This is the most beautiful song I've ever heard - and it's country
okay
okay
what in the actual fuck
so i'm a southern boy myself. ever since i was a little kid my mom tried so hard to make me into a little cowboy. i was bought cowboy boots, cowboy hats, and boot-cut blue jeans. even at my young toddler age, i detested all of it lmao.
i was always a city boy.
i loved the idea of big cities like new york, los angeles, chicago, etc. hell, i even fantasized about spending my days in dallas of all places when i was in school daydreaming.
my music tastes trended as far alternative as my style in clothes and girls - in middle school i listened to everything from Shinedown to Disturbed to A Day to Remember to Dimmu Borgir (spooky!)
when i was in higschool - everything from showtunes (Phantom of the Opera) to Eminem to more metal (We Butter The Bread With Butter) to indie rock (Mumford and Sons)
but never in my life was country even a blip on my radar.
sure there were one or two songs you pick up that you get to know like
"Pretty Good at Drinking Beer" x Billy Currington
(my stepdad is a country musician. it's hard not to pick up something here and there.)
but
i just discovered a new genre of music (new to me).
i just discovered a new sound.
i just discovered my new favorite song.
and it's country.
Hank Williams III - "Ghost to a Ghost"
like oh my God
i just earlier this week discovered something called "Outlaw Country". i'd somehow managed to go my whole life without ever coming into contact with this.
will you listen to this fucking song??
it's the same classic country instruments that we've heard for decades.
paired with dark, angsty, grungy, emo lyrics.
with an incredibly metal breakdown serving as the chorus.
with a terrifically orchestral and bluesy viola/violin backing the entire song.
WHAT IN TARNATION!?
why did no one ever tell me there was an entire subgenre of emo cowboys running around talking about sleeping on the blacktop, relationship struggles, and popping hella pills
i now listen to country music and i'm never admitting it to my parents lmao.
if you didn't catch the link earlier, this song is a fucking work of art and literally brought me from awe to tears to fuck yeah! all in the span of six minutes in public in this cafe.
i think i've looped it back 7-8 times in a row now.
i'm floored.
what did you lot think?
do you listen to outlaw country?
please pass on any recommendations you have
My folks were heavy into country, so I grew up hearing everything from Hank to Johnny to Willie to fucking Eddy Arnold. I have a soft spot for new music in old styles like that. If it's recommendations you're looking for, I can drop quite a few gems for you to check out.
Let's start with the modern poster boy for this stuff, Shakey Graves.. You would probably also dig on Townes Van Zandt. Look into Marty Stuart, Nathaniel Rateliff, Marty O'Reilly, Sam Amidon, Tom Waits, Ben Caplan, Sturgill Simpson for starters. Based on what you dig out of that set I can probably rep quite a few more.
The channels for Audiotree and JamInTheVan and NPR Music feature a hell of a lot of this sort of music. You'll find literally hundreds of artists to taste in just those three channels. There's also a fuck-ton of overlap nowdays between folk, country, blues, soul, jazz, and bluegrass - one gigantic ever-swirling pot of American-influenced styles. Odds are if you can find some stuff to love in one of them, you'll find plenty in the others. I have a hunch you might dig on the heavy blues.
Don't forget Blaze Foley and T Bone Burnett
Hey, less of that "fucking Eddy Arnold"! My mother had one of his albums when I was a kid, and (many) years later I still love that voice. Maybe it helps that my parents weren't as much into country as yours, so I didn't get tired of it. Maybe I just have a higher cheese tolerance.
I just pulled up Arnold's discography and holy cow, for someone you never hear about any more, he had a lot of albums. Some of the singles' titles are making me cringe, I'll confess.
Countrypolitain grates on me a bit - not the style, but the mindless marketing machine that basically swallowed an entire generation of country singers, chained them into a room with an orchestra, and then forced them to all cover the same two or three hundred songs for two decades. There's good music in that mess, but it's hard to find with so much overproduced schlock slathered over everyone's albums.
I'm always a little surprised to hear people call Eddy Arnold a country artist. I realize that's how he's categorized, but I think of him as an easy-listening singer, a crooner, and for that category I'd expect an orchestra and people sharing the same old material. If I want real country music there are hundreds of artists I'd choose ahead of Arnold.
Hah--this song is pretty badass. I do like some country (not really much of the pop country stuff), but I've never heard any country quite like this. Thanks for sharing it.
This reminded me a little bit of Johnny Dowd (not the metal part, but the vocals and the overall theme of the music)--you should check him out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z9YrMfvWq0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drMSPgPR1ZA
Hm, gotta take the opportunity to plug my favorite country song, River Take Me by Darrell Scott: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=svS6MwQ5mBY . It's got great lyrics and virtuoso guitar playing, and I can listen to it all day.
It sounds like an awkward clash of two different widely different genres of very different cultural backgrounds. I have to ask questions like: does the metal sound earn the country sound? And visa versa. I'm not totally convinced shoehorning metal vocals/instrumentation into the chorus makes a song any more serious, visceral or earnest. I think the lyrics fall flat too; country is a genre usually built by its gorgeous story telling - I'm not taken anywhere by this song, and lyrics feel like poetry for poetry sake.
To each their own. I'm not expert on either sound. It's wonderful to hear you've discovered something that's resonated with you so much.
I adore a great deal of the examples other users have listed here.
Since leaving Curb Records and operating independently (read: without the oversight of someone concerned about sales potential and/or production quality) Hank III's records have taken a major turn for the worse.
He caught lightning in a bottle with the album Straight to Hell, and issued a mostly solid follow-up with Damn Right, Rebel Proud, but now it seems like he's more concerened with being edgy than actually developing his ideas. Ever since Ghost to a Ghost/Gutter Town, it's profanity for profanity's sake, shoehorned metal breaks, and downright fatiguing production. Brothers of the 4x4 is the last album I heard from him, and I couldn't make it past the second track before just completely giving up.
I do not like the mix of metal in this, but to each their own. I remember reading an interview in Rolling Stone with HWIII where he was talking about attending his father's funeral tripping on acid - so not your mom and dad's country music for sure.
The whole things reminds me A LOT of Tom Waits, which is funny because there is even some footage of Waits cut into the video. I then went back and read the title and realized that he's doing the backing vocals.
Tom Waits isn't Outlaw Country, or Country at all, he's just Waits. You should really check him out. His works spans so many genres, but this is probably a good starting place for what you're looking for:
Big in Japan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVdfDoXHdZc
Telephone Call from Istanbul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g8eRnks9bM&index=21&list=RDFVdfDoXHdZc
16 Shells from a Thirty-ought-six
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XLdxxJEB80&index=7&list=RDFVdfDoXHdZc
Lastly, I wanted to point you to "Saddle in the Rain" by John Prine. His stuff is more traditional country but that song gets me and is all electric - and the lyrics are tremendous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYtMfGicPnc
"Downtown Train" from Rain Dogs is my favorite "sad" waits song, and maybe my favorite "sad" song ever.
My intro to Waits was "The Heart of Saturday Night" which I love but "Mule Variations" came out during a pivotal time in my life so that's always been my favorite. The broadway show he did is just all kinds of fantastic, immortalized on his album "Big Time." That's one to check out.
EDIT: "Way Down in the Hole" from Big Time. My god that man can preach!
I may or may not have a youtube mix going atm...
Only other artists that could subsume me into their little worlds so effortlessly as Waits does are Zappa and Oldfield. Waits has this impossible haunting sound that exists somewhere between the bar, the back alley, and the graveyard, with all the wisdom and pain of those places woven throughout his lyrics.