Many (though not all) of the songs reflect on aging and looming mortality, and the translucent quality of his thinned but still agile voice creates the ghostly sound that fits these lyrics. The album ends with “The Ghost,” a tune he wrote in 1962 about an old love affair, a memory that makes the silence “unusually loud tonight.” Now it sounds as if that ghost is the personification of his own long past stretching out behind him. Nelson uses his trademark, mid-line pauses to acknowledge his reluctance to confront the specter, and the song ends with the apparition laughing as it bids its final farewell.

Last Leaf on the Tree begins with the title track, a Tom Waits song about the final leaf on an autumn tree, missing all its now-gone friends and bracing itself for the inevitable descent. The slight tremble in the vocal only heightens the effect. Maybe Nelson can’t punch out the notes as firmly as before, but he still knows exactly where to land them. Willie only contributed one new song to the album, but it’s a good one. Co-written with his youngest son Micah, “Color of Sound” opens with the mind-tickling question: “If silence is golden, what color is sound?” Over the noirish breezes of Sam Grendel’s bass recorder, Willie’s tired voice finds beauty in the impending end of the journey. “Every road that leads nowhere, every road that’s homebound,” he sings, “every wind that’s blowing breathes the color of sound.”

The album was produced by Micah, who chose two songs by Neil Young (Micah’s longtime employer), two by Waits, and one apiece from himself, the Flaming Lips, Beck, Keith Richards, Sunny War, Warren Zevon and Nina Simone, supporting them with an eerie, art-rock soundscape behind his father’s voice and guitar. Among Micah’s many instruments listed in the liner notes are dulcimer, charango, surdo, dead leaves, coins and cicadas.

Joining him are Daniel Lanois on pedal steel, and the minimalist music’s eerie, late-night feel echoes the reverie of Lanois’s production for U2, Emmylou Harris and Willie himself. All of this may suggest that Last Leaf sounds like a rock ‘n’ roll record, but as soon as Willie opens his mouth, the music suddenly resembles a backroom East Texas picking party, circa 1959. Willie’s singing and acoustic-guitar fills on these story songs sound more like country music than most of what’s on country radio these days—no matter who wrote the songs and who plays behind them.