This week, Kacey Musgraves offers up a superb, folky ballad from her album Deeper Well, while ERNEST teams with the ubiquitous Jelly Roll for a new track, and Cyndi Thomson returns with “The Georgia in Me.” See all these and more Billboard picks for the week’s best new country below.
Kacey Musgraves, “The Architect”
A sublime track from her new album Deeper Well, “The Architect” marks one of the project’s high-water marks. Softly hypnotic and well-written, this song questions whether life’s zeniths, nadirs and turns along the way are orchestrated or happen randomly. “I don’t understand, are there blueprints or plans?
Can I speak to the architect?” she sings. Written by Musgraves with longtime collaborators Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, this deeply-felt track marks another musical triumph.
ERNEST feat. Jelly Roll, “I Went to College/ I Went to Jail”
Country music has a storied tradition of artists nodding to their own less-than-shining moments that become central parts of their legend and legacies, from Haggard’s “Mama Tried” to George Jones’ “No Show Jones.” ERNEST and Jelly Roll are both Nashville natives and on this collaboration, they detail their unconventional journeys to stardom, from ERNEST dropping out after a year of college and Jelly Roll’s evolution from jail cell to CMA Award-winning artist. Along the way, they both paid their music industry dues, too.
“Who came out on top/ Hell, it’s hard to tell,” they sing triumphantly, bolstered by a flourishing of steel guitars, fiddle and piano. Jelly even shouts out the location of the criminal justice center that is central to so much of his story. ERNEST wrote the song with Chandler Paul Walters, Luke Bryan and Rivers Rutherford., and “I Went to College/ I Went to Jail” will be found onERNEST’s upcoming April 12 album Nashville, Tennessee.
Cyndi Thomson, “The Georgia in Me”
In the two decades after releasing her debut album My World, earning the Country Airplay-topping hit with “What I Really Meant to Say” and then opting to leave her role as a recording artist behind, this Georgia native has released music sporadically. Her soft-edged, dusky vocal drawl is still as potent as a Southern magnolia, and front and center on her first new music since 2016, with this song she wrote with Paul Sikes (“Wildflowers and Wild Horses,” “Make Me Want To”). She reminisces about teenage summers spent on red dirt roads, filled with fun-loving Saturday nights and glory-giving Sunday mornings, with the song also nodding to another Georgia-born country singer, Trisha Yearwood. This sweet-yet-sutry sounding track is a solid addition to Thomson’s too-brief musical canon.
Matt Koziol, “I Was”
The age-weathered rasp in Koziol’s voice lends a veritable air to this blues-country track, as he reminisces about his former days of flying too fast down an unhealthy road and all the times he was “at the top of the prayer list” and the “reason for the last call.” The understated piano and percussion lend an oak-wood warmth to Koziol’s crackling fire of a voice. This track, which Koziol wrote with Kenton Bryant, is from Koziol’s upcoming April 5 album Last of the Old Dogs, which follows his 2022 project Wildhorse and 2023’s deluxe version Wildhorse (Barrel Aged).
Ben Rector and Hailey Whitters, “Color Up My World”
This quirky, feel-good love song manages to nod to Pat Green, Bob Ross and turquoise nudie suits in the span of just over two minutes. On this banjo-flecked track, Rector’s vocal balances both quick-wit and charisma, while Whitters’ smooth twang is the sweetener.
Madison Hughes, “Hate that You Love Me”
The Voice alum Hughes broke through last year with a cover of Morgan Wallen’s “I Deserve a Drink.” Her latest dips further into the blues realm than straight-forward country, and becomes a towering testament to both Hughes’ adroit guitar skills and the purring vocal. Her voice is world-weary, her guitar tones threaded with angst, as she offers up a relatable tale of falling headlong for a charismatic heart-breaker. The immensely talented Hughes is on a star-making trajectory.
Riley Green, “Way Out Here”
Before Keith Urban offered a nod to three “Johns” in “John Cougar, John Deere and John 3:16,” singer-songwriter Josh Thompson paid homage to his own trio of icons named John — Johnny Cash, John Wayne and John Deere — in his top 20 Hot Country Songs hit from 2010. Now, Riley Green offers up his own rendering of Thompson’s hit. “We don’t take a dime if we ain’t earned it/ When it comes to weight, brother we pull our own,” Riley sings. His take is more subdued, with slightly moodier production, on this 15-year-old song about defending rural living, but he delivers this track with plenty of heart.
