1. Courtney Marie Andrews Old Flowers
Courtney Marie Andrews’ last album, 2018’s critically-acclaimed May Your Kindness Remain, was an unsparing but tender exploration of her experience with depression. This year, she brought the same honest and compassionate songwriting to the recent end of her 9-year relationship. Old Flowers follows the narrative arc of a break-up: the first realisation of loving someone else in ‘Guilty’; the acceptance that there is no going back on the title track (‘You can’t water old flowers’); and finally, the neutral verdict of the closing track ‘Ships in the Night’, where Andrews concludes ‘I know we felt the same way/But the timing wasn’t right’.
With just 10 tracks, there is no filler – every song is exquisitely turned and essential to the whole. They range from quietly meditative ‘If I Told’, pedal-steel stomp ‘It Must Be Someone Else’s Fault’ and raw pain on ‘Carnival Dream’, which Andrews has revealed was inspired by a real dream that she and her ex had about searching for each other at a carnival. A dreamlike quality knits the album together, enhanced through the soft production and Andrews’ ethereal voice, occasionally double-tracked for extra intensity. Old Flowers is a wistful, but firm, goodbye.
2. Margo Price That’s how Rumors Get Started
In 2020, Margo Price continued her long-standing role – alongside husband Jeremy Ivey – as the conscience of country music. She declared Black Lives Matter at the Opry, consistently criticised the Trump administration’s Covid response, and called out this year’s CMAs for their whiteness and recklessness in holding an indoors ceremony as the pandemic surged. Alongside all of this, she released her long-awaited third solo album, three years after the excellent All American Made.
What struck me on first listen was the sound – rockier and grittier than the more traditional sound of her previous albums. Every song feels like a different sonic experiment, from the almost new-wave ‘Heartless Mind’ to the gospel ‘Prisoner of the Highway’ (which reminded me of Maren Morris’ ‘My Church’). To a greater extent than her first two solo albums, Price pushes at the boundaries of the country genre itself.
While Price’s lyrics have always traversed the line between personal and political, this time the personal and political interact less through straightforward narrative, and more through abstractions and metaphors. In ‘Hey Child’, surely inspired by the birth of her third child in June 2019, Price expresses a mother’s worry for her child’s safety, whilst also alluding to the broader burden being left on future generations: ‘Don’t you know your future’s almost gone’. The album concludes with ‘I Would Die for You’, which sounds like nothing else coming out of country right now. The song paints a bleak picture of poverty, discrimination and environmental devastation – but in the midst of it all, Price finds sustenance and resistance in the act of love.
3. JS Ondara Folk n’ Roll Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation
Arguably the country album which engaged most successfully with the effects of months of quarantine was by JS Ondara, the Nairobi-hailing songwriter who moved to the USA seven years ago. His Folk n’ Roll Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation (sadly Vol. 2 is yet to materialise) has an unmistakeable DIY quality – on ‘Shower Song’, he literally records in his shower, bringing a whole new dimension and intimacy to the home studio.
Ondara’s lyrics are wry and impressionistic (he has cited Bob Dylan as an influence), replete with Zoom references to Zoom and tuneful aphorisms – ‘I’ve already seen Tiger King three times though’. On ‘Hey Mr Landlord’, he jokes ‘If I bake you a cake/Will it help you forget/that I haven’t paid my rent?’, although beneath the humour is a serious commentary on the dire state of the music industry. The repeated mantra ‘Mother I don’t usually curse but I’m so fucking bored’ on ‘Isolation Boredom Syndrome (followed by ‘Isolation Depression Syndrome’ and ‘Isolation Blues’) will resonate with anyone confined indoors this year.
While the relevance of such quarantine albums is unclear in a post-Covid world, Ondara’s masterpiece ‘Pyramid Justice’ will linger on as an excoriating critique of those who adopt social justice activism as a cool trend. Comparing various causes to a ‘new suit’, he observes caustically ‘when the suit starts wearing out… You will lose again your sight of what’s wrong and what’s right’. As the news cycle moves on, and some of the public momentum behind Black Lives Matter fades, Ondara warns us against ‘pyramid justice, only when the suit fits’.
4. Mickey Guyton Bridges
Country music has never significantly acknowledged its historic debt to black musicians and their music, while systemically overlooking black country musicians in the present. There has been arguably an element of the latter in the career of Mickey Guyton: after attracting attention for her powerhouse vocals and eye for a hook on 2015 single ‘Better Than You Left Me’, Guyton has only sporadically released singles and the occasional EP since.
Perhaps it was personal frustrations, combined with the energy of anti-racist protests this year, that spurred Guyton to throw a grenade – in the form of her EP Bridges – into the heart of the country establishment. Of the six songs, ‘What Are You Gonna Tell Her?’ and ‘Black Like Me’ are particularly striking. The raw ‘What Are You Gonna Tell Her?’ echoes other recent engagements with sexism by country artists, including Little Big Town’s ‘The Daughters’. But in a move which subtly critique her peers’ blindness to race, Guyton emphasises how racism and sexism together impact black girls and women. The song’s structure, a series of questions, leaves the listener with no easy answers, but demands they continue to think about these thorny issues.
‘Black Like Me’ is a genuine landmark moment in country music history. The melody is elegant, the vocals immaculate, but it is the lyrics that stand out with searing clarity. Guyton traces a story from childhood (‘Broke my heart on the playground/when they said I was different’) to a present reality where it is still ‘just white painted picket fences far as you can see’. The chorus ends with the powerful couplet: ‘If you think we live in the land of the free/You should try to be black like me’. ‘Black Like Me’ feels like just the beginning; hopefully next year will see the release of a long-overdue debut album.
5. Ashley McBryde Never Will
The stratospheric rise of Ashley McBryde – from the ‘basement dives and county fairs’ described in her debut single ‘Girl Goin’ Nowhere’, to that very song being nominated for ‘Best Country Song’ at the Grammys – was an unmissable story in 2018. In her second album, the song ‘Sparrow’ is almost a sequel to Girl Goin’ Nowhere, as McBryde reflects on being ‘higher than you’ve ever been’ and also ‘lonely like you never been’.
But thankfully success, and acceptance by the country establishment, has not changed her. The defiant attitude that characterised her debut is directed at religious busybodies in ‘Shut up Sheila’, where McBryde contends ‘We don’t sing “Amazing Grace”/We don’t read from the Bible/We just go about letting go in our way’. Even more pointedly, the title track ‘Never Will’ sees McBryde rejecting the possibility of ever ‘sell[ing] out’: she declares pointedly ‘I’d been gone long ago if I’d listened/To what they were sayin’’.
Never Will has the same deft storytelling as its predecessor, but this time layered over a more adventurous sound. ‘Martha Divine’ is a murder ballad in the country tradition infused with unstoppable rock energy. Along with ‘One Night Standards’ and ‘Hang in There Girl’, ‘Martha Divine’ forms a glorious cinematic sequence, which fittingly has its own accompanying music video series. You can bet the next chapter will be even more exciting.
Girls Like Us 