How Gen Z Fell In Love With the Pistol Annies' Most Depressing Song

This week we've got a special guest post from friend of the newsletter and wonderful writer Will Groff!! Read more of his work here!

Praise be: The Pistol Annies’ 2018 song “Best Years of My Life” is finding new life on TikTok. A delectably depressing standout from the rootsy Interstate Gospel, the song has been featured in over 100,000 videos, many of them appearing in only the past few days. Fittingly, for a song with lyrics about craving “intellectual emptiness” and “a recreational Percocet,” most of the videos are about confronting quarter-life crises and romantic regrets. “How it feels going to your hometown after breaking up with your highschool sweetheart,” reads the text on one video. “Fell in love once now i hate everything,” reads another.

As is often true with TikTok, the origins of the song’s sudden virality are murky. Late last month, a Miranda Lambert fan account posted a clip of the Annies (made up of Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley) performing an acoustic version of “Best Years of My Life” with the caption: “the music I listen to at 7am before even giving the day a chance” (a popular joke format indicating that the OP is into very unchill songs). The next day, an anonymous account posted a generic video employing the studio version of the song as an original sound. It snowballed from there, with users generating a dizzying number of videos using the song, which has since experienced a surge in streams (up nearly 800 percent month-over-month, according to Lambert's team.) Even Lambert got in on the action, writing, “All y’all in your early 20s/30s..relating to this song…know that the best years are still ahead of you” over a sweet video of herself dancing with her hot husband at the most recent ACM awards.

Does anyone remember when Keith Whitley’s 1986 hit “Miami, My Amy” went mega-viral on TikTok in 2022? The joke here is semi-difficult to explain—as these things go—but TikTokers essentially used the song to soundtrack uncomfortable experiences with (usually reactionary/boomer-coded) strangers. See examples here, here and here. It’s always tough to watch a beloved (by me!!) piece of media get turned into a punchline, and TikTok is annoyingly effective at turning even genuinely great songs into meme fodder. 

Thankfully, that does not appear to be what’s happening with “Best Years of My Life”—at least not yet. Rather, the videos are mostly earnest/in line with the themes of the song (down to the wry humor). Of course, given that this is TikTok, there are still plenty of videos that employ the song in arbitrary or otherwise nonintuitive ways. Some sample use cases for the “Best Years of My Life” audio:

CMA Fest fit check

Brown sugar shaken espresso hack

Complaining about the song’s newfound popularity (relatable but annoying)

Being a girl with a boy dog

A lot of ink has been spilled over country music’s massive cultural resurgence in recent years—including by me lolol—but this is an interesting case study in why country music is thriving in the short-form video age. The best country songs condense entire narrative arcs into three-minute timespans, which is more or less what TikTok is all about (well, that and selling people garbage). On the one hand, I’m a little bummed that the snippet of the song that went viral does not contain the aforementioned and iconic “recreational Percocet” line. But it makes sense that the chorus, which stays in first-person but feels more universal, would better allow users to insert themselves into the story. Either way, it’s heartening to see the Annies tapping into a whole new generation of fans. (Yes, I recognize that the song is only eight years old, but that’s half a lifetime to some Gen Zers!)

Naturally, covers of the song have proliferated on social media in recent days. I was curious about what was drawing so many creators to the material, so I reached out to Emma Smalley, a South Carolina-raised, Nashville-based singer-songwriter who posted a video of herself singing “Best Years of My Life” to her 55,000 TikTok followers.

“I’ve kind of trained my algorithm to show me trending country/Americana songs, and I’ll use that as inspiration as to what songs to cover and when,” Smalley told me.

She said she was not familiar with the song before it started trending on TikTok, admitting that she was “a little behind on the Pistol Annies train,” despite being a fan of Miranda Lambert. However, she was immediately taken with the song, which she said “gives that perfect 90s female country vibe of feeling nostalgic for a small-town love despite the toxicity of it.”

So there you have it. “Trailer for Rent” next???

Will Groff is a writer based in Queens, covering country music and culture. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and the Guardian among other outlets.