Say what you will about Paul Cauthen: He’s not boring.
But he thinks the majority of country music is these days.
If you’re not familiar with Cauthen and you’ve only heard his first album you might think his music is pretty traditional. But with his second album, Room 41, Cauthen shattered any preconceived notions that you might have about him and proved what a wild card he really is.
Country, a lot of funk, some rock, some blues…the album really showed what an artist Cauthen truly is.
And then he followed that up with “Country As Fuck,” the lead single from his latest album Country Coming Down that absolutely blasted the current country music industry that’s feeding us all of these fake-country artists who expect us to believe that they’re country just because they say that they are.
“I’m a shade tree mechanic
Got a one-ton truck
I drink a 30 pack a day
Cause I’m country as fuck
Call me Lil Nas
Call me Tim McGraw
Not a moment too soon
I had horses in the stall”
The rest of the album is filled what what Cauthen calls “a good sonic balance between Merle Haggard and Funkadelic.”
So why is Cauthen making music that sounds so different than anything else in country music right now?
Because, in his words, most country music these days is “fucking boring.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Cauthen talked about the same problems with the country music industry that he sang about on “Country As Fuck.”
“I think country music, most of it now, is fucking boring.
I don’t even know if there is country music. Genres are so cross-contaminated, it’s turned into a pissing contest of ‘What do you call this, what do you call that?’ Mine is ‘Paul Cauthen’…and I’m just here to freakin’ light fires.”
And Cauthen says he did his best to keep the boring shit that’s coming out of Nashville right now off of his new album:
“I understand what the crowd really wants: They want to move. They want to shake their ass, you know? I needed to bring that thump.
If it wasn’t a banger or something that makes you move your toes and makes you dance, then I didn’t want it on the record. That’s where my mindset was, to fulfill a good sonic balance between Merle Haggard and Funkadelic.”
Say what you will about Paul Cauthen, but you can’t say that he’s boring.
