This week, the Country Music Dads welcome Nathan Evans Fox to the podcast. He is a Nashville-based country music artist and dad with a fascinating new album on the way. He explores his own country upbringing. Using traditional themes of land, hard work and faith, he approaches his music and life from the political left, in a space considered very conservative. Fox’s album Heirloom is out May 29 on Free Dirt Records. 

Show Notes:

3:12 – A discussion of “Lots of Beginnings” brings the conversation to the very end of the album, as Nathan explains the process of losing his dad and becoming one in the same year — and how he landed on the title of the Heirloom album. And we dive deep into family right away. 

6:00 – Nathan’s connection to family, family land and the family system, is deeply connected to his political understanding. His understanding is wildly personal, tactile and real. The family land allowed him to know his extended family through his universe of ghosts — and it still looms large in his experience even after the family sold it. 

9:50 – Growing up very weird and country go hand in hand with Nathan’s experience. 

10:50 – A feeling of home vs enjoying where you live. Nathan and the dads talk about how to create a home. Grief, economics and complications. 

12:10 – His time as a hospital chaplain exposed Nathan to the full range of emotions of those at the hardest points in their lives, forcing him to radically listen. These experiences drove him to be more explicit about the need for his music to become more message-driven. It also put his life as an artist in perspective. 

15:50 – Going viral with “Hillby Hymn” and bringing liberation theology to country music fans, and how Nathan became many folks’ favorite worship leader. 

18:51 – Understanding how to square yourself to the cultural dominance of Christianity in the bible belt, and how this language can be used as a vernacular poetic experience, one that helps folks accept something they don’t expect. 

25:48 – “We belong and we feel, well before we think or form ideologies,” Nathan said. And we should likely get back to knowing our neighbors and caring. 

26:35 – A discussion of Nathan’s music feels a bit like contemporary Christian music, suggested Dave. And Nathan felt called out. 

28:45 – Talking about “Racecar” and its place within contemporary country music, or as Nathan calls it, “Butthole Country Music.” Dave and Nathan geek out about Bro Country and how “Racecar” references “Dirt Road Anthem” for tone. Yet the topic of this song is anything but traditional — in fact, it’s pretty divisive. The guys jump into the question of politics of it all.

34:24 – The Dad Life Sound Check featuring songs from Roger Miller, Ryan Bingham and Corb Lund & Hayes Carll.  

Thank you for listening. The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or whatever podcast platform you use. If you want to see new episodes and more content delivered straight to your email inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter: countrymusicdads.substack.com. You can find everything we do on our website: countrymusicdads.com. And we’d love to hear what you think, so send us comments, suggestions, friendly banter on Instagram @countrymusicdads, or via email countrymusicdads@gmail.com.

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Liberation Theology
• The book about how country music was created to divide people is Creating Country Music: Fabricating Country Music
• Nathan Evans Fox’s substack

References/Songs:

• Theme Music: “Dark Country Rock” by Moodmode
• Lots of Beginnings by Nathan Evans Fox
• I Know the End by Nathan Evans Fox (out May 29)
• Hillbilly Hymn (Okra & Cigarettes) by Nathan Evans Fox
• Racecar by Nathan Evans Fox (out May 29)
• Dirt Road Anthem by Jason Aldean
• Do-Wacka-Do by Roger Miller
• Americana by Ryan Bingham and The Texas Gentlemen
• Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old) by Corb Lund & Hayes Carll

Transcript

This week on Country Music Dads, we welcome Nathan Evans Fox. He is a Nashville-based country music artist and dad with a fascinating new album on the way.

He explores all those country themes, land, hard work, and faith from the left, in a space traditionally considered pretty conservative. We are the only parenting podcast with a twang.

So whether you’re a dad, a country music fan, or a little boat, we’re here to help. Where the red dirt road of country music meets the long white line of modern fatherhood. That’s where we live and we’ll see you there.

So I want to start with a story.

It’s one that most people listening to this episode can relate to from their own experience. The day my first child was born, and my second child for that matter, I held him in my arms and talked to him.

I told him the truth about the world, how I would be there for him as long as I could, how I’d push him to be the best he could and protect him from anything that would stop him, hurt him, or simply make him feel sad.

All of us fail to live up to these promises, but we try every day to do our best. We do so because every day is a new beginning. Earlier this year, I heard a song that simply took my breath away.

I didn’t even know how to explain it. It put this conversation, that conversation I had with my child, to song. And the realization that we can’t live up to these promises, but we’ll never stop trying to do so.

Lots of Beginning does an incredible job of blending modern southern rock, classic hillbilly music, Carolina, country sounds, and aggressive storytelling that allow listeners into Nathan Evans Fox’s conversations with his child on that very first

day. And so, the North Carolina-born Nashville-based Indie country artist writes songs that explore the connections and broken places between family, faith, labor, and inheritance.

And his LP, Heirloom, which is out on May 29th via Free Dirt Records, will push a lot of country music fans to think a lot, but will do so from a very safe sonic place for them. And so we’re really glad that he has joined us today.

I’m going to give a little bit of background on Mr. Fox here so that we can get into this. Fox was a fourth generation to be raised at the end of a dead end road in Glen Alpine, North Carolina.

He grew up in a community shaped by mill closures, factory layoffs, and the slow erosion of what he would call working class stability.

He worked blue collar jobs, served in AmeriCorps, attended seminary in New York City at an interfaith and socially progressive institution, and trained to be a hospital chaplain, something we will definitely get into as we go a little bit further.

We’re really lucky to have him here today and have him on our show. And we’re really excited to kick off the first official kind of content version of season three with Nathan. So thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

I’m going to try to be about as coherent as I can. But it’s been a long couple days in the dad factory.

I hear that as speaking of the dad factory. I’d love to get into Lots of Beginnings.

3:12

Lots of Beginnings, family, and Heirloom.

It’s the first track on your album that’s coming out. And it’s really the right place for this kind of song. But it really is a wildly personal song that you put together.

And it’s something you shared with your child when she came into the world. But I’d love to hear how you decided to put such a personal memory to this type of an audience.

I think to really explain how I got there with how personal that song is, I had to explain the closing track of the record. Because I wrote that first song…

I’m not one of these artistic types where I’m like, oh, I’ve got to really just catch the muse. Normally, I’m very like, let’s just bang out the next verse, the next bridge, chop chop.

But I was writing the closing track of the record and just felt this thing to just keep writing. The closing track is about… So I lost my dad and became a dad in the same year.

I was in this kind of hall of mirrors about what it means to be a dad, what it means to like, think about what I want to pass on to my child, what I want to keep from the ways that my father parented me, what I want to like get rid of, what I’m mad

about, what I’m soft about, all of those things. And so I was right in the closing track talking about what it is, like the title of the record is Heirloom. And it’s not my kid that’s the heirloom, it’s me.

Because I see, I have now become like the seed from last season and also the seed that like promises next season as well, like I’m the one in the middle. And so thinking about what it is I want to seed bank for my kid and what it is I don’t want to.

And out of that came this like long extended heartfelt message about all the things that I want for my kid, all the things that I want to remember in her. Like I love my grandma. So my mom, I lived, just she just lived up the field for me.

She was the best person I’ve ever met in my life. My best friend was like, was a 98 year old woman. And I, and like, I’m like, my kid is the coolest way I get to meet her again.

Like there’s so much that I want for her. I, you know, and I want her to have my grandma’s like, I ain’t taking for men. There’s so much I want my kids to have.

And so I got to that, had the long process of just like writing this song about what it means to exercise the demons from your family.

And so what I got to was that, that like sassy little bit that I think you hear some of the grief in there, but you also hear some of the hope and the joy as well.

Clearly, family, you just were saying, is a huge part of your storytelling.

6:00

Family, family land and the family system.

How do you balance the importance of the storytelling and remembering the traditions and where you would like it to go, healing those generational issues, but also ensuring that the traditions continue?

I mean, we’ve already said that I’ve come at it from the left, so let’s just get into it.

The reason that my family ended up on our land without spilling too much family lore is a series of events that were really put into place by our relationship to work into war and our need to go somewhere that was safe.

That was a bit of a fugitive space. And so my connection to family and to family land always started with how is our family system diffusing the violence and the trauma that Uncle Sam has left with us. Like, he’s the real patriarch in the family.

And so for me to understand anything on a personal level, on an intergenerational level, on just a social level, has required also an understanding of what I now would consider politics in a way that’s not abstract at all, but is about, like, you

spend enough time working bad jobs and you spend enough time going to war, there’s going to be a lot of violence and there’s going to be a lot of scarcity, and there’s going to be a lot of meanness. And those are all things that came to us through

Empire, but we’re expected to deal with it on our end. So that’s part of it, you know. That family land is like, it’s funny because there’s plenty of people I never met in my family. They died or they moved off before I could meet them.

But I knew them in a way. Like, they were, as long as we had that land, which we don’t anymore, but as long as we had that land, we had a kind of like universe. We had like a universe of like ghosts.

That land was this like sacrament or like this like manifestation of all of that history.

Like I could walk down through the woods and see where the trailer parks used to be because they had grown into the fence or the trash had been pushed off in the woods.

I could walk up to my mom-alls and see where there used to be pasture land and stuff for different critters. And all of that ephemera told a story.

And so I grew up in this very like haunted place that also when I inherited it, my family and my mom-all were kind of like rewilding it. They were trying to give it a little bit of sense of like freedom and greenery and restoration.

So I inherited that kind of process.

And so you live there now?

Sorry, no, yeah.

What’s your wish to fill it out?

You get me talking about it and I start going off all kinds of rabbit trails. No, so I grew up there. When I graduated college, the recession was really bad in my hometown because my hometown was all mills.

So like North Carolina was like tobacco and mills. And so what went away in the 90s and the aughts, tobacco and mills. And so there was really not like any jobs for me to go home.

And I also kind of needed to go see other things in the world. So no, I left home in 2020. My mom all died.

And that was kind of she was like the last person on that family land beside my parents. And it was just a lot of upkeep. It was going to be expensive to keep up her house and all her land and all that.

And so my parents made the decision to sell the land, in part also because my dad needed better health care. He was, my dad’s been medically complex my whole life.

And we were kind of entering the last couple years of his life and kind of low key knew it. And he was getting kind of not great rural health care.

So they kind of made the tough decision to get rid of all of it, which was honestly like a massive loss. Like it felt like like a meta grief, like all the griefs I had for my grandmother and for other people in my family.

They all, like all of the roots came up when we when we had to sell that land. So yeah, I don’t live there anymore. I did grow up there.

I mean, I guess some of the the lore that’s also important is like is the end of a dead end road, there’s always kind of family tradition. I grew up really weird.

So like grew up really fundamentalist Christian in like weird ways, in ways that people are like, oh, it’s this.

9:50

Growing up very weird and very country.

I’m like, no, it’s not that. Oh, it’s this. It’s not that.

The closest thing I could say is like, think about the weirdest new age stuff you’ve done, but you just swap out the Holy Ghost for like whatever stuff. So super fluid, wasn’t like church based.

Like it gave me an imagination for like kind of anarchism in a way, because we had a lot of like spontaneously occurring communities based around our ability to literally speak gibberish and have gold dust appear on ourselves.

But also, you know, at the same time, those places were incredibly like harmful and abusive. So I have a very complicated relationship to all that.

But I can’t like tell the story that land also without the kind of like weird religious stuff that kicked off there, in part as a way of arresting a lot of the cycles that it was the best answer that my mom and my dad had for a long time for a lot of

Does that still feel like home to you or do you feel that home where you’re at?

10:50

A feeling of home vs enjoying where you live.

Yeah, no, I don’t feel it.

I live in a city. I hate this s***. No, this doesn’t feel like home.

I mean, I like where I live. I have a garden and I am slowly killing back all of our lawn to plant more Okra. And I’ve got my kids here now.

I’ve got two kids. I got a lot of kids in my book. And so I have a four month old and an almost three year old.

So yeah, we’re in the thick of it.

You’re in it. You’re in it.

So it feels like home in the sense that like it’s good enough. And I’m like grateful for my life and I wouldn’t like complain about it. But does this place feel like, does Nashville feel like where my roots are laid?

No. Do I think I’ll ever recover? The toddler is fully crashing up the stairs.

Do I think I’ll ever recover like a sense of roots that are as deep as what I grew up with? No. But also, I mean, that came with so much mess too that I don’t know.

You know, at some point, are you trauma bonded or are you, you know?

So I’m trying to remember that like it’s okay to grieve things because life is full of moving on, while also understanding that like economic privation is a force that removes a lot of people from their roots and their communities.

So that’s a complicated answer, but I feel really complicated about it.

12:10

Fox’s time as a hospital chaplain.

You mentioned your religious upbringing.

You spent time as a chaplain, a hospital chaplain. I imagine that comes with seeing a lot of the range of human emotions. Did that period of your life and that job contribute to your songwriting, your worldview?

The thing that was interesting about hospital chaplaincy is I never really fit.

I love the work because I love people. I was a non-religious hospital chaplain in the Bible belt, which is quite a way to swim upstream.

But I also understand that religious languages are a thing that people use to cope with things that are really hard to cope with like terminal illness, with disability, with life changing disability, with unexpected trauma.

For the longest time, I couldn’t really reconcile the two because I would go, I spent a lot of time going on the road and then coming back and picking up shifts at the hospital.

And one is like, here, you hold the mic and control the room and make everything about you. And then the other is just like, let me radically listen to you. And it was real whiplash.

And I never could really reconcile in myself how I could do both of those things. I’ve come to a sense now where making music has to be medicine. Like I’m pretty blue collar about what it means to make music.

I don’t like all this woo-woo art bullsh**. I don’t care about the muse. I don’t care.

Like miss me with all that. I’m pretty practical about it. It’s cool to make songs.

We’re not saving the world. Making a song is not a transcendental experience, but it’s a really cool thing to do and it is helpful for people.

I’ve come to this understanding now where like I’ve been able to integrate those two like things that I knew I just had to keep feeding and one day they would make sense but they weren’t for years.

At some point I just started being like my music has to be a little more explicitly message driven because the world has fallen apart and because I have sat with so many people in times of loss and of trauma and of tremendous violence and I’ve seen

so much social murder. Once again being a leftist about this I’ve seen so much social murder. I’ve seen so much debt. I’ve seen so much death.

I’ve seen so much surveillance. That’s the other thing we don’t talk about a lot when people are in hospitals.

I’ve seen so much of this that it would be I’d be a psychopath for it to not start to put roots down in me and to change the way that I see the world. Also, I would be a psychopath to spend the rest of my life deferring my desire to make music.

I’ve just decided I make medicine. I try to give people a sense of hope and beauty and poetry and feeling that helps them sort through the mess of living here.

It’s been cool to get into that because that sounds a little too high and mighty for my taste, but I think that’s how it’s going. I’ve had a bunch of people recently on this most recent run say they feel like they’re at church.

For the first time in my life, I don’t feel too worried about that because I’m telling people like go on your anger at a system that doesn’t care about if kids die.

Go feel free to grieve the things that you need to grieve and do it in your twang and in your vernacular. Like you don’t have to abandon yourself to be a human or to have a conscience or be a neighbor. So that’s my long answer.

Yes, it affects me in the ways that like I just…

Another thing is the other thing I’m just gonna say, I’m really soapboxing here, but the other thing I’m just gonna say is that when you have seen like really bad stuff, like every day, professional, like as much time as you spend at your job, it’s

all bad stuff. You don’t take yourself too seriously on like, am I selling up drink tickets at the bar as an artist? Like it just keeps things in perspective for me where I’m like, I have artist problems and like I want artists to get paid.

Like I work with the union, all this. And also there’s some perspective here where like people don’t pick up on my song about jello shots, it’s going to be okay.

15:50

Going viral with “Hillby Hymn” and bringing liberation theology to country music fans.

Well, perspective I think is kind of key to one of your first big hits.

You went viral with the Hillbilly Hymn, right?

When the Lord comes back and gonna be no cops, you can cook your own, you can smoke your crops, all the boys gonna wear the pretty thing.

This is a crazy cool song. It is shockingly different from what you may expect to go viral. It is you and two other people with just a little beat behind you singing about how the laws all are gonna go away when Jesus comes back.

Not my particular brand of religion, but I think that’s a pretty interesting perspective and as a student of religion, there’s so much true reading of both the New Testament, old kind of Torah instruments.

There’s a lot in this that is wildly accurate to the readings of those books and people may be like, whoa, I don’t agree with that.

And it also drives deeply into Liberation Theology, this concept of empowering those who have been brought up in the church or in other religious institutions to utilize religion for their own liberation from systems that are keeping them down, be it

the church or anything else, which is an interesting perspective all on its own and has tons of scholarship and it’s a great dive if people want to get into it. Do you see Hillbilly Hymn as a song within the canon of liberation theology, or am I

So I should say the seminar I went to was home to a lot of the patriarchs, matriarchs, natriarchs of multiple schools of liberation theology.

So it’s something that I’m very steeped in.

And frankly, I just want to say, once again, I’m not religious, but I do want to say, if you want just a way of understanding biblical text, it just has more explanatory power, more descriptive power, more interpretive power, to realize that it’s not

just about things in the clouds, but people’s actual lives. Just want to put that out there. This was not all abstract for a lot of people who are writing these things. So I’m very steeped in that tradition.

I’m very grateful for the places where it dropped me off after a season of trying to sort through the very bad religion that I inherited when I should have just, I should just look, I should just go on to like a lot of therapy, but instead I got

student debt to go to seminary and whatever. But the funny thing is to me that I think for some people, I’ve become their favorite worship leader and it’s happened after I just completely apostatized.

I’m not an expert in Jesus, but I’m pretty sure that’s kind of how that went too. Not to put that on you. Not to put that on you.

Yeah.

I mean, Paul was the first Christian. Honestly, the way that I took that song on was like in the Bible Belt, there has always been a kind of mandate to square yourself to the cultural dominance of Christianity.

18:51

The language of the Bible belt.

So there’s folks that subvert that, there’s folks that hide a lot of their practices within it, whatever.

But it’s a language that you kind of have to learn to speak, not because it’s better than anyone else, but because it’s the dominant cultural language. It’s the one that’s been enforced for hundreds of years.

So when I cut on Doc Watson and I hear him singing about, talk about following Jesus, I’m not like, oh, I’m going to go to church. I’m just like, oh, that’s just a part of the folk tradition.

So when I wrote that song, I’m like, yeah, this is just like a poetic language that I’ve had to inherit and become fluid in, in the South. And so it’s been like, I’m happy for folks who find it to be a really meaningful expression of their religion.

And I also, it’s just a song. It’s just a song about like, when the Lord comes back is a way of talking about Jubilee, about like what it means to get it right. It’s just like a poetic horizon for envisioning what it means to be at our best.

I’m a reformed Jew, right?

I grew up in this concept of the idea of messianic completion was exactly what you were just saying there. It’s like we’re going to fix the world and make it better. We aren’t required to finish the work, but we are required to engage with it.

And that is a big part of my tradition growing up. And this idea that there’s no work to be done is something that I’ve always had trouble with, with some traditions. And that goes across all different religions.

If you just put faith in God, you’re going to be fine. That doesn’t really work for me. Because I think that we all have, we have free will for a reason.

You’re utilizing a box of constraint to force people to think outside of its confines, right? You’re using this language that they understand to push people beyond that.

And I think that’s, honestly to me, from reading it poetically, critically, that particular song, also many of the songs on the album, but that particular song, I think, is probably the most explicitly religious expression of a very progressive

mindset. It’s very interesting to me that you’re able to utilize this language and this format to push people to think in a different way while also not completely dismissing what they believe.

Yeah, I think one of the great disservices that Christianity has done to the concept of jubilee is that it gave it to Gentiles.

So there’s this distance that folks read from, where they don’t think of it as like it’s this kind of like, we can read all these things in abstraction because they’re all symbols.

They’re not part of someone’s actual lived community and practice and all this. Jubilee is a real, it never happened historically, but it was going to look like everyday life for Jewish people.

It wasn’t going to be some big strange end times remaking annihilation of the world. It was going to be like, you let the land rewild, you forgive the debts.

It’s going to look like you have a bill with someone who’s your neighbor and you say, it’s all good. There’s nothing to mystify it.

So for me, when I think about jubilee, and this is also when I think about full communism, it’s just going to look like us. It’s going to look vernacular. It’s going to look in fleshed in our flesh.

It’s going to look like making sure that your grass is a little tall for critters. It’s going to look like making sure that everyone gets to have food, even if it’s just a mess of beans.

Yes, Oliver Anthony, it’s going to mean a little bit of junk food too. It’s going to mean some fudge rounds and honey buns. That’s what it’s going to look like.

It’s going to look like life as we know it. We don’t have to envision the end of the world to imagine the fulfillment of the world. We’ve got everything that we need, we just got to get it right, get the relationships of it all right.

I think that’s very challenging for some people.

I live a very comfortable life. I can’t deny that, and I am not a radical leftist in any way, shape, or form. But I think that is a goal we should have as society to make life a little bit better for everybody.

Make it a little easier, make it a little bit more comfortable.

It’s an interesting dilemma, because we can agree and disagree on how we get there, and we should probably talk a little bit more like this in forums where we don’t have the same approach to it, but perhaps we can learn from each other.

I saw an interesting bit recently, and I don’t remember exactly who was saying it.

It may have been on, I think it was on the American Aquarium social media feed, is if we just talk to each other and we talk about NASCAR, and we talk about how we enjoy okra, is it fried or is it in a stew, those southern things, or take it from my

traditions. I hate brisket, and saying that as a Jew is a very difficult thing to say. Brisket is a big deal in our community. I don’t like it.

I don’t like Jewish brisket. I like Texas brisket, that’s delicious. I like smoked brisket.

If you’re gonna cook it for long enough that it’s gonna turn into shoe leather, and you’re gonna put some sweet stuff on top of it, no one really wants to eat that. I’m gonna live on that. I’m gonna die on that hill.

I know that my Jewish friends are coming after me for that, but I’m okay. I’m okay with that. That’s something I believe.

But we can talk about it. I’m sure your mother’s brisket’s delicious. It’s not.

It’s not good. I promise. These are the things that we should be talking about because there’s so much intersection of humanity when we get rid of some of these preconceptions.

We’re not gonna agree on all of this stuff, but we can have some sort of dialogue where we can learn from each other and get better.

And I think that’s where, for me, religion, that’s what religion is for me, is creating communities in places where people feel safe, creating communities where people can feel like what they do has purpose. And that to me is really valuable.

And if you experience religion where you don’t have purpose and you don’t feel like you’re safe, I can understand why you would not want to create a space for religion.

That’s not been my experience, but I respect those who’ve come to it from a different place. Religion to me is such a wildly interesting social experiment that has provided us with so many different things to consider.

It’s quite similar to the construct of Country Music and how it was created to divide people, quite literally. And we can put that book in the show notes too.

But there’s just so much that happens with dividing of people when you could really talk and get to know folks through folk traditions, through food traditions, through religious traditions, through land traditions.

There’s so much that we can do that makes this easier. We come from different parts of the world, but we’re talking about the same goals. Perhaps we can understand how we get there in different ways and we can respect it a little bit better.

25:48

“We belong and we feel, well before we think or form ideologies.”

We belong and we feel well before we think and before we form ideologies.

Those are the fundamental things. I will blame a lot of this on the Conservatives and the Libs, but I think a lot of people want to argue over ideas before they get to know their neighbor.

That’s something that’s only fueled by the onlineification of politics and algorithm driven stuff.

Most people will probably agree that they want, if you really make them think about it, they’ll be like, yeah, I want people to be taken care of, genuinely. I think most people won’t. It’s just a matter of they can trust you with it.

Now, there’s always some bad actors and some people who are loyalists to all these Confederates, but we’ve got Nuremberg trials for them.

26:35

Dave notices some contemporary Christian sounds in Fox’s music.

Everybody else, I think we mostly want that stuff. You just got to make people feel it. You got to be trustworthy.

So people have called you their favorite worship leader or something, or something of that effect, because honestly, when I was listening to some of your stuff, as someone who’s spent a lot of time in church, I am a Christian, some of the style

reminded me of some of the more contemporary Christian music. I mean, is that something that you’re doing on purpose?

This has been a good interview. Have you been a worship leader before? No, it’s not at all.

I mean, I was raised in it, right? So I’m very familiar with it. What I love about Country Music is I think it’s like the most heathen-ass music you could make.

But no, I mean, there’s a couple of songs on the record that- I hate that I’m being called out on this. I’m getting so squirrely.

There’s a couple of songs on the record I didn’t want to cut because I told my producers, this feels like worship music and I don’t think we should do it. My producer was like, this is a banger. No way.

If you don’t cut it, you’re messing up. You have to do it. I was like, cool.

I would walk back like, don’t do this production thing. Don’t do this production thing. My producer was like, no, it’s not working and it didn’t work.

So we just said, full sin. Let’s just do the toms and snare thing. All that.

We committed to it. That’s really funny. The thing about Hillbilly Hymn is, to me, that sounds like church in a real way too.

That was deliberate. But I wanted that to feel like a tape recording of, if you’ve ever been to a weird church with a drop ceiling, that’s in an abandoned gas station, all four highways back off the interstate. I want it to feel like that.

That’s a very vernacular weird experience. I was like, I’ll be fine recreating that church. But man, I can’t believe you’re calling me out on it like that.

It’s crazy.

I won’t name names, but I’m pretty sure I know which one’s Dave is talking about. I like that song, if it’s the one I’m thinking about. I like it.

I was singing along to it.

It’s a great song. If we’re all talking about the same one. It’s probably my daughter’s favorite song.

You got to accept that light.

28:45

“Racecar” and bro country.

At some point, you just know the things that you know.

We’re talking about songs on the album.

I want to talk about Racecar real quick. I know that the album is coming out on the 29th. We probably are going to drop this right around that time.

So it’ll work out really nicely as a way to hopefully get you some more. That song is like a history lesson on NASCAR. Those guys were outlaws before outlaws.

And it’s just a cool way to jump into that. I like that song a lot. I hope that it hits the radio.

And this is where I’m going to go on the other direction of what Dave was saying with the worship music. I think your music sounds a lot like contemporary, modern-day radio country music in a lot of ways. Some of it does.

Other parts are like kind of on the edge of that. Other parts of it are a little bit in the worship space. I’m going to give them that.

Now that I hear that, I’m going to be like, listen to that song a little differently. But Racecar right there is, that is contemporary country music. I mean, it really is.

Yeah, look, that’s my favorite song on the record because I just love that Butthole Country rock s***.

I just love the worse it is. Just give me that slop.

Me too, man. No wonder I like that one so much.

It’s funny. Y’all, I think people think I’m kidding. I love just country music and people are like, I’ve said this to people and they’re like, oh, you mean alt country?

I’m like, no, I actually don’t care for alt hockey talk stuff that much. If it sounds like it was in a tape machine, I probably won’t listen to it. They’re like, oh, you mean like that old school stuff?

I’m like, I mean, I like Roger Miller, but not much more.

I don’t want to hear much Buck Owens.

I’m not going to lie. Mostly because there’s a lot of resentment in there. But I love Eric Church, Lainey Wilson, Luke Combs.

I will cut on unironically.

You can admit it here. This is a safe place. Who else do you like?

Brother’s Osborne.

So good. I love all that stuff. I will unironically cut the radio on and listen to Top 40 Country when I’m on the road.

And sure, some of it’s bad, but let’s be real. There’s bad music in every genre. Why all of a sudden is it Luke Bryant’s golf drink song that he put out the other day is what gets to represent all of country music.

Also, that man’s cash and checks, so good for him. If I was making money, I would for sure put out that song. That song is hilarious.

But it’s funny you bring up about Racecar because we referenced a Hotline TNT song for Tone, and we referenced Dirt Road Anthem. I was just like, dude, I think it’s this. I think we just need an endified version of this.

Amazing, man.

I listened to that today while I was on a run, and talk about a song that makes you want to run through a brick wall. It was really hard to get my heart rate down after that song came on. It took me the whole run.

I never got it down. It’s a banger, man.

It’s a good song.

No wonder.

I heard it the first time. I was like, damn. This is Radio Ready.

That’s what’s crazy about it, right? And it gets possibly to our last question here, right? You call yourself, you have Comrade Country.

You’re not hiding from the farthest aspects of the political spectrum, and you’re making music that is perceived as wildly conservative. And arguably, radio country is pretty conservative.

Politically, socially, even sort of socially, except for the parts like drinking and doing bad things like that. These are intentionally divisive terms.

Do you end up finding like-minded people who are like, yeah, I really like Bro Country, but let’s nationalize the oil companies. Do you find that? Or is it more like people are like, damn, this is good music.

These are different ideas than I’m used to. Where do you find it?

Tell us what else we think we should nationalize.

I don’t think we should nationalize anything. I’m not that guy. I’m not that guy.

I’m just going to say it.

We can talk about it.

If I was going to pick anything, it would be the utilities, but that’s a different story for a much longer conversation.

Yeah, look, I don’t know if they’re out there or not, but I’m just sick of lying. Like it goes back to the hospital chaplain thing.

I have seen in very concrete ways, and this is like very dark, but I’ve seen in very concrete ways, the actual blood that this country runs on, like the death that this country runs on, the death that empire requires, whether it’s the life that you

give to your work, that you take away from your family and that takes away from your body for years, or it’s kids who are shot because of bad gun policy. Like it doesn’t matter.

I do not have the patience in me anymore because I’ve seen so much hardship. I do not have the patience in me anymore to lie or to pretend like I’m okay with saying something that might be coded this way but might actually accommodate this.

Like I don’t have the patience for that. And I also don’t have the patience to sit out here and cosplay my culture like country is actually really weird. Like growing up in the country is a weird thing.

Like it’s not cowboy boots and trucks and stuff. It’s like Pontiac, Sunfires, and SoundCloud rap and like stained. And then it’s also Alan Jackson.

Like it’s this weird hybrid of things. And so like I just don’t have time to pretend that what I like isn’t what I like and what I mean isn’t what I mean. And so I’m just right at the intersection of all of those experiences.

Beautifully said, man.

That’s it.

Yeah.

So we have a recurring segment that we call the Dad Life Sound Check, where we share a song that is speaking to us as dads or just as fans or people.

34:24

The Dad Life Sound Check

So it’s always a pleasure to have the segment with a guest on the show. So we’ll start off with you, Nathan. What song is speaking to you?

Of course, it’s going to be Roger Miller.

To save our sanity in the house, we haven’t decided to go with a YouTube brush your teeth video. We play Do I Could Do for our toddler while she brushes her teeth.

I wish I had your happiness.

Then she runs around singing it and she messes up the lyrics and she’s like, I got girls in the front and money in the sack. It sounds really hard. It sounds like she’s really about some criminal enterprises when she says it.

Do I could do is it also makes me so happy because it’s the kind of like ketamine-pilled country stuff that also is so appropriate for kids. It’s this amazing point of connection with me and the toddler.

I was actually listening to Roger Miller as we were getting ready for this. I have the Greatest Hits album that I picked up from a discount bin at my local record shop. I was like, man, this stuff is so weird.

It is so strange. I was like, you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd. It was on this album.

I was like, this is a weird song, man.

I know. Everybody that wants to save country music should really just be talking about Roger Miller. They should bring back whatever he’s doing.

His weirdness, his freedom, his playfulness. Bring that back. Bring back men who like to play instead of just be resentful in their songs.

I like it.

Having some fun. Dave, what have you been listening to, man?

Speaking of having some fun, Americana by Ryan Bingham and The Texas Gentlemen keeps on coming across. It seems very unlike him because it’s just like a party song. He seems like such a serious guy.

So I like that it’s kind of like a change of his character a little bit. But there’s a line about having lots of dogs and having lots of kids. And I have lots of kids, Nathan.

I have four now. So anytime someone’s talking to me, I have lots of kids. It just, my ears perk up a little bit like, oh, that’s me.

But I mean, the song comes on in the car when I have my lots of kids there, and it’s not an appropriate song for kids.

Also, I just haven’t been able to listen to it all the way through for a while because there’s drugs and f-words in this song that I don’t really want to bring up on the way to school with kids.

Get them wired up for the principal’s office.

Man, we drive in very different cars to school.

We’re different dudes.

We are very different dudes. The only way we get to school is to listen to NPR, which I would assume you would like, but our favorite show is Marketplace Morning Report, so probably not your favorite one.

Oh, anyway, speaking of really the oldest thing you could possibly say, my pick right now is Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old. I really, really enjoy the new version by Corb Lund and Hayes Carll. I’ve been playing this new game with my oldest.

It’s kind of like this hybrid of volleyball, tennis, ground ball drills in our backyard. We have a cement patio in the middle, and then two patches of what used to be grass and now is weeds.

We play on either side of the backyard and have to bounce it across the middle, and you have to catch, make the catch, and then throw it back. It’s a good fun way to work on ground balls.

But you play by tennis rules, so you miss the play, the other person gets the point. I played with him over the weekend, and my 11-year-old kicked my a**. I was wasted.

I played so hard in trying to keep up with him, and I don’t think I’m that old. I am sore. I couldn’t sleep well.

My shoulder still hurts. I got killed, and that song came up, and I was like, man, that’s a little too on the nose, guys. It was rough.

It feels good to get out there and get really sweaty. He beat me playing basketball the other day, legitimately beat me on street basketball on an eight-foot net. I should be able to take an 11-year-old still.

You got to get the elbows up.

I did that once.

He’s like, hey, you knocked me over. I was like, you got in the way. He’s like, okay.

Then he went and did three head top shots over my head by doing a step back fade. I was like, not okay. Not okay.

I’m not ready to be this old. I’m just not. I’m not okay with this.

I was like, oh man, just to take an IV profan and ice my shoulder. I feel bad.

It’s time to hang it up.

Be sure to check out Errolome coming out on May 29th. Thank you all for listening. The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast platform you use.

If you want to see new episodes and more content delivered straight to your email inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter, countrymusictads.substack.com. I think Nathan Evans Fox also has a substack, if I’m not mistaken.

You can find everything we do on our website, countrymusictads.com, and we’d love to hear what you think, so send us comments, suggestions, friendly banter on Instagram, at countrymusictads, or via email, countrymusictads.gmail.com.

Stay tuned for our next episode, and until next time, whether you’re at the dance hall, the playground, or just folding some laundry, thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you soon.