Don't Rock The Comments Section: The Country Song of the Summer

May 24, 2023

Hello, and welcome to the first edition of our reader threads! Starting next month, we will be moving these posts to subscriber-only, so we can talk about contentious stuff, make wild hot takes and do whatever else feels fun and good in a safe, non-violent sort of way (our inspiration here is Culture Study and Anne Helen Peterson’s awesome Friday Threads, which is actually a lovely place for reader dialogue and not a cesspool somehow). If you want to make sure you don’t miss these posts in the future, become a paying subscriber! We will get into the dirt later, but we’re going to start out with something fun to get the wheels greased.

Today we ask: what is THE country song of the summer? This summer, last summer, summer of 1985, all summers forever and ever more, the summer you broke up with your partner and did nothing but listen to Keith Whitley for three months straight? Here are ours:

Marissa: For almost all of summer 2017, my country song of the summer was Tyler Childers’ “Whitehouse Road” and I’m happy to unpack that here or with a therapist. This was back when music publications still did premieres (RIP), and I wrote about the song for Rolling Stone Country. And then I didn’t stop listening to it: driving around trying to get my daughter to sleep, on headphones outside in the garden, on the long highway stretches to various family vacations or just en route to buy school supplies. It came to mean something else entirely for me than how it was written - the disassociation of my two selves, the mother and the writer, the parent and the professional, the once-feral child and the person now responsible for the growth of two of my own. Music can run so far away from where it started, where the lyrics or intention started, and grow in our heads: the best music can, at least. As soon as school gets out - which, for us, is tomorrow - I’m back thinking about summer 2000 and 5 a.m. nights while living in the camp drop-off line. Both are good, and both are me, and it’s a damn good feeling to run both roads.

Natalie: I don’t know what Clare Dunn is up to these days — based on her John Rich RTs, I’d probably rather not find out. But I do know her Honestly EP had a ton of my most listened-to tracks over that horrible (and occasionally great — I met my now-fiancé, after all) summer of 2020: “Salt and Lime” is a perfect post-Sheryl sunny day anthem, which tracks because it was co-written and produced by Jeff Trott — the co-author of basically all Sheryl’s iconic summery singles. It’s breezy and bright, a ride to the beach distilled into three minutes. (If you need more evidence of the anti-woman bias at country radio that Marissa wrote about this week, this EP feels like it to me — hit after hit that went absolutely nowhere.)

Here’s to running on your own Whitehouse Roads this summer, or whichever fork you take.

What’s yours? Comment below.

- Natalie & Marissa

46 Comments

Don't Rock The Inbox

May 24, 2023Author

Marissa here - kind of panicking that I also didn't include Brent Cobb's "Providence Canyon." I mean, we drove two+ hours out of the way on the way home from vacation once to visit it, we listen to the song so much in the summer. Perfect album IMO too

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