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After his arrest on Thursday evening (Sept. 7) in Oklahoma for obstruction of an investigation, Zach Bryan posted a video on Friday morning (Sept. 8) further explaining what happened during the incident in which he said he got “too lippy” with officers.
Bryan is sitting in his car in the nearly five-minute clip, speaking directly to fans while driving to New York with his dog Jack in the passenger seat. “I just wanted to be completely transparent with everyone who listens to my music about what happened yesterday with me getting arrested,” said the singer who just scored his first Billboard 200 No. 1 album with his new self-titled project and his first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 song with “I Remember Everything,” featuring Kacey Musgraves.
Prefacing his story by saying that he will have to deal with the “legalities” of the arrest, that he did go to jail and that police did not play any favorites with him, Bryan bluntly said, “I was an idiot today. My decisions did not reflect who I was as a person… I should have been smarter about it”; in an earlier social media post, Bryan said he’d had an “incident” with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and that “emotions got the best of me, and I was out of line in the things I said.”
He then laid out what he said was the full timeline of events, which Bryan explained began three days ago when he was driving through a small town in Oklahoma, where he was pulled over by a police office for going “4-5 [miles] over” the speed limit. The singer said after being asked for his license, registration and address, he explained to the officer that he was not comfortable giving out his address because of his notoriety as a musician.
Bryan said the officer informed him that if he did not give his address he would go to jail. “I’m like, ‘man, I’m not gonna give you my address,’” Bryan said he told the cop, who then allegedly asked him to step out of the vehicle, at which point the singer said he was handcuffed. “I’m like, ‘man, what the hell is going on? Why are you doing this?’” he recalled saying.
After Bryan discussed it with the officer, he agreed to give his address and the cuffs were taken off, but the encounter “frustrated me a lot because I didn’t know if I had a right to refuse giving him my address,” he said. Fast forward to Thursday, when Bryan tells his security guard that he’s driving to Boston to see his favorite team, the Philadelphia Eagles, play the New England Patriots in Foxborough on Sunday.
The pair begin driving and Bryan said they were 40 minutes from his Tulsa house — with his security guard trailing him in another car — when he saw his security get pulled over. Bryan said he pulled around the block and parked his car near his security guard’s and waited for the traffic stop to conclude. After 15 minutes Bryan said he wondered why it was taking so long, so he got out of his car. “I was gonna smoke a cigarette [and] the cop comes up to me and he’s like, ‘sir, get back in your vehicle.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not the one getting pulled over,’” Bryan said he told the officer.
When told he would go to jail if he didn’t get back in his car, “like a dumbass I said, ‘take me to f—ing jail? What do you mean?’” Bryan said he replied, admitting that he got “too lippy” with the cop, who then brought him over to his cruiser. “I didn’t help my situation at all,” Bryan said of his confrontation with the patrolman. “I felt like a child, it was ridiculous, it was immature. And I just pray everyone knows I don’t think I’m above the law. I was just being disrespectful and I shouldn’t have been and it was my mistake.”
After getting cuffed for the second time in three days — Bryan noted that the restraints were tight on his wrists — the singer was placed in the front seat of the cruiser, where he engaged in some back-and-forth about how the handcuffs hurt. He said the officer told him, “they’re not supposed to be comfortable.” Bryan said he began getting “more angry and angry” about the situation, “which is the worst thing you can do.”
After 15 minutes Bryan said he was released from the police cruiser, at which point he said he was just “mouthing off, like an idiot. Like an actual child. I’m like, ‘man, someone’s gotta get a hold of you guys. Why are you using your authority like this? This is so wrong.’ When in reality they were just doing their jobs. I was upset.”
He said the officer then explained that he was going to talk to Bryan and he didn’t want to be interrupted, after which Bryan said he would listen, but then he wanted to respond. “He started talking, I interrupted him. Naturally, because I was just angry,” Bryan said. The officer then informed the singer that he was taking him to jail, where he spent several hours, during which Bryan said he “cooled off a little bit.”
He said everyone in booking at the Vinita, OK jail was very kind to him and that he and the arresting officer ended up shaking hands, after which he posted his online apology note. “I was just an idiot and I’ll take the fall for it,” Bryan said. “I’m a grown man and I shouldn’t have behaved like that. And it won’t happen again.”
Watch Bryan’s video below.
Zach Bryan was arrested Thursday evening (Sept. 7) in Oklahoma for obstruction of investigation, according to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office. There are currently no other details on the country/rock star’s arrest, which was first reported by TMZ. Bryan was born in Oologah, Oklahoma, and lives in nearby Tulsa, while the sheriff’s office where he […]
Kimberly Perry and her husband, Johnny Costello, have welcomed their first child together, son Whit Costello. Whit was born Aug. 26 at 4:01 p.m. in Nashville, Tennessee. “Welcome to the world Whit,” Perry said in a statement, posted to her social media. “I feel like in one short week Dad and I have moved from a […]
Zach Bryan earns his first No. 1 on Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart with the Kacey Musgraves-featuring “I Remember Everything,” which debuts atop the Sept. 9-dated survey. In the Aug. 25-31 tracking week, “I Remember Everything” earned 33.7 million official U.S. streams, according to Luminate. Bryan’s first Streaming Songs ruler eclipses the No. 3 peak of […]
Morgan Wallen, Miranda Lambert and Eric Church will headline the Goldenvoice-produced Stagecoach Festival when it returns to the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif., on April 26-28, 2024.
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Church will spearhead the Friday, April 26, lineup, joined by Jelly Roll, Elle King, Dwight Yoakam, Hailey Whitters, Carin Leon, Paul Cauthen, Zach Top and more.
Lambert will lead the Saturday, April 27, slate of performers, joined by Post Malone, Willie Nelson & Family, Leon Bridges, Ernest, Charley Crockett, Luke Grimes, Allison Russell, Tenille Townes, Asleep at the Wheel and Kylie Morgan.
The three-day festival’s final evening will wrap with headliner Morgan Wallen on April 28. Also on the lineup that day are HARDY, Bailey Zimmerman, The Beach Boys, Megan Moroney, Clint Black, Pam Tillis, Charles Wesley Godwin, The War and Treaty, Brittney Spencer, Sam Barber, Miko Marks and Ashley Cooke.
“I can’t wait to get back to the desert to play Stagecoach in 2024,” Church said in a statement. “It’s going to be one hell of a party.”
Lambert also shared her excitement. “There is something so special about playing music when the sun goes down in the middle of the desert. The fans, the setup, the location — there really is no other festival like it,” she said in a statement. “My band and I have had the chance to experience the magic that is Stagecoach a few times now, and we can’t wait to be back in 2024!”
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Wallen added, “Stagecoach is such a legendary festival, and I am honored to be headlining the final night. I have so many friends who never miss it and I know this will be a monumental weekend for all of us. Can’t wait to see everybody there.”
Also returning for a fifth year is fan-favorite Guy Fieri’s Stagecoach Smokehouse, which will reveal new chefs, pit bosses and barbecue vendors. The Compton Cowboys will return for a third consecutive year, as a crew of 10 Black horseback riders share the story of their community, and their Richland Farms, located in Compton, Calif.
As is Stagecoach Festival tradition, the party will continue long into the evening at the Palomino stage, as Friday night will feature Nickelback, Saturday will feature the return of Diplo, while Sunday evening will feature Wiz Khalifa.
Festival passes go on sale Friday, Sept. 15, at 11 a.m. PT.
The final nominees for the 57th annual Country Music Association Awards were revealed Thursday morning (Sept. 7), with this year’s slate of nominees reflecting the chart dominance of an array of artists, but leaning heavily on giving recognition to relative newcomers whose starpower is surging — including Lainey Wilson, Jelly Roll, HARDY and Jordan Davis. […]
“It’s like going over to a friend’s house for a sleepover and then deciding to stay an extra day,” singer—songwriter Ashley McBryde describes the roughly three-month collaborative process over late 2021 and early 2022 that encompassed the recordings of her previous album Lindeville and her new album, The Devil I Know, out Sept. 8.
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Lindeville found McBryde collaborating with a slate of fellow musicians, including Brandy Clark, Nicolette Hayford (a longtime McBryde collaborator who also co-wrote three songs on McBryde’s new album), Aaron Raitiere and Brothers Osborne’s John Osborne, to create an album that sketched the stories of blue-collar characters inhabiting the fictional town on Lindeville. But The Devil I Know veers toward introspection; the songs that govern the new album glean lessons from McBryde’s four decades of life.
“I started playing bars when I was 19 and definitely too young to be by myself, driving all over the f**king place and just being like, ‘I’ve never been in a city. This will be fine,’” McBryde tells Billboard. “The things I learned in those years, I wouldn’t trade for anything. They don’t make a college degree for things like that.”
The album’s focus track, “Light on in the Kitchen,” currently sits at No. 28 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, and sets the scene of late-night, heart-to-heart chats sitting around a dimly lit kitchen table. McBryde and co-writers Jessi Alexander and Connie Harrington drew on their own childhoods.
“I remember the way my mom and my aunts, the way their kitchens were,” McBryde says. “We spent so much time living inside Aunt Clara’s kitchen and Aunt Gloria’s kitchen and my mother’s kitchen. We played games, planned vacations and spent summers in those kitchens. I wrote ‘Andy’ [a standout from McBryde’s debut album] at a kitchen table. So the phrase ‘light on in the kitchen’ had more power than we had any idea about when Connie first said it.”
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In the five years that have elapsed since the tattooed, Arkansas native broke through with the autobiographical, aspirational “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” she’s earned a No. 1 Country Airplay hit for “Never Wanted to Be That Girl” (her collaboration with Carly Pearce), six Grammy nominations and one win. She’s also established an artistic range that spans crafting songs recorded by artists including Trisha Yearwood, Jelly Roll and Rodney Crowell, as well as the imaginative, collaborative album Lindeville.McBryde’s approach to recording The Devil I Know with her band Deadhorse was old-school, with McBryde preferring to record as live as possible, unlike many artists who record tracks separately and repeatedly.
“My bass player, who has been with us about a year, was asking about our recording process,” McBryde recalls of recording the album in producer Jay Joyce’s studio. “I said, ‘We’re all in a big room together… apart from the drummer who does have to be kind of isolated, we’re all together and record everything live. We’ll do a song maybe four times and move on.’ I think Jay’s studio just feels like a womb. It’s just creatively nourishing. I didn’t realize it was rare the way we record together. Jay has even said, ‘You’re one of the only singers I work with who truly sings better when tracking live with the band.’ I had no idea that was special.”
Hard-edged truths about the brutality of the life of a touring musician spill from “Made for This”: the heady mix of Adderall and alcohol to key up and wind down, bathroom stalls that double as dressing rooms, and turning on the charm for the big record man “because he ain’t gonna call you twice.” “Learned to Lie” examines how readily habits and coping mechanisms become ingrained after growing up in a home filled with secrets, pain and half-truths. Acceptance and self-assuredness flows particularly on album closer “6th of October,” which ends with the advice, “Just live in the rhythms and the rhymes when you get ‘em/ The notes when you miss ‘em.”
Two other songs on the album, “Blackout Betty” and “Whiskey and Country Music,” have key ties to the making of Lindeville and The Devil I Know. The realization of the characters she writes about in songs such as “Blackout Betty” led McBryde to the ideation of Lindeville. “Whiskey and Country Music,” which McBryde wrote with Lee Thomas Miller and John Osborne and first debuted onstage at the Grand Ole Opry back in 2021, proved an essential moment when she knew Osborne was the right partner for Lindeville.
But when Miller first brought up the title idea of “Whiskey and Country Music” in the writing room, McBryde first balked, then took a chance. “I was like, ‘Hang on, none of us needs another whiskey song. But with the three of us in a room, the worst that can happen is that we write a good song, because none of us are willing to phone it in for the day. We got to lines like, ‘’Cause nothin’ takes the edge off when I’m going through it/ Like whiskey and country music,’ that’s just very true. If you play a Gary Stewart vinyl in front of me, every cell in my body would want to sit on the floor and drink at least half of a bottle, because I know it works.”
The Devil I Know will be released during a curious moment in country music — a time when country and country-adjacent songs from Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs and Oliver Anthony Music are setting records on the Billboard Hot 100. Meanwhile, an array of songs from more organic-sounding artists like Bryan, Tyler Childers, Turnpike Troubadours and Dylan Gossett, as well as rock-tendered songs from Jelly Roll, HARDY and Warren Zeiders, and sleeker songs from Alana Springsteen, have all made forays onto various Billboard listings. And of course, Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” and Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” have both topped the charts while garnering both praise and backlash.
“It is an interesting time. If you look at some of the stuff that has caused the spotlight to be on country music, it makes it pretty embarrassing to be part of country music,” McBryde says. “And it’s sad that the phrase ‘alt-country’ gets stuck on Tyler Childers, because he’s one of the most country artists we’ve had in the last 10 years. But there are so many strains of country music. If you like something straight up the middle, that is good on radio and sells tons of mattresses and pickup trucks, we have that for you. If you’d like something that can make you uncomfortable and covers some subject matters that not everyone would cover, we totally have that.
“We have songs from a person who’s singing about pulling a row,” she adds with a pregnant pause, “but we also have that from people who actually farm crops. No matter what version of getting in touch with things that you need — or getting out of touch — we have that.”
McBryde is gearing up to introduce her fans to more strains of what country music is and can be, when she launches her 30+ city The Devil I Know Tour in October. She will bring a unique array of opening acts, including “Wild as Her” hitmaker Corey Kent, Bella White, Will Jones, Harper O’Neill, Kasey Tyndall, Zach Top and JD Clayton.
When the time came to select openers for the tour, McBryde was sent a potential list of around 30 artists, and she made sure to select based solely on the music.
“I don’t want to get myself in trouble, but when they sent me all of the submissions, there was a suggestion that was made at one point that said, ‘Take a look at their streaming numbers and maybe their TikTok followers; if you don’t know where to start with the list, start with those,’” McBryde says. “And I’m so glad I did, so I could mark those people off my list, because it was the least palatable version of anything I wanted.”
With the remaining artists on the list, McBryde solicited the opinions of her band and crew members; They divvied up names, each listening to a few songs from each artist, and then discussing their favorites.
“It was such a cool way to do it, because I had never heard Will [Jones], but a couple of guys were like, ‘I go to his set at The Local [in Nashville]. He’s fricking awesome,’” McBryde says. “My fans love music, they love to consume good music — and not just what is handed to them out of mainstream radio. They enjoy discovering artists, and I thought with this set of openers, we have such a beautiful bouquet of music.”
She continues, “Fans are going to die over Zach Top’s voice and how sweet he is. And if you’re not already familiar with Kasey Tyndall, you’re seriously behind — I love this girl and her music. And the audacity of guys like JD Clayton, Zach and Will, the audacity to play actual country music and wear a cowboy hat, and it not just be part of a costume — with balls that size, they need to be on my stage.”
Seven years before he was born, Charles Wesley Godwin’s parents survived a hurricane and subsequent flood in 1985 that was determined to wreak havoc on West Virginia. For a harrowing several hours, his mom and dad navigated treacherous waters and a washed-out bridge by car and foot trying to reach the safe embrace of their parents and grandparents.
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As they walked along the ridgelines of the Allegheny mountains, they saw Godwin’s uncle, waving a flashlight in the darkness, waiting on them. “He had no idea they would be coming, no way to reach them, but he just said he had a feeling they would come, so he went to the hill that night to wait on them,” Godwin says.
That true tale is recounted in “The Flood,” a song on Godwin’s third album, Family Ties, out Sept. 22 on Big Loud Records. Godwin calls the song a chronicling of “the bravest moment in my mom’s life.” It is one of several family-oriented songs on the project, alongside the towering romance of “Willing and Able” (written for his wife Samantha), “Gabriel” and “Dance in Rain,” written for their children, and the keen-eyed “Miner Imperfections” (a tribute to Godwin’s father).
Godwin has been among the acoustic, roots-oriented singer-songwriters and groups surging to the forefront over the past few years, including Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Billy Strings and Turnpike Troubadours. Since the release of his 2019 debut Seneca and its follow-up, 2021’s How The Mighty Fall, Godwin has further refined his considerable skill as a detailed storyteller. “The Cranes of Potter,” from How the Mighty Fall, cast a critical eye on big-city development, while that album’s title track surveyed the toll time ravages on the weak and strong alike. Much like those previous projects, Godwin is the sole writer on nearly every song on the new, 19-track album.
The aforementioned “Miner Imperfections,” written with Zach McCord, is one of the few exceptions. The track showcases Godwin’s rough-hewn vocals as he sings of the worthy qualities and shortcomings of a working-class man trying to build a simple, loving life, and his pride in all of it.
“[Zach] had that chorus, and my dad was a coal miner, so I loved the idea,” Godwin says. “His dad’s a blue-collar guy from West Virginia and both of them were similar, in that they were pretty quiet guys, but extremely loving fathers at the same time. We worked on it that whole day and We just wrote it for our dads. It felt like a perfect song for this album.”
Godwin picked up a guitar just over a decade ago, inspired by watching a Grammys performance from The Avett Brothers, Bob Dylan and Mumford & Sons.
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“It blew me away,” he says. “It made me want to pick up a guitar. I thought it would just be another productive hobby, since after high school, I wasn’t playing sports anymore.” But rather than the onslaught of bro-country that dominated the country radio airwaves around that time, Godwin’s influences veered toward names like Prine, Kristofferson and Nelson.
He first played onstage while still studying finance at West Virginia University; a college classmate essentially forced him onstage during a semester abroad in Estonia, during Godwin’s junior year.
“I brought my guitar [on the trip] and one night we went to a show in Tartu,” Godwin says. “I didn’t know it, but one of my roommates took my guitar out of my room after I left and brought it to the show. When the concert was over, he ran up onstage — and somehow didn’t get kicked out — and got everyone in the room to start chanting, until I got up there and played a song.”
His potential as a musician was solidified when he received a Facebook message from a local fashion designer who had seen his impromptu performance and offered him 150 Euros to play music during a local fashion show. “Drinks were on me that night,” he recalls with a laugh. “That just changed my whole life.”
Along the way, Godwin has slowly, deliberately built his career, playing shows, and drawing fans with his burly vocal and nuanced writing style. But not long after the release of How the Mighty Fall, Godwin began facing new pressures as labels began sniffing around.
“I was having a hard time dealing with it, to be honest,” he recalls. “I was in a funk for a handful of months. I was trying to get back to writing songs, spending each morning going into the woodshed, kind of writing garbage but just trying my best. A bunch of labels wanted to hear what I was working on, even though I had just come out with an album. It threw me off because I had two albums out at that point and was selling tickets all around the country. To me, I was not a risk, yet folks were still kind of wanting to cherry-pick whether I had ‘it’ or not.”
He recalls that it took him “a few months to get my head around that, and be confident again. I had all these guys depending on me, my family. I want to keep growing on their behalf, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care if a label worked out or not.”
A heart-to-heart with his father offered perspective. “He said, ‘All you have control over is the pen in your hand and the notebook in front of you. Everything else will happen in time if it’s meant to be.’ It helped me to shake all that stuff off.’”
The next morning, Godwin wrote “Two Weeks Gone,” start to finish; the song served as a launching point for what became Family Ties. “I just thought, ‘Okay, how about I just go within myself and write what’s personal to me? I’m gonna write about my family this year.’ I ended up having one of the best writing years of my life last year, and that led to the album.”
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Earlier this year, he released the EP Live From the Church, recorded at The Church studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He recorded Family Ties at Echo Mountain Recording, an old Asheville, North Carolina church building that was remodeled into a recording studio and has since become a go-to recording center for artists including The Avett Brothers (Godwin was inspired to record there thanks to the 2017 The Avett Brothers documentary May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers).
“I always wondered what it would be like to get to record in a place like that,” Godwin says. “This time around, I finally had the opportunity and resource to do it. And in a practical sense, the main room is so big — and they have so many iso booths — that all of us were able to record live to tape at the same time. It was a best-case scenario to work in that studio.”
He also nods to his roots with “Cue Country Roads” and cover of the John Denver classic “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which he performs to close every show. Godwin says he recorded it with the blessing of the manager of Denver’s estate. “He and his son came out to Red Rocks when I played there in May,” he says. “They said they loved it and wanted to do whatever they can to help, because they view it as kind of helping the song reach the next generation.”
The label issues resolved themselves, too; in March, Big Loud, home to artists including Morgan Wallen, HARDY, and Hailey Whitters, announced it had signed Godwin. Family Ties was completed before he signed his label deal.
“We made the album in January and handed it in to them and they said, ‘We love it,’ and that was it. There was no helicoptering over making the album or anything,” Godwin says.
Godwin spent much of this year opening for Zach Bryan’s Burn, Burn, Burn Tour and will join Luke Combs’ 2024 summer stadium tour. But before then, he will continue with the house of worship-turned-house of music conduit when he headlines two shows at Nashville’s own Mother Church, the Ryman Auditorium on Dec. 7-8.
“I’m just very grateful for the people that connect with my music,” Godwin says. “It’s amazing just how diehard they are and it’s going to be a really special couple of nights.”
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Final nominees for the 57th CMA Awards will be announced Thursday at 8 a.m. ET. It’s been an exceptional year for country music, with artists like Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs dominating the pop and country charts. Newer acts like Zach Bryan and Oliver Anthony Music have seemingly come out of nowhere to top the charts […]
In this week’s batch of new country music, bluegrass luminaries Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle team up for a sterling collaboration, while Brian Kelley, Carter Faith, Larry Fleet, Jobi Riccio, and more also offer new tunes.
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Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle, “Listen to the Radio”
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Two of bluegrass music’s greatest forces team up on this tender cover of a Nanci Griffith classic. Tuttle takes the lead here, her sweet vocals capturing hints of Griffith’s vocal stylings, with Strings offering plaintive harmonies as they sing of a young girl who chases the strains of Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard flowing from her radio. Shimmering, virtuosic mandolin and guitar wrap around this dreamy outing. Both Strings and Tuttle (the latter with her Golden Highway band) are nominated for International Bluegrass Music Association’s top honors this year.
Brian Kelley, “Dirt Cheap”
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Written by Andy Sheridan, Seth Ennis and Wyatt McCubbin, with production by Dann Huff, Kelley’s latest solo effort finds him veering toward a vocal with heavier twang, backed by plenty of banjo and steel guitar.
On “Dirt Cheap,” he contemplates trading the hustle of city life for more time spent on a porch swing or by the pond, in a rural community and celebrating life with those he loves. Though lyrically, the song falls squarely in line with a plethora of other songs on country radio that celebrate rural living, this song marks a welcome change from his hip-hop-flecked FGL days, but Kelley’s vocal feels more relaxed and right at home on this radio-friendly track.
Tyler Braden, “Friends”
Braden follows his breakthrough songs — including “Try Losing One” and “Little Red Wine” — with “Friends,” written by Brent Anderson, Randy Montana and Lynn Hutton. The song finds Braden unfurling his true hurt and skepticism when an ex-lover wants to continue being friends, and act as though their deeper relationship never happened. Braden’s dusty, acid-fueled rendering conveys all the sarcasm, pain and bewilderment of the song’s essence, furthered heightened by rock-propelled production.
Carter Faith, “Carolina Burns”
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“I still wear a grudge like a f–ked up crown,” Faith sings, offering a sharp-witted elegy for a past relationship — one still seared into her memory, even as her ex-lover has long since left the emotional ashes behind. Faith wrote this track with Lauren Hungate and Tofer Brown, with Brown also handling the song’s dreamy, soft-focus production. Faith’s lilting, summery vocals soothe her bone-deep observations, in a convergence of country, pop and Americana elements that’s uniquely her own.
Larry Fleet, Earned It EP
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Fleet issues his third studio project, with 21 tracks of smooth, ’80s and ’90s country-influenced songs that touch on spirituality, loss, love, barrooms, youthful revelries and hard-earned wisdom and gratitude. He takes saw-dusted romantic chances in “There’s a Waylon,” laces a fiddle-and-piano jam-band vibe around late-night vibes in “Taking the Long Way,” and recalls midnights spent covertly soaking in soul-saving classic rock in “Devil Music.” Fleet is a writer on nearly every track on the project, further cementing his imposing talents as both songcrafter and vocalist, with a style that delves into blues, rock and retro-country with ease.
Jobi Riccio, “Sweet”
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Riccio, the winner of the 2023 John Prine Songwriter Fellowship at Newport Folk, releases a new album, Whiplash, this month via Yep Roc Records. On “Sweet,” Riccio dabbles with a “Sweet Home Alabama” groove, but vocally inhabits an insouciance towards changing personality traits or personal preferences to please a lover — or anyone else, for that matter.
Bryan Martin, “We Ride”
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Martin’s “We Ride,” which he wrote with Vernon Brown (with production from Nick Gibbens), currently resides just outside the top 40 on the Hot Country Songs chart, and is included on Martin’s 2023 album Poets and Old Souls. Here, his grizzly vocal soars over lyrics that pair perspective on everyday struggles on lines including “Hard to make a living while the gas is so high,” with a rock-seared, ramblin’-man sense of defiance and honesty — all elements that are finding popularity within the ever-expanding country music genre, in songs from artists including HARDY, Jelly Roll and Oliver Anthony.
