Ok, what the hell Tom?
We were doing so good, SO GOOD, with all these new songs you’ve been teasing and now you hit us with this?
First, let’s walk the timeline back to this past fall when Thomas Rhett said his next album was going to be much closer to the country stuff he was raised on:
“All the songs I’ve been writing for my next album have been way more singer/songwriter, way more back to my roots, just way more, I’m not even going to call it… it is way more country what I’m writing right now. I’m going to go to what I fell in love with in the first place.”
Sounds good. I’m all ears. Let’s make some damn country music.
And then, throughout the entire quarantine, Rhett has been sharing snippets of different songs he’s been working on. If I’m being completely honest, it was really encouraging. He even said all this time at home has helped him “rediscover” himself and performed a song called “Country Again.”
He followed that up with a new one called “What’s Your Country Song,” another one called “More Time Fishin,” and then debuted another new one around Father’s Day called “Things Dads Do.” And then finally, he recently shared a a song called “Death Row,” a powerful new song about sitting down with a prison inmate.
All signs point to a pretty solid mainstream country on the way from Thomas Rhett. Obviously, these are quick acoustic performance and we’d have to see what kind of production moves they make, but overall, we’ve been seeing some promising work from Thomas Rhett lately, the kind of stuff that reminds of his debut record. And more than anything, we were getting TONS of comments from self-proclaimed Rhett haters saying how impressed they were.
Until this…
Yesterday, Rhett shared this to his Instagram story…
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NOOOOOOO.
I mean, really?
“Put it on ice, put it on ice, put it on ice, and drink it down,
Grab your girl, tip your hat, grab that jar and pass it ’round,
til we ridin’ white lightning, that’s when everybody vibin’.”
C’mon man…
I mean, nobody is expecting Thomas Rhett to wake up and be Tyler Childers, but after everything we’ve heard in the in the past few months, this feels like a 180 in the other direction.
Why do I even care?
Because like it or not, Thomas Rhett is a mainstream country superstar, and talented one at that. And anytime he’s pushing the genre back towards traditional country music, it’s a good thing for country music as a whole. And unlike many others in the mainstream right now, Thomas Rhett has already shown us that he’s more than capable of making a solid country record.
At the end of the day, Thomas is free to make whatever kind of music he wants and doesn’t have to explain himself to me or anybody else. He likes pop music and there’s probably always going to be shades of pop in everything he does, but I won’t pretend like I’m not looking forward to if and when he goes “country again.”
