Issue #50: Where we started, and where we're going (and a sale!)
Looks like we made it, look how far we've come...
Hi friends! As wild as it is to believe, we’ve been regularly newslettering about country and related topics for nearly a year now (!) — so, we decided to take our 50th dispatch (!!) to reflect a little bit about our newsletter journey, one that started in the summer of 2020 in a fit of frustration and powerlessness. It has taken quite a bit of gumption to get to this point, since we are both (gasp) full-time freelance writers in the year 2024 (absurd, ridiculous, totally dumb). But here we are! All thanks to you, our readers, who have hung around and hopefully gotten some good stuff out of our whims and schemes — or at the very least, learned about some good tunes. We are so grateful to you for riding with us, and excited to keep building and growing and…well, keepin’ on.
In 50 issues we have…
Written about Tina Turner, country music and the original sin of genre
Contemplated Jason Isbell, Weathervanes, death, love and listening like a mother
Wrote a love letter to Brandy Clark and to Joshua Ray Walker
Pondered the the "summer of the woman," that happened everywhere but country radio
Spoke with Amanda Shires about Bobbie Nelson, the Highwomen and her creative life
Created a shit ton of playlists and so much more
To celebrate 50 issues, we’re offering 50% off annual subscriptions for 24 hours (!) — that’s just $40 (or 77 cents a week) for 2+ posts a week, full access to live Zoom interviews with great artists, our podcast, playlists galore and so much more (love to rhyme). It’s our biggest sale ever so subscribe today!
We hopped in the DRTI Slack for a little reflection and contemplation about the state of things, and a very lightly edited transcript of what transpired follows. Thanks, as ever, for reading, and tell your friends!
Natalie: It's pretty wild how different everything feels than the moment when we first decided to start Don't Rock The Inbox — aka mid-2020. The way the conversation around country has expanded, the artists that are now in the center of it....Like, I think we were just trying to have an outlet, sensing that the media world was starting to more severely contract, but little did we know how relevant the stuff we were interested in was about to become.
Marissa: Absolutely. Creating a space to discuss country music in a free and open sense now feels...very timely (pats us on the back), not knowing that the media world would self-destruct even more, and country music would skyrocket even more into the broader cultural conversation, zeitgeist, what have you. I forgot our initial alternate title was "two jews, one country newsletter."
Natalie: We could still go back to that…But yeah, like, last weekend I went to see Tyler Childers *in an arena*. An arena full of teens making TikToks. This is not the reality I saw coming back then!
Marissa: Maybe I am a sap but that's, like, fucking beautiful to me? I feel like people ask both of us a lot, probably, about how you can be optimistic considering how deeply embedded all the bigotry is in the country music machine, and how broken country radio is. And that's kind of it to me, an arena full of folks listening to Tyler Childers…trying not to be a grandma about the TikToks, but if they're young and relating to country music, then that's great.
So much of what you and Miko spoke about in our very first newsletter feels like it could be lifted from the present moment…Oh boy, looking back at our first CMA Recap and remembering the "No Drama" post.
Natalie: Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Jesus. We were definitely (obviously) reacting to conversations and frustrations that came out of the Black Lives Matter movement, the George Floyd protests, the election and the pandemic and connected with the country music world and discourse in a specific way — stuff that, as you said, is all still very much top of mind. Miko was so great talking about that, as was producer and songwriter Anthony L. Smith, Kalie Shorr, Charley Crockett (yes, we knew him when!)...all giving us the time of day when we were very overambitiously throwing everything at the wall lol.
Marissa: It was such an insane time of course, looking back. Odd how we have all sort of had to pretend none of that happened in order to get back to "normal" life and feed the capitalist machine! But it was good to have a place to work through some of these very real crises and conflicts and conversations in a way that was much more healthy than...me just firing off whatever on Twitter in between virtual school classes for my kids. But now it's nice to celebrate our one year mark of being a fully functional, non-sporadic newsletter!
Natalie: Yes, definitely! It's been really cool to try to create a semi-sane corner of country community — to explore some of our whims but also offer some perspective on this kind of ~explosive~ country music time.
Marissa: I'm proud of it! I am not good at saying that (thanks to the patriarchy conditioning and all that good stuff). But I do think we have created a special corner of the musical internet, I hope.
Natalie: Feels necessary to carve out our niche with the big country “moment.” This country-pop crossover moment has been happening for a minute now (see: FGL and Sam Hunt) but it's on another level right now, and hard to know if that will hold.
Marissa: Yeah all happening at the same time this retro-cowboy Western revival is kicking along. I loved your Tina Turner piece - also very relevant to read through now in the Cowboy Carter era!
Natalie: Totally - I think your "Midland anticipated this aesthetic trend” take is being proven more right every day.
Marissa: Midland and “Mr. Lonely” walked so Zach Top could run (in a more acceptably "masculine" way).
Natalie: And yeah, re: Tina, that was a fun one. That ongoing musical dialogue around country being written out of histories or at least canons is just more evidence of the same ol' racism from the people who make said histories and canons. It's like, not fair at all to expect Beyoncé to be like the single corrective to decades of history that looked at Black people making country music as anomalous or a novelty. BUT given that there is so much to mine there, I personally was looking for more of it in Cowboy Carter — but that was my unfair expectation.
Marissa: And that's the area where I just see so little progress. Same people still holding the storytelling powers. And are the women who get "let in" truly holding open the door for everyone else?
Natalie: Yes, so so far to go...and we're just one lil newsletter with liler bandwidth lol. But always working towards intentional inclusion and, moreover, accuracy (the inclusion comes naturally if you simply paint things as they are in a clear-eyed way).
Marissa: People really did love when we tortured ourselves for their enjoyment (i.e. listened to an hour of country radio). I guess we should do that again soon.
Natalie: It is probably time for a check in; need pithy MM genre takes for whatever era of Nickelback country we're currently in....we can only pray that there is no longer a Morgan Wallen double wide.
Marissa: Lord. Given his track record and country music's love of never forgiving women but heaping forgiveness on men, they will probably joke about it on air and then play three songs in a row this time. I won't get into Wallen but I wish people would start pointing more fingers at the label and management who seem to love making lots of money while this man keeps going. Anyway!
Natalie: Yeah, the deeply entrenched fuckedupness of Music Row is something you got into really thoughtfully with your Jimmie Allen reaction piece (not that they are the same, we’re speaking about broad systemic issues here!).
I also think anyone new to the newsletter would probably get in their feelings about your Eras tour dispatch with your daughter; I know even as a non-Swiftie it moved me.
Marissa: I definitely didn't expect how much of the newsletter writing for me would be getting into my feelings about music and my kids and motherhood, but that's just where I'm at. 8 or 9 years ago, with one small kid, I would have never thought I'd be comfortable doing that. I basically tried to pretend like I wasn't a mother to keep up with what I thought a music critic was supposed to look like. There were barely any other mothers around me and still aren't, in this business. I sometimes wonder if I lose work by being open about it and then I remind myself who fucking cares…
Natalie: Well from the outside I'd say it seems like you get a wild amount done!! Just waiting for that next preorder to drop... :)
Marissa: I love scrolling back and seeing all the love you give to Joshua Ray Walker.
Natalie: Yes, the best thoughts out to him! A great artist and a great hang. We've got it all: artist interviews, album reviews, historical deep dives, personal essays, a fair amount of trash talk....what more could you ask for?
Marissa: Ha damn right - shout out to your very prescient Zach Bryan piece too. I dont want to pick a favorite essay, but that might be my favorite of yours if I had to. It reminded me why it's important to have spaces like this, because I don't think that kind of perspective was making it through the noise. Everything he did was just taken as God level.
Natalie: Well, I did listen to every single Zach Bryan song for it which...took a long time. I mean it seems like the Bryan train is just picking up more and more steam...I try to just be interested in it as a phenomenon and not too much of a hater, lol.
I think one of my favorite pieces of yours was your essay about faith and country music — I find solace in some of the Jesusy songs too, in spite of the fact that Jesus is just alright with me…
Anyway! I think that about does it — cheers to 50 issues and a year of newslettering and playlisting and interviewing and posting, we could not have done it without all of you who have somehow read this far. We’ve got the coolest readership anyone could ask for, and all we ask is for you to keep lending your ears (or hell, pop in the comment section and tell us what’s what!). Any final thoughts, Marissa?
Marissa: Cheers to 50 issues! And Earl had to die.
Old posts still hold up!