Over the past three years or so, I’ve found myself listening to a lot more country and country-influenced music, both voluntarily and involuntarily. The involuntarily piece should be familiar to anyone who’s currently living in the United States: country’s chart dominance has arguably been the biggest music story of the 2020s so far, with Nashville stars like Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, and Chris Stapleton racking up insane streaming numbers and selling out arenas on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. My feelings on country’s current winning streak are mixed; while I don’t have anything novel to say about the Combses or Lainey Wilsons of the world, I can’t help but shudder every time I hear Wallen’s “Me on Whiskey,” a song that feels like it’s destined to play at the weddings of the most boring people I went to high school with, and roll my eyes at Nashville’s craven trend chasing, whether it’s the hip-hop beats on Wallen’s own “Last Night” or the disgraceful repurposing of David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” guitar riff for Chris Young’s execrable “Young Love & Saturday Nights.” Of course, that bandwagon jumping goes both ways: you may have heard that Act II, the next album from native Texan Beyoncé, will be a country record.

Most of my voluntary country and country-adjacent consumption has come, as you can probably guess, through the lens of indie rock. The most obvious twang-delivery system in the genre is Asheville, North Carolina’s Wednesday, who wear their Southern roots on their sleeve and whose feedback-drenched cover of Gary Stewart’s “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” turned the nearly 50-year old ballad into essential listening for the underground set, but other bands have also found room for pedal steel and slide guitar in their sonic palette. Ratboys isn’t exactly a country band, but their two-highest streaming songs (“Elvis is in the Freezer” and “Go Outside”) recall the alt-country leanings of Wilco’s early catalog, while Angel Olsen has emerged out of her synths and symphony-era into a psychedelic country sound that better suits her Missouri-bred warble. Of course, the unquestioned queen of country-tinged indie is Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, who established herself as the heir apparent to both Dolly Parton and Lucinda Williams (the latter of whom is arguably the godmother of the current indie country movement, having been covered by both Crutchfield and Olsen) on 2020’s masterful Saint Cloud, as well as 2022’s I Walked With You a Ways, which she recorded with Los Angeles-by-way-of-Austin singer/songwriter Jess Williamson under the name Plains. 

2024 is likely to be another banner year for Crutchfield – she’s poised release Tigers Blood, her sixth album as Waxahatchee, in March, and has already released two excellent singles from the record, one of which features Wednesday guitarist (and accomplished solo artist) MJ Lenderman providing some fretwork and backing vocals. While I’m sure I’ll come to love that album and forever regret missing out on tickets for her upcoming tour, it was Crutchfield’s Plains-mate Williamson who really got me thinking about this country/indie connection when I saw her perform a sold out show at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom on Saturday night. 

Truth be told, I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to enjoy myself at this show – Time Ain’t Accidental, Williamson’s solo breakthrough, was my third favorite album of 20231True to the trend, the top two entries on my list were Ratboys’ The Window and Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, but it’s also the kind of album I need to hear in the right time and right place to fully enjoy. That place was not NJ Transit or the Subway, who’s clattering tracks drowned out Williamson’s delicate ballads about love and loss and overpowered the subtle, modern touches of drum machine and saxophone on songs like “Topanga Two Step” and the title track. As a millennial indie rock fan, I’d already seen dozens of understated female singer-songwriters perform mellow, intimate ballads to standing room only venues – did I really need to hear another one? Did I really need to be put in that vulnerable, reflective mood on a blustery February night?

Luckily, that’s not what Williamson had in store for me, or any of the other 500 plus attendees, who swarmed the Bowery Ballroom’s basement bar at a greater volume and with greater punctuality than I had been accustomed to. Instead, Williamson assembled an all-star band of LA musicians – drummer Rob Mills, bassist Ben Schwab, and pedal steel/dobro/guitar polymath Zena Kay – to flesh out her sound and give even her slowest tracks a gentle sense of body and groove. The result was a setlist that improved on its already excellent source material by turning these gentle, personal songs into anthems that could fill up a room, not with an overwhelming sense of force but with a sun-dappled warmth that provided a sense of unity and community, the provincial, familiar-promise of country made real in perhaps the least-country city in the nation.

Key to Williamson and her band’s sound is, of course, her voice. Compare a live recording of her vocals with the studio version, and you aren’t likely to hear a difference – in both cases, her singing is fluid and sweet, conveying a simultaneous sense of romantic longing and mournful regret. She isn’t a belter – rather, the power of her voice lies in its smoothness and clarity, as well as the unique spin her Texas accent lends to certain words (my personal favorite being her assurance that It’s all “ex-peer-a-mental” in the chorus of “Time Ain’t Accidental’). This literate but easygoing delivery is an extension of her on-stage persona, which, compared to the magisterial bearings struck by many pop stars and the irony-laden self-deprecation of many indie acts, is refreshingly earnest and even a little square. I wouldn’t blame anyone for rolling their eyes just a little when Williamson dedicated “Harm None” to “the creatives” and media professionals who lost their jobs in the industry’s recent contraction – but I’d also challenge them not to be swept away as she sang about “Wild love, no money.” In a world full of cynics, a little country kumbaya can’t hurt.

This isn’t to imply that Williamson is somehow naïve or chaste, however. Rather, her songwriting and performance style is, to quote “Hunter,” “as pure as the universe, honest as an ashtray.” She’s undoubtedly a romantic, but she grounds her romantic notions in a kind of weary knowingness that comes out when she’s sizing up her ex’s new fling (“You all seem good, she looks real young and nice”/”And agreeable, why am I not surprised?”) and herself (“I’m not a good woman if I leave or if I stay”). Those qualities extend to Williamson’s live show, as well. The group’s presentation – which featured mic stands adorned in fake lilacs and Kay donning a Nudie suit – clearly hinted at a reverence for country’s history and a desire to live up to the genre’s greats, even if they couldn’t entirely live up to their glamor. “I was originally going to wear a short black dress,” Williamson, who wore a much longer, Little Home on the Prairie-style outfit instead, said. “But then I remembered that I do this,” she said, gesturing to the electric piano she sat at for a few songs, “and if I hadn’t changed, it would have been a very different show.” But whatever limitations, sartorial or otherwise, Williamson and her band had to deal with proved to be no contest for their ingenuity – the pre-recorded drum machine tracks seamlessly complimented the live instrumentation, and a rearranged version of “A Few Seasons,” sung as a three-part harmony by Williamson, Mills, and Schwab, soared, even as Mills had to lunge across the stage to cue in the song’s minimal percussion.

The setlist as a whole moved with an incredible sense of momentum, which is remarkable considering that they squeezed in nearly every song from Time Ain’t Accidental as well as cuts from Sorceress, Williamson’s 2020 album that she was never able to tour behind thanks to COVID, as well as two Williamson-penned Plains songs. A lot of that momentum is thanks to Williamson’s commitment to keeping the whole band involved – only one song (“I Walked With You a Ways”) was performed without the full band, which guaranteed a gentle but deliberate tempo and necessitated some interesting rearrangements. Audience participation – which can often be a distraction at these kinds of singer/songwriter shows – also helped liven up the atmosphere, with “Hunter” and “Roads” inviting the most enthusiastic singalongs from a crowd that has probably never been to the small Texas towns that Williamson sings about, but were transported there spiritually thanks to her vivid and poignant songwriting.

Williamson performed behind a guitar or piano for every song with the exception of “Time Ain’t Accidental,” during which she freed up her hands to evoke the floaty, almost improvised-feeling choreography of the song’s video. Guiding the mic wire over the amplifiers and fake candles, she came off as simultaneously awkward and free, as if mirroring the way that the cramped (and primarily female) crowd had reacted to each of her prior songs. It was the perfect evocation of the kind of every woman-ness that bro country songs about girls wearing baseball caps and driving pickup trucks pretend to be about – a form of femininity accountable only to itself, not empty cultural signification or male fantasy. It also struck me as why many people, from traditionally country-listening regions and elsewhere, have begun to embrace this music as it has crept into the indie world. In a scene that can become obsessed with obscurity and esotericism, the country is refreshingly unpretentious, but also authentic in the ways that it gestures towards a musician’s heritage. Its tropes and cliches lend performers a sort of freedom, a chance to color inside the lines while simultaneously thrusting the genre into the future. 

Williamson attained a similar kind of freedom with her final song of the night, a cover of Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” sung as a duet with the show’s opener, Montreal-based singer/songwriter Le Ren. It was something of a paradox – a poppy product from the record industry’s most decadent era reproduced by a group of younger, independent artists in a more traditional style – that also served as a kind of winking celebration of the two artists’ accomplishments. “Looks like we made it,” Williamson sang after strumming the song’s opening chords. Indeed, they have.