I used to love music more than maybe anything. I absolutely lived for live music, especially. Then something happened. Probably it was a crappy relationship that threw everything off for awhile and it just stayed that way, maybe it was also drinking too much and desensitizing myself to the world, maybe it is simply what happens as you reach your your 30s, but I just stopped caring about music at all for awhile. Maybe I’d leave the radio on in the car as background noise, and one or two years stick out to me where I was really into whatever music was on the radio that summer or whatever, but usually I’d put on a podcast or an audiobook or NPR. For awhile, after I got sick of hearing people talk all the time but still wasn’t interested in music, I wanted to hear something else, so I put on the classical station. That stuck for awhile. I still couldn’t tell you what any of the composer’s names are or what any of the pieces are called other than that one piece I was obsessed with for awhile by Dmitri Shostakovich, but I liked it. Songs with lyrics suddenly felt like corny foreign pop music to me, no matter the genre.
Then, Huntley won The Voice.
I was out of state visiting family over Christmas break this past year and also house-sitting for some friends. Meanwhile, my Facebook feed was blowing up with all the local Fredericksburg pages I follow crowing about Huntley, a local musician who had been performing very well on The Voice and had just won the competition, and how everyone was so proud. I hadn’t watched The Voice or a show like it in maybe a decade and I didn’t have anything specific to do at night over at my friends’ house, so I decided to look him up.
I spent the rest of my week at the house binging the entire season of The Voice on Peacock, re-watching all of his performances several times after I finished it — especially this one, which I am pretty sure I can literally feel in my bones when he sings it.
I don’t know how or why this random ass dude basically musically rewired my entire brain by singing other people’s songs on a national stage, but I was instantly mesmerized. The hair and his sheer enormous presence certainly had something to do with it, but that voice, the power behind it, my god. I vowed to see him as often as possible once I got home. I’ve seen him three times since and met him a couple times. I just deleted several sentences of obnoxious starstruck fangirling about it. You’re welcome.
Because you can’t hear all of his original music on albums or anywhere other than YouTube and what’s randomly shared on social media yet, here is the one and only original song of his that he’s recorded and released so far. I absolutely love seeing all the familiar downtown Fredericksburg scenery. And the man bun. I go to that coffee shop, too!
Interestingly, for reasons I do not know, he rarely performs this song live.
Since then, I started using Spotify for my yoga class playlists, and through Spotify I’ve found so much more music and many more artists to obsess over while I anxiously await Huntley’s first album. Here is some of it.
Charles Wesley Godwin has an old-fashioned country sound — like, really old-fashioned, not like the very-produced stuff usually on country music radio (although I’m pretty sure he’s also on the radio) and an absolutely magical and unique voice, and every one of the songs of his that I’ve heard evokes such deep emotion in me. Looking up this video, I realized I’d never seen it and only heard the song. Well, that made me tear up. Here’s another of my favorites by him that you may even recognize. If you’re anything like me, it will also cause tears, but not the happy kind. Again, my first time seeing the video, and now I know the whole story and kind of wish I didn’t:
And now we move on to Zach Bryan.
Zach Bryan is an interesting guy. He was set to be a Navy guy for life until one of his random Twitter iPhone videos went viral. The Navy said it was a conflict of interest and that he had to leave the military to go sing. So he did. They discharged him honorably, like Elvis.
Zach Bryan has captured my ears because of the emotional depth of his songwriting and the vulnerability of his music — and poetry, which he includes in a few songs and albums.
Here’s another one. Ouch, my heart.
If you aren’t sick of videos that’ll make you cry yet, take a look at this one by HARDY, featuring Laine Wilson:
This song is an outlier here, because I only heard this song for the first time this morning in the car, halfway over. I didn’t hear the whole thing until I looked up the video for this post. But oh boy, I know I’ll be listening to it a lot more after this.
HARDY is kinda new, but also not. He’s been a songwriter for some of the biggest country music acts for awhile now, but only fairly recently started performing himself. The first of his songs that I heard was Truck Bed, which gave me immediate “Bartender Song (Sittin’ At A Bar)” by Rehab vibes. I thought it was hilarious. I mean, it is:
That’s not even the most hilarious one, though. “Rednecker” pretty much wins that one:
HARDY stands out to me because he and a bunch of others coming up in country right now are so… hipster. I mean yeah, he looks redneck(er than you), but also, I’m pretty sure we have the same glasses.
I’ve talked about Huntley and how he’s local to me, but I just found out that one of my current favorite country songs at the moment is also by a nearby artist: Shaboozey, from Woodbridge, Virginia, where I did my yoga teacher training and buy my weed:
Listen, I fucking love country and rap hybrids. It’s my favorite thing. You know how, at least back in the day, if you asked someone what kind of music they were into, they’d often say something like, “oh, I like pretty much everything — except country and rap.”
Well, friends, my answer to that question would be, “country and rap, that’s pretty much it.”
Back to Huntley. I mean, Chris Stapleton, to whom Huntley was constantly compared on The Voice because of his raspy voice. Huntley is the primary reason I started listening to Chris Stapleton, and now I cannot get enough of the man.
If you did still want to cry, here’s another one by Chris Stapleton that I didn’t know was actually really fucking sad as fuck until I watched the video:
Like so many other notable country artists, Chris Stapleton started off writing songs for other artists until he decided to perform his own and became everyone’s favorite guy. Even people who don’t like country music like Chris Stapleton. I hear lots of “now that’s what country music is supposed to sound like” when I play him around people who make it a loud point to never listen to country music on purpose.
Speaking of which, are you sick of country yet? Here’s some Hozier.
I always liked Hozier’s sound, but I hadn’t listened to him in quite awhile. Until Huntley covered the chorus of this song on Instagram, of course, at which point I went directly to Spotify to play the whole thing. My poor, patient husband is very, very sick of this song right now.
I have nothing to say about this brief and beautiful clip other than various unintelligible animal noises.
Speaking of artists with whom I have a nonsensical and probably unhealthy parasocial relationship, check out my deeply disturbed alcoholic little brother I’ve never met, Morgan Wallen, who needs to stop drinking and getting into toxic ass relationships. Then again, what else would he sing about?
I don’t know why I love this song so much, but I can’t get enough of it. Everything he sings is so goddamn catchy as hell, and I am fascinated by the fact that he was cancelled a few years ago and yet pretty much never lost his superstardom or fan base despite paying (sometimes literally) various professional consequences. His fans fucking love him. I get it. It took a while to choose a song to post here, because half the time I just tell Spotify or Alexa to play him, period, because I know I’ll like just about every song I hear. Same with Chris Stapleton.
Here’s a guy that I thought was Morgan Wallen at first, but then discovered was not. Sounds like I’m about to have another new fave to add to the list, though:
I typed “Wine Into Whiskey” into the YouTube search bar. The first suggested search term was “wine into whiskey morgan wallen.” See? I’m not the only one. He’s also got that redneck-hipster vibe going on. Just needs some black plastic glasses and he could be HARDY’s twin brother.
Then there’s Bailey Zimmerman, another guy with a wiggly Charles Wesley Godwin-like voice that makes me tingle. His songs have an interesting quality, too: many of them are so blatantly religious, but without being that gross and annoying contemporary Christian music, or even gospel. I guess country music does that a lot. This, though, is a heartstring-puller. The raw emotion in his voice gets me every time:
Then he’s got one of those fun “first time I had sex” songs. Again, lots of religion, lots of emotion:
Well, I think that about sums up what I’ve been listening to lately. Tell me what you’ve been listening to in the comments!