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'Indie country' takes on the mainstream with true tales from red-state America

Indie-pedent women … Angaleena Presley, Sunny Sweeney and Natalie Hemby.
Indie-pedent women … Angaleena Presley, Sunny Sweeney and Natalie Hemby. Composite: AP, Getty Images & Rex Features

At its best, country music tells stories about people and places that don’t always otherwise get told. So with all the endless chatter since the election about the need for a dialogue between urban and rural America, it’s a wonder that critics and commentators haven’t been paying more attention to the genre.

You won’t hear any of these artists on the radio, but several recent country albums – Wrangled by Angaleena Presley, Puxico by Natalie Hemby and Trophy by Sunny Sweeney – deliver the types of frank depictions of red-state America that are so sorely missing these days.

More timely than ever, these albums deliver nuanced, honest portrayals of middle America that complicate, enrich and refute the idealized rural lore offered up on country radio in hits like Luke Bryan’s Huntin’, Fishin’ and Lovin’ Every Day and Florida Georgia Line’s God, Your Mama and Me.

“When you’re living in a bubble, you can bet that it’s bound to burst,” Angaleena Presley sings on her forthcoming album, Wrangled, a collection of sharp takedowns of small-town insularity and phony southern pleasantries that depicts a rural America choking on its own traditions.

Presley, Sweeney and Hemby all have close ties to mainstream country, but their own music is out of step with contemporary commercial trends, so the three singers have all gone indie. They’ve self-released their most recent records, partnering up with full service distribution and marketing companies like Thirty Tigers that offer creative freedom while providing many of the services of a traditional label. It’s an increasingly popular model for country-minded singer-songwriters, from Jason Isbell to Lucinda Williams, whose audiences are mostly distinct from major-label hitmakers like Jason Aldean, Sam Hunt and Carrie Underwood.

Self-releasing is an effective model for singer-songwriter-based country acts like Sweeney and Presley, whose fanbases, which favor a more traditional sound, are likely to look to sources like Spotify and satellite radio to find the types of sounds and stories they can no longer find on terrestrial radio.

The self-release model is thriving in country music, and the result is an unprecedented richness in perspectives from songwriters who, free from the need to try to write hits for the radio, are able to tell bleakly honest stories of a struggling middle America.

Presley, a native of Kentucky coal country, is sharply attuned to the problems plaguing the white rural working class. On her 2014 debut, she chronicled a cycle of prescription pills, part-time service jobs and teenage pregnancies plaguing rural America. “It’s this sort of isolating experience,” she said in an interview at the time. “You’re just kind of in it to survive.”

Presley digs even deeper on her new album, exploring the constraining grip of strict parental expectations, the pitfalls of Christian fundamentalism, and the brutality of teenage gender norms. On the title track, she’s desperate to escape it all and see more of the world for herself:

“Bible says a woman oughta know her place,” she sings. “Mine’s out here in the middle of all of this wide open space.”

That script is flipped on Sunny Sweeney’s new album, Trophy. In Nothing Wrong With Texas, Sweeney comes to a richer understanding and appreciation of her Texas upbringing only after having traveled the world and lived elsewhere. “You might have to leave to see that you wanna come back,” she sings on the ode to her home state. Elsewhere, on songs like Bottle By My Bed and Pills, Sweeney pulls the curtain back on middle-age hardship with a dirty realism largely absent from her first couple of albums recorded on major labels.

The most intimate portrayal, however, of small-town USA in 2017 thus far has been Puxico, the debut album from Natalie Hemby, a songwriter who has written hits for artists such as Miranda Lambert and Little Big Town. Self-released on her husband’s independent label, Puxico is a concept album about the south-eastern Missouri town (population 800) Hemby’s grandfather has lived in his whole life.

With a median household income of $34,000, Puxico is located in Stoddard County, a 96% white county that favored Donald Trump by a margin of nearly six to one. It’s the type of region that’s been dissected with anthropological curiosity ad nauseam since the election.

Hemby offers a portrayal of the town’s values and “time-honored traditions”, as the opening song puts it, that relies on nostalgic romanticism without falling prey to rural stereotype. By focusing on intimate moments of revelation on songs like Ferris Wheel and The Grand Restoration, the songwriter renders Puxico as a three-dimensional, breathing community, one bound together by friends and neighbors and family with complex and contradictory problems, values, fears and dreams.

During a recent interview, Hemby expressed hope that her project might encourage the slightest bit of demographic healing. “I just wanted people to go, ‘When I heard this song it reminds me of my home town,’” Hemby said. “That would mean so much.”

With the 2016 election proving, among other things, that the greatest ideological divide in the country may very well be between the rural and the urban, there’s a quiet radicalism to Puxico, an album made by a lifelong city-dweller (Hemby was born and raised in Nashville), that tells the story of an otherwise neglected region without condescension.

Like Wrangled and Trophy, Puxico offers a vision of contemporary country music that tells stories about a part of the country that’s still largely misunderstood. For those who want to get a grasp of life away from the so-called “coastal elites”, listening to Presley, Hemby and Sweeney might be a good place to start.