One of the reasons I like seeing bands play live, outside of the fact that it gives me a reason to leave the house, is that it also gives me a way to develop a deeper connection with the music I’ve been listening to on record. You can get a much better sense for an artist’s personality when you see them try to connect with the crowd or interact with their bandmates, and the way they try to present their music can give you a sense of their artistic intentions, adding both subtext and context that may not be present on the record. It also helps me get a grasp on the different trends going on in the listening public at large – what songs and bands are crowds reacting to? What opening acts are headliners booking to play with them? What venues are hosting these groups?

A lot of these questions were cycling through my head as I saw Rosali and her backing band, Mowed Sound, play at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan on April 12th, but while I had time to ponder the way the group straddled the line between noise rock and classic rock, the vocal chemistry between Rosali and Mowed Sound leader David Nance, and guitarist Jim Schroeder’s thunderclap leads, my mind kept circling back to the same place – there sure are a lot of people into this country/folk/Americana thing now, huh?

Rosali and Mowed Sound’s indebtedness to country rock, specifically that of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, should be self-evident to anyone who’s listened to either 2021’s No Medium or this year’s Bite Down, the singer and backing group’s first two albums together. I don’t know if you could go as far as to call both of those albums’ country rock in and of themselves (they’re more often referred to as “folk rock”), but they are undeniably rural, or at the very least, not urban. Recorded in Mowed Sound’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, the at times stomping instrumentation of both records recalls a gathering prairie thundercloud, a feeling the band was able to recreate on stage to thrilling effect, elevating what were already good songs into more engrossing, full-bodied experiences. But even though the group’s noisy, abstract transitions added a left-field element to a sound that’s otherwise quite reverential of the past, I couldn’t help but think it was a little odd that artists this interested in playing what would have been considered fairly mainstream rock music in the 1970s were drawing a hip (but not necessarily young) crowd. Add in the fact that the Knitting Factory has traditionally hosted more experimental acts, and that its bar was blasting the incredibly urban Interpol before the show, and the combination of act and venue just gets more peculiar. 

As I already noted in my Jess Williamson live review, country music seems to have seeped into nearly every other musical genre over the last few years. Obviously, the most high-profile case came in March with the release of Beyonce’s COWBOY CARTER, in which the hip-hop/R&B superstar explores her Texas roots via acoustic guitars, a Dolly Parton cover, and a few Willie Nelson features. Like nearly everyone else, I enjoyed COWBOY CARTER, even if many of the problems that plague mainstream albums these days – scattered sequencing, an overlong runtime, lyrical literalism – are still present. But even if you take those issues into account, COWBOY CARTER still stands not only as a testament to both Beyonce’s flexible artistry and country music’s current imperial era, but to how the soft taboo around the genre has begun to dissipate. While most people probably weren’t expecting Beyonce to record a country album, it makes sense that one of the world’s best-selling artists would dabble in one of music’s best-selling genres. As a writer who primarily covers indie rock, I’m still struck by how both country and folk music have been re-embraced by a scene that has kept it at arm’s length for the last ten years or so.

The Great Country/Indie Schism

To be fair, bands mixing country and indie rock aren’t a new phenomenon. Groups like Meat Puppets, The Gun Club, and Violent Femmes had been combining roots music and “college rock” before the term “alt country,” which was coined describe the mix of Guthrie-esque balladry and Replacements-style rockers on Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression, entered common usage. But the fates of Uncle Tupelo’s two founders serve as a handy microcosm for the way that “alt country” became a bit of a trap for certain artists rather than an asset for further indie fame. After Uncle Tupelo split, Jay Farrar leaned fully into the genre by forming Son Volt, a band with alternative sensibilities that still foregrounded enough harmonica on their 1995 debut Trace to get them pegged as a country act, so much so that they were derided after moving in a rockier direction of their 1997 follow up Straightaways, only to fall back into the critics’ good graces when they returned to their rootsy, uh, roots on 1998’s Wide Swing Tremolo. Jeff Tweedy, on the other hand, went on to found Wilco, who kept some of their twang for their first two albums before more or less abandoning it on 1999’s Summerteeth and 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the latter of which was hailed as an indie landmark and established them as one of the most prominent names in the genre, subsequent “dad rock” accusations be damned. 

On the one hand, this bifurcation – with straight up “indie rock” bands on one end and bands too country to be considered indie on the other – was probably as much a result of marketing than genre prejudice, but either way, it had the effect of excluding many country-heavy bands from the larger critical discussion and subsequent canon-making exercises that took place at the end of the 2000s. The Drive-By Truckers’ Decoration Day got an enviable 8.0 from Pitchfork when it was released in 2003, but when it came time for the Most Trusted Name in Music to make their lists of the best albums of that year and of the decade at large, the Athens, Georgia-based group were nowhere to be found. Given the band’s subsequent success as a touring act, I’m sure they don’t stay up at night wondering how their lives might have been different if they had ended up on more “best of” lists. But their omission from the indie canon still left them and artists like them (former Trucker Jason Isbell, kinda sorta Alabama Shakes) in an awkward in-between state where they weren’t fully embraced by mainstream radio, the country music establishment, or the alternative tastemakers.

Folk music fared better over that same timeframe, but it, too, eventually fell out of favor.So-called  “freak folk” acts like Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Animal Collective flourished critically and creatively in the 2000s, as did more straight forward indie folk acts like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. But by the early 2010s, those acts had either taken long gaps between albums or pivoted in more experimental directions, and the tepid critical response to mainstream folk acts like Mumford and Sons and The Lumineers who broke in at the same time made anything within spitting distance of a banjo or a cowboy hat decidedly unhip.

A Southern Fueled Revival

 Of course, folk music never disappeared entirely from indie rock – the latter half of the 2010s was replete with primarily female singer-songwriters like the boygenius trio who were undoubtedly influenced by folk and country music, but those roots were always downplayed in favor of the hipper, more respected progenitors like Bright Eyes and Elliott Smith as opposed to, say, Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan. Even Angel Olsen, who got her start as a backup singer for alt country innovator Will Oldham, came to resent her image as a “sad country cartoon girl singer,” and moved her music in a more art pop direction as the decade progressed before boomeranging back to a Laurel Canyon-inspired sound on 2022’s Big Time.

But the crucial pivot point in country/indie relations came two years before Big Time, with the release of Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud. Although American Weekend, Alabama singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield’s debut as Waxahatchee, was a stark, lo-fi collection of Southern-tinged breakup songs, the project began to draw more heavily from 90s alt rock as the 2010s wore on, culminating in 2017’s Out in the Storm, which featured Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth producer John Agnello lending Crutchfield a vintage Clinton era fuzz. But after a stint in rehab, Crutchfield decided to return to her roots, putting out a nostalgic, honeyed collection of songs whose clear blue skies aesthetic was embraced by a listening public coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Saint Cloud’s 2021 reissue, Saint Cloud+3, may have been even more influential, if only because it included covers of Lucinda Williams’ “Fruits of My Labor” and Dolly Parton’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” providing country curious indie rockers with two suggestions for influences.

2021 also marked the beginning of the rise of Wednesday, who made the merger of country and indie even more explicit on Twin Plagues, which not only featured country melodies with grunge-y and shoegaze-y textures, but but distorted Xamby Chemlis’ steel pedal almost beyond recognition, turning one of country’s hallmark instruments into something new and modern. Like Waxahatchee, they followed up their breakthrough with a hit cover, transforming Gary Stewart’s honky tonk classic “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” into a squalling, shambolic indie rock standard, a formula they would replicate with songs from country acts like Roger Miller and Drive-By Truckers on their 2022 EP Mowin’ the Leaves Instead of Pilin’ em Up. 2022 also marked the release of lead guitarist MJ Lenderman’s breakthrough solo album Boat Songs, raising the band’s profile even further and expanding the aperture of modern alt country to include cheeky songs about snobby boat-owning neighbors and washed up NFL quarterbacks. The Wednesday/Lenderman wave-crested, at least for the time being, in 2023, when the band released their critical smash Rat Saw God, whose pre-release single “Chosen to Deserve” stands as perhaps the purest country song they’ve ever recorded, clean pedal steel and all. Lenderman’s Sytrofoam Wino’s assisted cover of “Long Black Veil,” which appeared on his live album And the Wind (Live and Loose!), only solidified his and his group’s country bona fides.

The Year Country Broke?

As I’ve written in the past, what makes Wednesday and Lenderman such important figures is the way they chose, like Waxahatchee, to represent ruralness and Southerness in their music. They didn’t move to Philly or New York to make it big – instead, they stayed in Asheville, North Carolina, and chose to embrace and interrogate the contradictions inherent in their sense of regional pride rather than run away from it all together. This used to be more common in the indie rock of the 80s and 90s, when distinct and cohesive scenes cropped up in cities like Minneapolis; Austin, Texas; Athens, Georgia; and Seattle. But the revitalization of New York’s rock scene in the early 2000s, and later Philadelphia’s in the 2010s, drew droves of aspiring acts away from their less glamorous hometowns for a chance to make it on the East Coast, sanding down their unique regional identities in the process.

If this return to regionality in the indie sphere – and more specifically its newfound acceptance of folk and country – began in 2020, it seems to have reached its peak in 2024. In March, Waxahatchee released her Saint Cloud follow up Tigers Blood, a slick, soul-bearing record that probably could’ve launched her to mainstream radio airplay in the 2000s. Hurray for the Riff Raff, who moved away from their original Americana sound in the late 2010s for Bruce Springsteen-inspired arena rock, went back to writing strummy songs about the American buffalo and vegetation on 2024’s The Past is Still Alive. Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker strips down her band’s spectral folk rock to its most traditional form on her solo record Bright Future, which manages to find the psychedelic spaces between acoustic guitars and fiddles, while on the complete other end of the spectrum, Madi Diaz’s Weird Faith offers a vision of an alternate universe where a young Taylor Swift was obsessed with Bon Iver instead of Tim McGraw. In addition to their work with Rosali, David Nance and Mowed Sound released a self-titled album of their own that’s full of psych-country rockers that wouldn’t sound that out of place on a Sturgill Simpson album, while Faye Webster continues to act as the missing link between country and R&B on songs like the melancholy “Tttttime.” Even Maggie Rogers, who rose to fame in the late 2010s as one of many Lorde imitators, closes her most recent album with a straight up country song, and even appeared on a recent Zach Bryan single. A few years ago, LA hipster queen Sky Ferreira covering Lady A’s 2009 country hit “Need You Now” at Coachella would’ve felt like a surprise; now, it only feels natural.

The question, of course, is how long this “peak” of country-influenced indie rock will last. Considering how immutable it’s become to Waxahatchee and Wednesday’s identities, it’s hard to see this trend reverse entirely, although that’s probably what listeners thought when they heard the first two Wilco albums before that group completely reinvented their sound and the sound of indie rock with it. But regardless of whether we eventually look back at this period as a blip or a tidal wave, the embrace of country by indie groups has done its job by injecting some variety and experimentation in the form that will hopefully stretch the borders of both genres in the coming years. Even if this combination gets stale, maybe one of these groups will go on to record the next Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, or at least act as the match that sparks a new scene in an unjustly overlooked city. Maybe some will even breakthrough to major labels like Orville Peck. Either way, it promises to be a refreshing, invigorating, ride – so pull up your boots, book some steel pedal lessons, and join in.

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Want a deeper dive into country and folk-tinged indie rock? Check out this Spotify playlist I’ve curated, which traces the genres’ relationships from The Gun Club to Waxahatchee.