Put a Record On: If You're Gonna Play in Nashville You Gotta Have a Fiddle in the Band(?!?!?)

Is it finally happening?

Welcome back to Don’t Rock the Inbox! Here’s this week’s music recommendation post and playlist, which are for paying subscribers only. Subscribe to get access to all our new (and old) music picks and pans, and so much more — including new playlists weekly, which are always at the bottom of this email (paying subscribers — make sure you don’t miss them!). If you’re interested in paid content but not able to afford it, shoot us an email.

Credit: Allister Ann

The Good

“Fault Line,” Carly Pearce: Carly Pearce has been subtly nudging her sound, and mainstream country, into a more traditionalist direction for some time now - it’s not that she doesn’t do the pop-country thing well, but she can truly kill it when the music’s more fit for a honkytonk than a streaming playlist. If you think Zach Top is the leader in bringing that George Jones sound back to Music Row, you might wanna cue up this total gem from Carly, which opens with a whole lot of fiddle and just….never kicks off the boots. Might be one of my favorite songs of hers yet. Between this, Top, Lainey Wilson (see more on that below), Midland (see previous argument about how they’ve been here doing this but not in a masculine enough way for all y’all) and others this spring is feeling very country (the sound, not the made up genre). - MM

The Liberated Woman's Songbook, Dawn Landes: I have been meaning to spotlight this for weeks — what a wonderful conceit for an album, and so well-executed! I have been thinking a lot about how country/folk artists can tap into the genre's long, well-established radical, progressive songwriting tradition — how thinking about how evergreen those sentiments and ideas are can make them feel even more potent. Landes really delivers here, from both a conceptual and research angle (there are a few familiar chestnuts here, like "Which Side Are You On?", but many are new to me) and a musical one. — NW [Agreed, I love this record - MM] 

"Static," Caitlyn Smith: A mental health-y song that's considerably less flip and a lot more heartbreaking — really like it, though. The production is in a nice country-rock sweet spot, and it all just comes together in a way that made me keep listening. — NW