It seems so easy / so dog-gone easy

Linda Ronstadt

Some people can’t stop themselves from sharing everything. It’s like the dam holding back the stream of consciousness has failed. I have never been like this because as a gay kid and a sissy in the 90’s I learned early on that sharing what you thought and felt brought ridicule at best. Then there was the matter of my favorite music. Country music was not cool where I grew up (rather strange for a rural place but there you are) and telling people what I actually listened to on the radio at home elicited mockery and teasing.

I spent a long time listening to what other people liked and finding songs I liked here and there. My tastes tend to be very broad but somewhat shallow. I’m not the one to team up with if you want to win at pub trivia – I don’t know many deep cuts or the minutiae of band lineup changes. I eventually discovered that I loved hard rock and even metal and punk music as much as I’d loved country music. For many years that was fine and I would sometimes listen to an old favorite country song but mainly I was occupied with other genres. In the 2010s the proliferation of bro country and the shocking dearth of female artists felt like the last nail in the coffin for my country roots.

But at the beginning of 2024 a new friendship rekindled my affection for country. I would send links and videos to songs I remembered liking and then they would send some back and gradually this rivulet of recollection grew into a torrent of exclamation points, all caps texts, and a repeating refrain of “HOW DID I FORGET THIS?!” on both sides. It could not have been a better time to return to country – some country bros had hung on and as established artists they took the time to celebrate and name the country songs and artists of the 80s and 90s that they loved. The electrifying performance of Cole Swindell and Jo Dee Messina with their mashup of his She Had Me At Heads Carolina and her Heads Carolina, Tails California still gives me goosebumps all over my body.

There wasn’t just the obvious respect and affection of Cole for Jo Dee but the sheer joy on her face as they traded verses and choruses back and forth. Some artists might be bitter about being out of the spotlight and missing the continuity of career that others enjoy in genres that didn’t have the very clear and obvious break between 90’s country and the music that replaced it. But the artists I see performing now, the ones I eagerly waited to hear on my dad’s boombox in the garage as a kid, have so much energy and excitement to be on stage with newer artists. What I see is an obvious attempt by artists of today and yesterday to heal the break that corporate interests inflicted on the genre.

I think that tradition and history are more visible to the casual country fan than fans of most other genres. Established acts have always played a role in shepherding newer ones and it is beautiful to see newer artists reaching back for their influences to help bring them forward and reconnect those ties of tradition and history between generations.

That reweaving of generational ties is what brought me fully back into the fold. I have listened to more country, new and old, in the last 6 months than I had in the last 6 years. Women are back! Openly queer artists are here! And a whole bunch of songs that aren’t about nameless formless women that only exist in the passenger seats of trucks! All that listening has brought on a lot of thinking and that’s what I’ll be sharing here – as easy or hard as it may be for me to do.