Every week, the Wide Open Country team rounds up our favorite newly released country, folk, bluegrass and Americana songs for the Wide Open Country Six Pack. This week's roundup includes a Kelsey Waldon and S.G. Goodman collaboration, a '90s country bop from Adeem The Artist, a gritty love song from Luke Grimes and more.
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Here are 6 new country songs you need to hear this week.
"Hello Stranger," Kelsey Waldon and S.G. Goodman
Alysse Gafkjen
Two of Kentucky's best young voices, Kelsey Waldon and S.G. Goodman, team up for a rousing rendition of Bluegrass icons Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard's "Hello Stranger. It's the first release from Waldon's forthcoming 8-song album There's Always a Song, a tribute to the musicians that shaped her.
"It's like, I kind of was able to find my voice through these voices, you know?" Waldon says in a press statement. "A part of me doing this album is expressing so much gratitude for the music that I love, for music that has meant a lot to me and helped me."
There's Always a Song also features collaborations with Margo Price, Amanda Shires and Isaac Gibson.
-- Bobbie Jean Sawyer
"One Night Stand," Adeem The Artist
Madison Miles Photography
Adeem The Artist previews their new album Anniversary with "One Night Stand," an irresistible queer country love song and, in the words of the East Tennessee singer-songwriter, "a 90s pop country bop." (We agree wholeheartedly.)
"Queer Country as a genre has meant a lot to me," Adeem The Artist says in a press statement. "Discovering Karen & The Sorrows, Paisley Fields, D'orjay the Singing Shaman, I had a community that I got stitched into with a rich tradition of political activism, demystifying theory, and reclaiming space in the cultural rooms where we've long sat unacknowledged."
The Butch Walker-produced Anniversary is due out May 3 via Four Quarters Records and Thirty Tigers.
-- BS
"God and a Girl," Luke Grimes
In case you missed the memo, Kacey Dutton is a country singer now. Okay, not actually. The youngest Dutton is still busy dealing with...well, everything that comes along with being one of John Dutton's heirs and is far too distracted to pick up a guitar and start jamming out with Walker at the Yellowstone bunkhouse. But Luke Grimes, the actor who's brought Kacey to life for five seasons of the hit western Yellowstone has been releasing stone cold country anthems that would sound right at home on the Dutton ranch. On March 8, he released his self-titled debut album, which follows his acclaimed 2023 EP Pain Pills or Pews. "God and a Girl," written by Dillon James, Jason Nix and Tucker Beathard, is a heart-on-his-Wrangler-sleeve ode to the woman who's stood beside him through the ups and downs.
"She leads me to Jesus, loves me like hell/ Keeps me believin' in more than myself," Grimes sings. "She picks up the pieces and turns down the demons/ And I finally found what I never knew I'd need in this world, God and a girl."
-- BS
"Burn the Boxes," Call Me Spinster
Sister trio Call Me Spinster's latest folksy tune is a '70s-inspired suggests doing more with boxes than not neatly fitting in one because of societal pressures.
"'Burn the Boxes' is all about tearing down and re-defining terms— of relationships, of our contract with societal institutions, siblings and bandmates Amelia, Rachel and Rosalie explained in a joint statement. "It felt fitting to rip apart and reuse cardboard boxes to make something colorful, haphazard and beautiful - a reminder that change takes the creative, destructive and playful mind of a child."
A brilliant music video drives home the song's liberating theme.
"Amelia's husband Dan got the idea for this music video at 7 in the morning, groggily watching our 6 and 2-and-a-half year olds crafting away, hot-gluing cardboard dioramas and a dollhouse they are perpetually retro-fitting with found objects," the statement read. "By 10 a.m. we were deep in a cardboard frenzy, the assembly line led by 6-year-old Amos and our art director friend Chad. We sent our kid off to first grade the next morning exhausted and still covered in spray paint, but proud of his first (and likely not last) production design credit."
"Burn the Boxes" previews the album Potholes (out April 12 via Strolling Bones Records).
— Addie Moore
"Good at Being Bad," Gangstagrass
Gangstagrass' reputation has been built on a clever and never corny mashup of bluegrass instrumentation and fire-spitting hip-hop. Yet on new song "Good at Being Bad," the group's MCs rap over a backing track that's more akin to classic '70s funk —think Lakeside's "Fantastic Voyage" and of course the Parliament and Funkadelic catalogs— and the early hip-hop ensembles that music inspired than boundary-pushing bluegrass.
In all, it's a rewarding curveball from the band that ups anticipation for new album The Blackest Thing on the Menu (out June 14).
— AM
"Where the Road Goes," Old 97's
Yes, Dallas' Old 97's qualify more so as indie rock stalwarts than a country or Americana band. Yet clearly, Rhett Miller and company would've sounded way different over the past 30 years —if they'd played together at all— without the decades-long history of country-rock.
The band's lush, story-driven new song "Where the Road Goes" previews the group's 13th studio album, American Primitive (out April 5 on ATO Records).
"I was in Montana and found myself on the banks of the Blackfoot River, watching the water pounding with a ferocious power, and I started building this song as a statement of gratitude for having survived this long," Miller shared about the album in a press release. "It revisits some of the darkest moments of my life, including a suicide attempt at age 14 that by all rights I shouldn't have lived through and yet somehow did. In a way it's like a spiritual travelogue that rolls back through all the places that shaped me for better or worse, and ends up in this beautiful place that I felt so thankful to experience."
— AM
