This is the track list for Freedom in a Broken Heart, a mix of contemporary country music made for Jay Thompson on January 27, 2023. It is the fourth mixtape in the 42/40 Explorer Series Box Set.
Brent Cobb, Solving Problems — from the album Shine On Rainy Day (2016)
Miranda Lambert, Runnin’ Just In Case — from the album The Weight of These Wings (2016)
Turnpike Troubadours, Good Lord Lorrie — from the album Goodbye Normal Street (2012)
Brandy Clark, Big Day in a Small Town — from the album Big Day in a Small Town (2016)
Margo Price, About to Find Out — from the album Midwest Farmer’s Daughter (2016)
(Intermission — 30 Seconds Silence — flip over the tape)
Charley Crockett, The Valley — from the album The Valley (2019)
Reba McEntire, Swing All Night Long With You — from the album Stronger Than the Truth (2019)
Tyler Childers, All Your’n — from the album Country Squire (2019)
Cody Jinks, The Wanting — from the album The Wanting (2019)
John Anderson, Wild & Free — from the album Years (2020)
Contemporary country music, from Nashville in particular, is for me an archipelago of darkness. There is little there that I have the courage to venture through, and I’m generally grateful that my visits to its little islands of pain are brief. At the same time, I enjoy country music and some of its adjacent genres as long as the music is not too heavily commercial in its sound and subject matter. As a result, I continue making brief visits to the area. Any visit is a compromise, but compromise typically yields something useful for its maker.
*
Brent Cobb’s porch sounds like hell to me. I wouldn’t like to sit and talk about the things he and his friend talk about — but I love sitting and talking with a friend. Even on a porch.
*
Eastbound and Down and highways through Alabama are a combo I can’t stomach. But there is freedom in a broken heart, happiness isn’t prison, and a slow-burning storm of guitars always feels welcoming to me.
*
Should I be saying “and” instead of “but”? Turnpike Troubadours tap into the mainline of family-based masculinity with a side of alcohol and they have a ramshackle singalong sound that delivers the huge choruses promised and desired.
*
Big Day in a Small Town offers detached ironic humor about small-town country life and it has one of the best guitar hooks of the 21st Century’s first quarter.
*
Margo Price went on to become Nashville-integral and on About to Find Out she’s righteously badass putting Nashville music industry creeps in their properly underfoot place.
*
A nice thing about an archipelago is it takes breaks — there is open water between the islands.
*
Charley Crockett — well, it kinda turns out that there isn’t much of a downside here. No real compromises. This is just an all-around excellent male country singer. It’s hard to believe.
*
I’ve been disliking contemporary country music for so long that I distinctly remember disliking Reba McEntire in the early nineties, and this is a Reba McEntire song that throws back to a sound from well before the nineties.
*
It turns out All Your’n is probably the most widely-liked song I’ve put on a mixtape since, I don’t know, Halo? And, it has a real revival feeling, complete with plaintive melodies, piano, and fiddle.
*
Cody Jinks sure sounds like an asshole, and the simple ascending pattern of his melody makes me swoon basically.
*
John Anderson is proof that if you hang around long enough you get weathered and worn. Declaring that you’re wild and free at seventy has a better ring to it than doing the same thing when you’re thirty.
*
The primary test of a country or country-adjacent song, in my eyes, is whether it’s fun to sing and play on guitar with kids. Each of these songs meets that criteria, and because my kids got ahold of this mixtape and liked it, it’s the one of these forty-two that I’ve listened to the most regularly in the past two years. Seems I’ve reached at least a moderate compromise with one edge of the archipelago.
Share this post