The Top 20 Country Songs of the 2010s
A couple of months ago, I previewed my pending list of the decade's top-20 country songs with a disclaimer that it was a bad decade for country music, falling considerably short even of the previous decade which I also considered lacking. I won't rehash the core reasons why I thought country music lost its soul in the past 10 years, but I'll offer some overarching commentary at the bottom of the list.
#20. "Break Up in the End"--Cole Swindell (2018).....Sometimes artists' careers don't measure up the way you expected them to. Back in 2013 when he debuted, Cole Swindell was the embodiment of breezy "bro country" genericness. But as his career has progressed, he's shown signs of personality and songwriting skill, and also having a better handle on what makes a good country song than his contemporaries who are trending shallower. His most memorable release was this first single from his third album, an ode to a ex-girlfriend after their break up that was the best "it was all worth it despite the pain" ballad since Garth's "The Dance". Swindell's biggest liability continues to be his mediocre vocals, and his lack of emotional range is hard to miss even on a quality number like this one, but in today's country music world, one has to take any victory that they can get. A heartfelt ballad with a worthy accompanying melody stands out in the crowd even with a ho-hum vocal delivery.
#19. "Days of Gold"--Jake Owen (2013)....One can't look at the country music of the past decade and completely ignore the "bro country" phenomenon. Not every song from the subgenre was as horrific as Luke Bryan's "That's My Kind of Night" or Blake Shelton's "The Boys 'Round Here". In terms of the bro-country song that handled its tropes most adeptly, "Days of Gold" stands out as being a fireball with breathless energy and sizzling, raging guitars. It's easy to see why it wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, but in terms of working within the trends of the era, Jake Owen was one of the few who broke a sweat in an effort to lift "bro country" above its lowest denominator.
#18. "The House That Built Me"--Miranda Lambert (2010).....Much ink was spilled at the beginning of the decade about Miranda Lambert's #1 ballad revisiting her childhood home as an adult in an effort to mend her broken soul. It was a poignant lyric, and has taken on much greater resonance with me in the last couple of years as my parents moved out of my boyhood home. I've always liked the song, but I will say the song's sparse arrangement and vocal performance keep it from hitting me with an emotional sledgehammer in the way that some of country music's most emotionally charged tearjerkers have. That's not a criticism...just a recognition that certain stylistic approaches are more impactful to me than others on this type of song. Miranda has generally been hit or miss for me over the course of her long career, and her 2014 rocker "Mama's Broken Heart" is probably the song of hers that has the best playback reward for me at decade's end, but I can't in good conscience rate it as a better song than "House That Built Me" when compiling this end-of-decade list.
#17. "Drunk on a Plane"--Dierks Bentley (2014).....I would never have imagined in 2003 when Dierks Bentley first burst onto the country music scene that he'd still be relevant at the end of the NEXT decade, but that's exactly what happened, and by and large Bentley deserves it as one of the only mainstream country singers around today that has some artistic merit and something substantive to say. With that said, nothing he's released has really hit me where I live, and even this mid-tempo toe-tapper isn't perfect in its vocal or lyrical delivery. Still, the story of a broken-hearted guy on his honeymoon flight alone after his fiancée broke off the engagement, washing away his grief with alcohol as he "taped her picture to seatback right beside me" is a smorgasbord of gut-punch country music heartbreak with lots of clever lines and an addictive chorus that holds up better than most to repeated listening. Bentley would have a couple more songs make my list this decade if I expanded it to a top-30, but "Drunk on a Plane" stands out as the top of his catalogue from the 2010s.
#16. "Let it Rain"--David Nail (2011).....One of the more surprising commercial success stories of the last decade was David Nail, a no-frills, few-gimmicks troubadour who resisted most of the pulpy trends of the era. The first single of his second album was a cheatin' song, rare for the current generation of commercial country, where the narrator comes to terms with his sins and confesses to his wife, ready to accept whatever well-deserved hell is about to come raining down on him. It was a raw lyric with a great vocal performance and an arrangement worthy of both. It took a while for radio listeners to fully appreciate what they had, but "Let it Rain" went all the way to #1 when they did.
#15. "The Sound of a Million Dreams"--David Nail (2012)....The follow-up single to David Nail's "Let it Rain" had far less success on radio, but hit the right musical note for me. A piano-laced arrangement was the perfect fit for this story of a songwriter's dream of capturing the words to inspire and touch a new generation's heart as his predecessor's touched his heart in his formative years. Nail's vocals were just the right touch to sell the narrator's aspirations.
#14. "Make You Mine"--High Valley (2016).....American radio listeners are probably unaware of how substantial the localized country music scene is just north of the border, but Canada has launched quite a few international country superstars and has a significant number of its own acts that either don't make the jump to the American market or do so in a limited capacity. The duo High Valley fits the latter category, finally getting some radio play out of Nashville in 2016 after several years of success in Canada. And they hit American radio like raging bulls with the high-energy romp "Make You Mine", which fits stylistically in the vein of American pop/folk acts like Mumford and Sons and the Avett Brothers, but with a decidedly country twang and a bouncy arrangement guaranteed to turn even the sourest mood into something sweet. They went top-20 with "Make You Mine" and scored a top-10 with another single the following year.
#13. "What We Ain't Got"--Jake Owen (2014).....Back in the 80s and 90s, country radio's airwaves were chock full of tear-in-my-beer tales of heartache and woe, capturing the vocalist's grief for whatever poor choices led to losing the best thing they ever had. Whether these songs came from silky smooth vocalists like Ronnie Milsap or Steve Wariner or from stone-cold country twang kings like Mark Chesnutt or Sammy Kershaw, they were a staple of what defined country music for me growing up and their currency has soared for me in recent years because of their relative absence on country radio today. Jake Owen's "What We Ain't Got" would have been a satisfying entry into this subgenre had it come out 20 years before it was released, but the complete absence of anything else quite like it on radio this decade really made it stand out as something special. Owen's by no means a bad vocalist, but I think a vocal stylist of Milsap, Chesnutt, or Kershaw's ilk could have really lifted the impressive lyrical hooks to amazing places had they gotten hold of it in the 90s. Still, Jake Owen deserves a hat tip for taking a chance on a song like this--right in the heyday of his career--in the current radio landscape of emotionally empty songs
#12. "Guinevere"--Eli Young Band (2010)....I've always been partial to the sound of the Eli Young Band, a group that seemed like a long shot for commercial success when they came out late last decade but persevered for quite a few decent hits. Unfortunately, their most unique, oddball commercial entry was not one of their big hits, as the very literary "Guinevere" flopped on radio early this decade when released as the fourth single of their debut album. The narrator's depiction of a complicated woman--and accompanying comparisons of her to the unpredictable wife of King Arthur--lands some great lyrical moments and leaves the listener curious about the narrator's agenda, until the final line ("Lean into me Guinevere...be mine tonight Guinevere") reveals his love for her. There's not much about the song that's "country" but the sound is solid with a fittingly mysterious arrangement that crescendos to an emotionally charged finish. It took me a few times listening to this before I fell in love, but unfortunately most listeners on radio didn't seem to have the patience for it that I did.
#11. "Song for Another Time"--Old Dominion (2016)....Most reviewers tend to cringe at country music's "laundry list" songs, viewing them as gimmicky and lyrically lazy. I usually tend to agree, and the first time I heard Old Dominion's "Song for Another Time", I dismissed it as a clever but ultimately empty vessel to name-drop a bunch of other famous pop and country songs. But when I listened to the story, centered around a couple's final night together before "the plane's gonna fly away, and you'll be on it," it had a much stronger emotional impact. Music typically plays such a strong role in defining a couple's trajectory and shaping the memories of their relationship, so it's really powerful for the narrator to both reflect on the music that defined their relationship and acknowledging the staying power of the music destined to define their final evening together. It's unfortunate this song triggered soulless, fourth-rate imitators like Chris Young's "Raised on Country", but Old Dominion succeeded in hitting a powerful chord with the story in this #1 hit, leading me to cycle through my memory bank and fill in the blanks for the songs that were just as resonant with my ex-girlfriends.
#10. "It Ain't My Fault"--Brothers Osborne (2017)......Few uptempo songs this decade had enough energy to rise up out of the hammock, usually hewing to predictable production gimmicks and generic snap tracks that sapped originality and soul. That made the uptempo songs that did crank up the energy level that much more satisfying, and the charging guitars of Brothers Osborne's "It Aint' My Fault" was near the top of the list. The fraternal duo had a reputation for quality guitar riffs and had some decent if unspectacular success on their first album with a few singles. They came busting through the gates with their sophomore album though with a fun, cleverly crafted party song that allowed the brothers to rock out more than they had with previous singles. The song had a memorable video featuring "the four Presidents" (Clinton, Obama, Bush, and Trump) as masked armed robbers fleeing from the cops. The video is fun and likely helped the song gain notoriety but it's a little busy and distracts from the song if you haven't heard it before, so my advice to anybody who's neither heard the song nor seen the video is to give the tune a listen first before checking out the video.
#9. "From a Table Away"--Sunny Sweeney (2010)....The complete dearth of new female country singers to break through this past decade will go down as the genre's most unforgivable sin of the 2010s. One worth emissary I'd have liked to hear much more from was Sunny Sweeney, who boasted a vocal delivery comparable to Patty Loveless early last decade when she finally scratched out her only top-10 hit. "From a Table Away" was a cheatin' song where the mistress realizes she's getting played by her slimy suitor when she sees him in public with his wife and the vibe tells a whole different story than the line he'd been giving her. The song's lyrics and midtempo arrangement pack quite a punch, but the somber black-and-white video fits the song well and helps sell the storyline even more perfectly. There was so much promise for country music at the beginning of this past decade, as evidenced when calling back a song like this, which makes it all the more painful to come to terms with how bad things ended up.
#8. "American Honey"--Lady Antebellum (2010)....The pure, golden voice of Lady Antebellum lead singer Hillary Scott always shines best when doing ballads and traditional-sounding country, so the timing was great when Lady Antebellum followed their career record (2009's pop-crossover "I Need You Now") with the most traditionally country-sounding single of their career in "American Honey". The narrator's call back to the nostalgia and slow-moving innocence of childhood paints perfect portraits of carefree summer days with a rural backdrop that instantly fills those of us who grew up in that environment with more tingles than an hour's worth of ASMR on You Tube. It was a well-deserved #1 and a tough act to follow for the group who's had hits and misses since.
#7. "Marry Me"--Thomas Rhett (2018)....I've had a love-hate relationship with Thomas Rhett for years. He's been responsible for taking country music to some of the most loathsome depths that it ventured this past decade with abominations like "T-Shirt" and "Vacation" but his boundary-pushing has also resulted in some above-average uptempo cuts like "Crash and Burn" and "Craving You". But I feel like Rhett found his niche with ballads in recent years, really hitting his stride with last year's "Marry Me", which in its first verse lulls the listener into believing the narrator is about to marry the love of his life until the end of the chorus hits you with "but she ain't gonna marry me". The narrator is watching the love of his life marry someone else, told in jarring and gut-wrenching detail in keeping with the genre's most effective storytelling traditions, with a video that really knocks it out of the park. Both the song and video are given a worthy sequel with Rhett's current single "Remember You Young", currently in the top-5 and poised to hit #1 early in 2020. It will be an early frontrunner for the top-20 song list for the next decade, but doesn't reach the storytelling heights of "Marry Me".
#6. "Raymond"--Brett Eldredge (2010)....Country storytelling had fewer shining moments this past decade than any others in my lifetime, making the debut single from future star Brett Eldredge that much more impactful on the radio landscape. The narrator is a lost and lonely nursing home caretaker who befriends an elderly lady in the deep throes of dementia who confuses him with her son and regales him with "stories of the family he never had." The story was already powerful and impactful even before the explosive revelation of who "Raymond" is in the song's final bridge. The song was entirely unlike anything else played on country radio this decade. Unfortunately, Brett Eldredge would go on to be one of country's premier mediocrity-peddlers in the years that followed, and all of his other hits combined didn't have as much heart as "Raymond".
#5. "Turning Home"--David Nail (2010)....Nostalgia for home has always been a common--and effective--trope in country music, but David Nail's second hit at the dawn of the current decade was the most poignantly descriptive ode to one's Midwestern hometown I've come across. Whether it be memories of Friday night football games or the first love on the dance floor to those high school friends for whom "I never seem to laugh now like I did with them", the lyrics dig beneath the surface and get to someplace more viscerally relatable than some of the more abstract odes to nostalgia that country has given us in the past, effective as they were in their own right. David Nail puts forth a typically powerful vocal performance that really puts the material on its feet, but it really surprised me to discover Kenny Chesney was a songwriter on this song. Nothing from Chesney's own two-decade body of work ever really hit me as much as "Turning Home" which he allowed to be recorded by somebody else.
#4. "Amen"--Eden's Edge (2011)....Even a crusty and cynical soul like myself occasionally goes for a song that's just sweet in its tone and presentation, and the debut single from the group Eden's Edge sure hit the sweet spot for me. The swooning midtempo melody along with lead singer Hannah Blalock's perfect vocal pitch really sold the narrator's joy about finally having her chance with the man of her dreams in their small town following his many years of being stuck in a miserable relationship with another woman. It's the kind of song that I'm glad didn't get lost on the Nashville assembly line in the hands of Carrie Underwood or Taylor Swift because the treatment it was given by this new group with a different sound gave it an identity that might have been otherwise lost. Sadly, it was Eden's Edge's only hit of significance and the group broke up after their first critically acclaimed but poor-performing album. It was yet another puzzle piece that helps explain why country music was so forgettable this decade.
#3. "Tornado"--Little Big Town (2012).....Little Big Town has had more lives than Shirley MacLaine, appearing to be fading into oblivion at numerous points in their two-decade career only to then score another big hit that puts them back onto the charts. "Pontoon" and "Girl Crush" were their biggest chart hits of the decade, but it was a top-5 hit that came between those two that stands out to me as the hands-down best thing the group ever recorded. A Gothic revenge tale set to a thunderous percussive tempo, "Tornado" pushed the boundaries of country music to its limit but did so without betraying the genre's fundamentals. I also prefer revenge tales that hyperbolize metaphorically rather than specifically implicate the narrator in homicides, as has become the cliché in recent years. The song's heavily stylized video speaks volumes about the narrator being heavy on big talk, but lacking in delivery, which brings an interesting perspective to the apocalyptic lyrics.
#2. "Sunny and 75"--Joe Nichols (2013)....If ever there was a great song that found just the right artist, it was this modern summertime country classic "Sunny and 75" getting recorded by veteran crooner Joe Nichols, whose laconic vocal delivery gives the lyrics room to breathe. Nichols also helps sell the ambiguous interpretation of the story, which I suspect the songwriters intended. Is the song a love letter to the present-tense love of his life, or a reflection on his memories of a love lost? It works either way. Whatever the interpretation, the mellow opening escalates wonderfully to a soaring instrumental flourish that keeps the song aurally captivating for the entire three minutes. As someone with plenty of treasured memories of summertime fun with ex-girlfriends, the combination of descriptive summer visuals and the song's addictive melodic structure makes "Sunny and 75" my favorite country-pop song of the decade, and by no small amount. It was a comeback vehicle for Nichols more than worthy of it's #1 success on the charts.
#1. "Till Summer Comes Around"--Keith Urban (2010)....Hard to believe there was a song about summer love that I liked even more than "Sunny and 75" in the last 10 years, but very early in the decade, Keith Urban had a top-5 hit with a song that took a decidedly different approach. The narrator fell in love with a vacationing girl he met at the amusement park of the touristy town where he lives, and has spent the last five years working at that amusement park holding her to the promise that she'd come back for him, slowly coming to accept that he's seen the last of her. It's a chilling story of love unfulfilled every bit as compelling for me as George Jones' much-ballyhooed "He Stopped Loving Her Today," set to the most haunting guitar arrangement I can ever remember from a hit country song. Keith Urban has showed us over the years that he's capable of making some really impressive songs, but "Till Summer Comes Around" is light years ahead of its nearest competitor from Urban's catalogue. Anybody who ever had an adolescent summer romance that has stuck with them into adulthood can connect with the story, even if their own experience didn't end up as soul-crushingly dark as the narrator's.
Notice how a full seven entries on this list came from the decade's opening year? And how another four came in the two years? The frontloaded nature of the list hammers home country music's declining trajectory, with most of the best music of the decade being holdovers from recordings of the previous decade. As country music found its defining voice of the current decade in its third and fourth years, it really started to lose me. "Bro country" made all of us a little dumber and a little more tone-deaf, and it's jarring to contrast those chauvinistic anthems with the onset of the #MeToo movement only a few years later. Yet somehow, even in the current era of the female empowerment narrative, we're seeing very little in the way of new female voices on country radio. The bros are still dominating, even if their output is more "sensitive" than it was five years ago.
I said early on my list that some artists improved while others declined over the course of the decade. Cole Swindell and Kip Moore rose above their bro-country origins and found their respective niches late in the decade, while Luke Bryan and Dustin Lynch started the decade with potential but ultimately sold out to the lowest denominator with consistently lackluster, trend-hopping material. Leading superstars Blake Shelton, Jason Aldean, and Florida-Georgia Line got their hands bloody with loathsome garbage, but mostly just cruised along with a mix of mediocrity and mildly satisfying trifles that are pleasant but unmemorable. This pattern seems likely to persist with newer artists being groomed for superstardom like Brett Young, Michael Ray, Kane Brown, and the aforementioned Brett Eldredge. One of the most controversial artists of the decade is Sam Hunt, who pushed the genre's boundaries into pop, hip-hop, and EDM terrain even more shamelessly than Thomas Rhett. Hunt appears to be a mercurial figure who isn't nearly as interested in music industry stardom as he expected to be when he got his record deal, so there's a real chance his footprint moving forward will shrink.
The few females with chart success this decade, such as Maren Morris and Kelsea Ballerini, seem inclined to forge even deeper than the guys into pop territory with decidedly mixed results trending downward. Carrie Underwood, the only consistently successful female artist on country radio who spanned the decade, treaded the same territory far too often with homicidal scorned lover tales and oversung power ballads. Meanwhile, there were dozens of female artists who should have had success but didn't, with the perfect commercial package Kacey Musgraves being the most confusing. Musgraves actually did have modest chart success in the middle of the decade but even as her profile has risen, country radio's reception has inexplicably only gotten cooler. Carly Pearce is another highly worthy rising star whose chart success thus far (she's now on her second album) has been a decidedly mixed bag. For the life of me I can't understand country radio's unwillingness to groom future female country stars.
Some artists deserve some praise for consistently carving out a worthwhile body of work that shows some artistic merit while still managing radio play that spanned the decade. I mentioned Dierks Bentley, and while I certainly don't love everything he's put out, it's nonetheless clear he's smarter than the average bear and gets a little more creative license than the top-tier artists like Shelton who are kept on the shortest leashes. Brad Paisley also gets some creative license to drift from the center lane and regale listeners with his sense of humor, blistering guitar skills, and relatable slice-of-life ballads. The results don't always hit the mark, but they also don't seem as mechanical as those from most of his less-talented peers. And the most brazen commercial country experimenter from this decade has been Eric Church, who cuts a bad boy profile comparable to the outlaws of yesteryear and can always be relied upon to do his own thing after struggling to break through a decade ago when he was forced to hew closer to Nashville's more conventional tropes. None of Church's efforts individually struck me as worthy of this year's top-20 list, but taken as a body of work over the course of the decade, I probably have more respect for him than any of the other chart mainstays.
Looking forward to the decade ahead I see conflicting signals. I suspect the core of the country music superstars will continue to hop trends, and in the #MeToo era, that likely means sappy, sensitive-guy love songs that don't appeal to me much more than the empty-headed party-bro anthems that defined this past decade. Furthermore, the trend toward bombastic, pulsating, dance club-style pop arrangements that lack even a toehold of respect toward the genre's traditions is not going away, with artists more brazenly blowing way past the line each year. And radio will almost certainly continue to be unbearably awful, sabotaging worthy careers while shoehorning once-promising careers to a clunky formula. On the other hand, a new wave of artists is trickling in that offers some hope for giving listeners something that's either new or nostalgically familiar. In a couple of years, we should know what the decade's new country music zeitgeist will be. I'm not confident at all that it'll return to anything resembling the 90s pinnacle or anything that preceded it, I'm not resigned to this coming decade's product being even worse than the past decade's product. Clearly, I'm positioning the bar for acceptability pretty darn low.
#20. "Break Up in the End"--Cole Swindell (2018).....Sometimes artists' careers don't measure up the way you expected them to. Back in 2013 when he debuted, Cole Swindell was the embodiment of breezy "bro country" genericness. But as his career has progressed, he's shown signs of personality and songwriting skill, and also having a better handle on what makes a good country song than his contemporaries who are trending shallower. His most memorable release was this first single from his third album, an ode to a ex-girlfriend after their break up that was the best "it was all worth it despite the pain" ballad since Garth's "The Dance". Swindell's biggest liability continues to be his mediocre vocals, and his lack of emotional range is hard to miss even on a quality number like this one, but in today's country music world, one has to take any victory that they can get. A heartfelt ballad with a worthy accompanying melody stands out in the crowd even with a ho-hum vocal delivery.
#19. "Days of Gold"--Jake Owen (2013)....One can't look at the country music of the past decade and completely ignore the "bro country" phenomenon. Not every song from the subgenre was as horrific as Luke Bryan's "That's My Kind of Night" or Blake Shelton's "The Boys 'Round Here". In terms of the bro-country song that handled its tropes most adeptly, "Days of Gold" stands out as being a fireball with breathless energy and sizzling, raging guitars. It's easy to see why it wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, but in terms of working within the trends of the era, Jake Owen was one of the few who broke a sweat in an effort to lift "bro country" above its lowest denominator.
#18. "The House That Built Me"--Miranda Lambert (2010).....Much ink was spilled at the beginning of the decade about Miranda Lambert's #1 ballad revisiting her childhood home as an adult in an effort to mend her broken soul. It was a poignant lyric, and has taken on much greater resonance with me in the last couple of years as my parents moved out of my boyhood home. I've always liked the song, but I will say the song's sparse arrangement and vocal performance keep it from hitting me with an emotional sledgehammer in the way that some of country music's most emotionally charged tearjerkers have. That's not a criticism...just a recognition that certain stylistic approaches are more impactful to me than others on this type of song. Miranda has generally been hit or miss for me over the course of her long career, and her 2014 rocker "Mama's Broken Heart" is probably the song of hers that has the best playback reward for me at decade's end, but I can't in good conscience rate it as a better song than "House That Built Me" when compiling this end-of-decade list.
#17. "Drunk on a Plane"--Dierks Bentley (2014).....I would never have imagined in 2003 when Dierks Bentley first burst onto the country music scene that he'd still be relevant at the end of the NEXT decade, but that's exactly what happened, and by and large Bentley deserves it as one of the only mainstream country singers around today that has some artistic merit and something substantive to say. With that said, nothing he's released has really hit me where I live, and even this mid-tempo toe-tapper isn't perfect in its vocal or lyrical delivery. Still, the story of a broken-hearted guy on his honeymoon flight alone after his fiancée broke off the engagement, washing away his grief with alcohol as he "taped her picture to seatback right beside me" is a smorgasbord of gut-punch country music heartbreak with lots of clever lines and an addictive chorus that holds up better than most to repeated listening. Bentley would have a couple more songs make my list this decade if I expanded it to a top-30, but "Drunk on a Plane" stands out as the top of his catalogue from the 2010s.
#16. "Let it Rain"--David Nail (2011).....One of the more surprising commercial success stories of the last decade was David Nail, a no-frills, few-gimmicks troubadour who resisted most of the pulpy trends of the era. The first single of his second album was a cheatin' song, rare for the current generation of commercial country, where the narrator comes to terms with his sins and confesses to his wife, ready to accept whatever well-deserved hell is about to come raining down on him. It was a raw lyric with a great vocal performance and an arrangement worthy of both. It took a while for radio listeners to fully appreciate what they had, but "Let it Rain" went all the way to #1 when they did.
#15. "The Sound of a Million Dreams"--David Nail (2012)....The follow-up single to David Nail's "Let it Rain" had far less success on radio, but hit the right musical note for me. A piano-laced arrangement was the perfect fit for this story of a songwriter's dream of capturing the words to inspire and touch a new generation's heart as his predecessor's touched his heart in his formative years. Nail's vocals were just the right touch to sell the narrator's aspirations.
#14. "Make You Mine"--High Valley (2016).....American radio listeners are probably unaware of how substantial the localized country music scene is just north of the border, but Canada has launched quite a few international country superstars and has a significant number of its own acts that either don't make the jump to the American market or do so in a limited capacity. The duo High Valley fits the latter category, finally getting some radio play out of Nashville in 2016 after several years of success in Canada. And they hit American radio like raging bulls with the high-energy romp "Make You Mine", which fits stylistically in the vein of American pop/folk acts like Mumford and Sons and the Avett Brothers, but with a decidedly country twang and a bouncy arrangement guaranteed to turn even the sourest mood into something sweet. They went top-20 with "Make You Mine" and scored a top-10 with another single the following year.
#13. "What We Ain't Got"--Jake Owen (2014).....Back in the 80s and 90s, country radio's airwaves were chock full of tear-in-my-beer tales of heartache and woe, capturing the vocalist's grief for whatever poor choices led to losing the best thing they ever had. Whether these songs came from silky smooth vocalists like Ronnie Milsap or Steve Wariner or from stone-cold country twang kings like Mark Chesnutt or Sammy Kershaw, they were a staple of what defined country music for me growing up and their currency has soared for me in recent years because of their relative absence on country radio today. Jake Owen's "What We Ain't Got" would have been a satisfying entry into this subgenre had it come out 20 years before it was released, but the complete absence of anything else quite like it on radio this decade really made it stand out as something special. Owen's by no means a bad vocalist, but I think a vocal stylist of Milsap, Chesnutt, or Kershaw's ilk could have really lifted the impressive lyrical hooks to amazing places had they gotten hold of it in the 90s. Still, Jake Owen deserves a hat tip for taking a chance on a song like this--right in the heyday of his career--in the current radio landscape of emotionally empty songs
#12. "Guinevere"--Eli Young Band (2010)....I've always been partial to the sound of the Eli Young Band, a group that seemed like a long shot for commercial success when they came out late last decade but persevered for quite a few decent hits. Unfortunately, their most unique, oddball commercial entry was not one of their big hits, as the very literary "Guinevere" flopped on radio early this decade when released as the fourth single of their debut album. The narrator's depiction of a complicated woman--and accompanying comparisons of her to the unpredictable wife of King Arthur--lands some great lyrical moments and leaves the listener curious about the narrator's agenda, until the final line ("Lean into me Guinevere...be mine tonight Guinevere") reveals his love for her. There's not much about the song that's "country" but the sound is solid with a fittingly mysterious arrangement that crescendos to an emotionally charged finish. It took me a few times listening to this before I fell in love, but unfortunately most listeners on radio didn't seem to have the patience for it that I did.
#11. "Song for Another Time"--Old Dominion (2016)....Most reviewers tend to cringe at country music's "laundry list" songs, viewing them as gimmicky and lyrically lazy. I usually tend to agree, and the first time I heard Old Dominion's "Song for Another Time", I dismissed it as a clever but ultimately empty vessel to name-drop a bunch of other famous pop and country songs. But when I listened to the story, centered around a couple's final night together before "the plane's gonna fly away, and you'll be on it," it had a much stronger emotional impact. Music typically plays such a strong role in defining a couple's trajectory and shaping the memories of their relationship, so it's really powerful for the narrator to both reflect on the music that defined their relationship and acknowledging the staying power of the music destined to define their final evening together. It's unfortunate this song triggered soulless, fourth-rate imitators like Chris Young's "Raised on Country", but Old Dominion succeeded in hitting a powerful chord with the story in this #1 hit, leading me to cycle through my memory bank and fill in the blanks for the songs that were just as resonant with my ex-girlfriends.
#10. "It Ain't My Fault"--Brothers Osborne (2017)......Few uptempo songs this decade had enough energy to rise up out of the hammock, usually hewing to predictable production gimmicks and generic snap tracks that sapped originality and soul. That made the uptempo songs that did crank up the energy level that much more satisfying, and the charging guitars of Brothers Osborne's "It Aint' My Fault" was near the top of the list. The fraternal duo had a reputation for quality guitar riffs and had some decent if unspectacular success on their first album with a few singles. They came busting through the gates with their sophomore album though with a fun, cleverly crafted party song that allowed the brothers to rock out more than they had with previous singles. The song had a memorable video featuring "the four Presidents" (Clinton, Obama, Bush, and Trump) as masked armed robbers fleeing from the cops. The video is fun and likely helped the song gain notoriety but it's a little busy and distracts from the song if you haven't heard it before, so my advice to anybody who's neither heard the song nor seen the video is to give the tune a listen first before checking out the video.
#9. "From a Table Away"--Sunny Sweeney (2010)....The complete dearth of new female country singers to break through this past decade will go down as the genre's most unforgivable sin of the 2010s. One worth emissary I'd have liked to hear much more from was Sunny Sweeney, who boasted a vocal delivery comparable to Patty Loveless early last decade when she finally scratched out her only top-10 hit. "From a Table Away" was a cheatin' song where the mistress realizes she's getting played by her slimy suitor when she sees him in public with his wife and the vibe tells a whole different story than the line he'd been giving her. The song's lyrics and midtempo arrangement pack quite a punch, but the somber black-and-white video fits the song well and helps sell the storyline even more perfectly. There was so much promise for country music at the beginning of this past decade, as evidenced when calling back a song like this, which makes it all the more painful to come to terms with how bad things ended up.
#8. "American Honey"--Lady Antebellum (2010)....The pure, golden voice of Lady Antebellum lead singer Hillary Scott always shines best when doing ballads and traditional-sounding country, so the timing was great when Lady Antebellum followed their career record (2009's pop-crossover "I Need You Now") with the most traditionally country-sounding single of their career in "American Honey". The narrator's call back to the nostalgia and slow-moving innocence of childhood paints perfect portraits of carefree summer days with a rural backdrop that instantly fills those of us who grew up in that environment with more tingles than an hour's worth of ASMR on You Tube. It was a well-deserved #1 and a tough act to follow for the group who's had hits and misses since.
#7. "Marry Me"--Thomas Rhett (2018)....I've had a love-hate relationship with Thomas Rhett for years. He's been responsible for taking country music to some of the most loathsome depths that it ventured this past decade with abominations like "T-Shirt" and "Vacation" but his boundary-pushing has also resulted in some above-average uptempo cuts like "Crash and Burn" and "Craving You". But I feel like Rhett found his niche with ballads in recent years, really hitting his stride with last year's "Marry Me", which in its first verse lulls the listener into believing the narrator is about to marry the love of his life until the end of the chorus hits you with "but she ain't gonna marry me". The narrator is watching the love of his life marry someone else, told in jarring and gut-wrenching detail in keeping with the genre's most effective storytelling traditions, with a video that really knocks it out of the park. Both the song and video are given a worthy sequel with Rhett's current single "Remember You Young", currently in the top-5 and poised to hit #1 early in 2020. It will be an early frontrunner for the top-20 song list for the next decade, but doesn't reach the storytelling heights of "Marry Me".
#6. "Raymond"--Brett Eldredge (2010)....Country storytelling had fewer shining moments this past decade than any others in my lifetime, making the debut single from future star Brett Eldredge that much more impactful on the radio landscape. The narrator is a lost and lonely nursing home caretaker who befriends an elderly lady in the deep throes of dementia who confuses him with her son and regales him with "stories of the family he never had." The story was already powerful and impactful even before the explosive revelation of who "Raymond" is in the song's final bridge. The song was entirely unlike anything else played on country radio this decade. Unfortunately, Brett Eldredge would go on to be one of country's premier mediocrity-peddlers in the years that followed, and all of his other hits combined didn't have as much heart as "Raymond".
#5. "Turning Home"--David Nail (2010)....Nostalgia for home has always been a common--and effective--trope in country music, but David Nail's second hit at the dawn of the current decade was the most poignantly descriptive ode to one's Midwestern hometown I've come across. Whether it be memories of Friday night football games or the first love on the dance floor to those high school friends for whom "I never seem to laugh now like I did with them", the lyrics dig beneath the surface and get to someplace more viscerally relatable than some of the more abstract odes to nostalgia that country has given us in the past, effective as they were in their own right. David Nail puts forth a typically powerful vocal performance that really puts the material on its feet, but it really surprised me to discover Kenny Chesney was a songwriter on this song. Nothing from Chesney's own two-decade body of work ever really hit me as much as "Turning Home" which he allowed to be recorded by somebody else.
#4. "Amen"--Eden's Edge (2011)....Even a crusty and cynical soul like myself occasionally goes for a song that's just sweet in its tone and presentation, and the debut single from the group Eden's Edge sure hit the sweet spot for me. The swooning midtempo melody along with lead singer Hannah Blalock's perfect vocal pitch really sold the narrator's joy about finally having her chance with the man of her dreams in their small town following his many years of being stuck in a miserable relationship with another woman. It's the kind of song that I'm glad didn't get lost on the Nashville assembly line in the hands of Carrie Underwood or Taylor Swift because the treatment it was given by this new group with a different sound gave it an identity that might have been otherwise lost. Sadly, it was Eden's Edge's only hit of significance and the group broke up after their first critically acclaimed but poor-performing album. It was yet another puzzle piece that helps explain why country music was so forgettable this decade.
#3. "Tornado"--Little Big Town (2012).....Little Big Town has had more lives than Shirley MacLaine, appearing to be fading into oblivion at numerous points in their two-decade career only to then score another big hit that puts them back onto the charts. "Pontoon" and "Girl Crush" were their biggest chart hits of the decade, but it was a top-5 hit that came between those two that stands out to me as the hands-down best thing the group ever recorded. A Gothic revenge tale set to a thunderous percussive tempo, "Tornado" pushed the boundaries of country music to its limit but did so without betraying the genre's fundamentals. I also prefer revenge tales that hyperbolize metaphorically rather than specifically implicate the narrator in homicides, as has become the cliché in recent years. The song's heavily stylized video speaks volumes about the narrator being heavy on big talk, but lacking in delivery, which brings an interesting perspective to the apocalyptic lyrics.
#2. "Sunny and 75"--Joe Nichols (2013)....If ever there was a great song that found just the right artist, it was this modern summertime country classic "Sunny and 75" getting recorded by veteran crooner Joe Nichols, whose laconic vocal delivery gives the lyrics room to breathe. Nichols also helps sell the ambiguous interpretation of the story, which I suspect the songwriters intended. Is the song a love letter to the present-tense love of his life, or a reflection on his memories of a love lost? It works either way. Whatever the interpretation, the mellow opening escalates wonderfully to a soaring instrumental flourish that keeps the song aurally captivating for the entire three minutes. As someone with plenty of treasured memories of summertime fun with ex-girlfriends, the combination of descriptive summer visuals and the song's addictive melodic structure makes "Sunny and 75" my favorite country-pop song of the decade, and by no small amount. It was a comeback vehicle for Nichols more than worthy of it's #1 success on the charts.
#1. "Till Summer Comes Around"--Keith Urban (2010)....Hard to believe there was a song about summer love that I liked even more than "Sunny and 75" in the last 10 years, but very early in the decade, Keith Urban had a top-5 hit with a song that took a decidedly different approach. The narrator fell in love with a vacationing girl he met at the amusement park of the touristy town where he lives, and has spent the last five years working at that amusement park holding her to the promise that she'd come back for him, slowly coming to accept that he's seen the last of her. It's a chilling story of love unfulfilled every bit as compelling for me as George Jones' much-ballyhooed "He Stopped Loving Her Today," set to the most haunting guitar arrangement I can ever remember from a hit country song. Keith Urban has showed us over the years that he's capable of making some really impressive songs, but "Till Summer Comes Around" is light years ahead of its nearest competitor from Urban's catalogue. Anybody who ever had an adolescent summer romance that has stuck with them into adulthood can connect with the story, even if their own experience didn't end up as soul-crushingly dark as the narrator's.
Notice how a full seven entries on this list came from the decade's opening year? And how another four came in the two years? The frontloaded nature of the list hammers home country music's declining trajectory, with most of the best music of the decade being holdovers from recordings of the previous decade. As country music found its defining voice of the current decade in its third and fourth years, it really started to lose me. "Bro country" made all of us a little dumber and a little more tone-deaf, and it's jarring to contrast those chauvinistic anthems with the onset of the #MeToo movement only a few years later. Yet somehow, even in the current era of the female empowerment narrative, we're seeing very little in the way of new female voices on country radio. The bros are still dominating, even if their output is more "sensitive" than it was five years ago.
I said early on my list that some artists improved while others declined over the course of the decade. Cole Swindell and Kip Moore rose above their bro-country origins and found their respective niches late in the decade, while Luke Bryan and Dustin Lynch started the decade with potential but ultimately sold out to the lowest denominator with consistently lackluster, trend-hopping material. Leading superstars Blake Shelton, Jason Aldean, and Florida-Georgia Line got their hands bloody with loathsome garbage, but mostly just cruised along with a mix of mediocrity and mildly satisfying trifles that are pleasant but unmemorable. This pattern seems likely to persist with newer artists being groomed for superstardom like Brett Young, Michael Ray, Kane Brown, and the aforementioned Brett Eldredge. One of the most controversial artists of the decade is Sam Hunt, who pushed the genre's boundaries into pop, hip-hop, and EDM terrain even more shamelessly than Thomas Rhett. Hunt appears to be a mercurial figure who isn't nearly as interested in music industry stardom as he expected to be when he got his record deal, so there's a real chance his footprint moving forward will shrink.
The few females with chart success this decade, such as Maren Morris and Kelsea Ballerini, seem inclined to forge even deeper than the guys into pop territory with decidedly mixed results trending downward. Carrie Underwood, the only consistently successful female artist on country radio who spanned the decade, treaded the same territory far too often with homicidal scorned lover tales and oversung power ballads. Meanwhile, there were dozens of female artists who should have had success but didn't, with the perfect commercial package Kacey Musgraves being the most confusing. Musgraves actually did have modest chart success in the middle of the decade but even as her profile has risen, country radio's reception has inexplicably only gotten cooler. Carly Pearce is another highly worthy rising star whose chart success thus far (she's now on her second album) has been a decidedly mixed bag. For the life of me I can't understand country radio's unwillingness to groom future female country stars.
Some artists deserve some praise for consistently carving out a worthwhile body of work that shows some artistic merit while still managing radio play that spanned the decade. I mentioned Dierks Bentley, and while I certainly don't love everything he's put out, it's nonetheless clear he's smarter than the average bear and gets a little more creative license than the top-tier artists like Shelton who are kept on the shortest leashes. Brad Paisley also gets some creative license to drift from the center lane and regale listeners with his sense of humor, blistering guitar skills, and relatable slice-of-life ballads. The results don't always hit the mark, but they also don't seem as mechanical as those from most of his less-talented peers. And the most brazen commercial country experimenter from this decade has been Eric Church, who cuts a bad boy profile comparable to the outlaws of yesteryear and can always be relied upon to do his own thing after struggling to break through a decade ago when he was forced to hew closer to Nashville's more conventional tropes. None of Church's efforts individually struck me as worthy of this year's top-20 list, but taken as a body of work over the course of the decade, I probably have more respect for him than any of the other chart mainstays.
Looking forward to the decade ahead I see conflicting signals. I suspect the core of the country music superstars will continue to hop trends, and in the #MeToo era, that likely means sappy, sensitive-guy love songs that don't appeal to me much more than the empty-headed party-bro anthems that defined this past decade. Furthermore, the trend toward bombastic, pulsating, dance club-style pop arrangements that lack even a toehold of respect toward the genre's traditions is not going away, with artists more brazenly blowing way past the line each year. And radio will almost certainly continue to be unbearably awful, sabotaging worthy careers while shoehorning once-promising careers to a clunky formula. On the other hand, a new wave of artists is trickling in that offers some hope for giving listeners something that's either new or nostalgically familiar. In a couple of years, we should know what the decade's new country music zeitgeist will be. I'm not confident at all that it'll return to anything resembling the 90s pinnacle or anything that preceded it, I'm not resigned to this coming decade's product being even worse than the past decade's product. Clearly, I'm positioning the bar for acceptability pretty darn low.
posted by Mark at 9:38 AM
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