Last I saw Willie Nelson, on the Outlaw Music Festival tour, he gave well-earned solo space to son Lukas Nelson, who just released his first solo album. It’s high time. Dude’s a lifelong utility player — rock solid on guitar and vocals with the family band, while Willie circles the beat, and a team player with frequent Neil Young backing crew Promise of the Real. He’s become a go-to duet partner, notably with fellow next-gen icon Sierra Ferrell. Ferrell’s cameo on Nelson’s new American Romance is “Friend in the End,” a song about a bond that can see us through darkness, until “the clouds blew south/And the rain thinned out/And the sky was all sunlight again.” It’s a timely metaphor, and a good example of country’s ability to mirror how America sees itself, accurately or wishfully.
Nelson has said the album title refers to his romance with the nation. The album’s deepest song, “The Lie,” is a laundry list of cultural hogwash. “Come here, kid/Here’s a story for you/You’re defined by what you do/ No one ever made it stayin’ home with the kids/And if you ain’t winnin’/You ain’t worth shit,” describing an American mindset that can turn a “simple soul” into a “spinning black hole.” But American Romance also celebrates national beauty, pride, and wonder.
Hailey Whitters broadcast her storytelling skill on The Dream in 2020, and her knack for rebooting country clichés got sharpened on 2022’s Raised. With Corn Queen, she supersizes it all into what should prove the most giddily virtuosic country album of the year. Stuart Duncan, Charlie Worsham, Justin Moses, and clawhammer guitar hero Molly Tuttle bring instrumental flash, and it serves songs that are poignant and hilarious by turns. When Tuttle and Whitters lean into the chorus of “Prodigal Daughter” — “Holy smoke and holy water/From doe-eyed girl to prodigal daughter/Did a devil’s dance to a fiddle in a holler/This angel’s hell on the heavenly Father” — it’s as fun as an old-time fall-from-grace gets. Corn Queen shows how modern country can celebrate tradition without being a macho flex or a cultural bulwark. It can just be a playground: for camp cosplay, strutting your stuff, and partying with friends.
Which doesn’t mean Whitters can’t go deep. She’s a versatile writer, assisted here by Hillary Lindsey and Shane McAnally, among others. “Casseroles” is a weeper about a widower that interrogates how we care for grieving friends. “I Don’t Want You,” with Charles Wesley Godwin, joins a mini trend in thoughtfully dysfunctional duets. But Whitters is most winning when the lyrical liquor flows — see “Loose Strings” and “Fillin’ My Cup” — and “Shotgun Wedding Baby” is the mic drop here. Any family history that begins “Eighteen don’t know shit from Shinola/Well thank God my daddy had Crown in his cola” has our unshakable respect.
Anderson East is another master craftsman, one whose concept of country leans into the old-school Southern R&B sounds Chris Stapleton reanimated in the genre’s mainstream. With Dave Cobb co-producing, East really goes in on Worthy, paying matter-of-fact homage to Otis Redding against dukes-up Stax/Volt horn arrangements, or conjuring Roy Orbison (“Say I Love You”) in orchestral pop settings that might’ve pleased George Martin. The writing shines, with assists from Lori McKenna (“Chasing”) and Trent Dabbs, wingman on East’s 2021 profound pandemic journey, Maybe We Never Die (he also co-wrote “High Horse” with Kacey Musgraves). In the vein of Jim Ford and Tony Joe White, East’s voice is fully formed here, twining country rootstock with soul and gospel so tightly that the traditions feel inseparable, and rightly so.
The head turner on Kelsey Waldon’s haunting new album is “Falling Down,” a first-person character study of hard drinking that’s a shade darker than Whitters’ approach. “My wife is gone, and my kids are grown/And I don’t talk to them no more,” Waldon sings with a plainspoken, gut-punching lilt. But Every Ghost is a survivor’s journey, from the doom-scroll sorrow of “Nursery Rhyme” to “Lost in My Idlin’,” a Hank Williams update with a tattoo-ready “wishin’ I was fucked up in some honky-tonk” chorus. The set comes via John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, and Waldon proves herself worthy of his truth-talking legacy. And for the record: Your American-flag decal still won’t get you into heaven.
