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Friday, August 23, 2024

August 23, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Kane Brown

[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

On three exemplary songs from one of the city’s (and country’s) up and coming stars.

1)      Thank God”: I’ll admit that this pretty but extremely sappy ballad, a duet with Brown’s singer-songwriter wife Katelyn (Jae) Brown, is probably the least interesting Kane Brown song I’ve heard. I’m starting this post with it partly because it feels like something that two of the married musician characters in Robert Altman’s film might have recorded together, and thus a nice transition from yesterday’s 1970s cultural text to today’s 21st century Nashville artist. But it’s also the case that what stands out the most to me about Brown is his multigenerational and to my mind very American family identity and heritage—he’s the product of a multiracial marriage and has Cherokee ancestry as well—and so I love that there’s a musical representation of his own continuation of that multigenerational story through his marriage to Katelyn and their blossoming family (they have two daughters and a son on the way).

2)      Grand”: “Grand” was the lead single off Brown’s third studio album, Different Man (2022), but it was the first song of his that my sons and I heard, and to us it seemed to define Brown quite specifically as a hip hop artist (and I think you’ll agree if you give it a listen at that hyperlink). Yet that album was released by his (country music) label, RCA Records Nashville; and charted highest on the Top Country Albums Billboard list, as all of his albums to date have. As much as I love Brown’s personal heritage and identity, I think I might love even more the concurrent (and I would argue deeply interconnected) ways in which he has begun to build a music career that so fully and effortlessly crosses genres, making Brown an artist who is equally adept at crafting hip hop anthems like “Grand” alongside country bangers like “One Mississippi” (from the same album).

3)      Fiddle in the Band”: That multi-genre musical identity seems to have been central to Brown’s career since its 2014 origins, but I’m not sure he’s ever expressed it as clearly nor as powerfully as on his most recent single, 2024’s “Fiddle in the Band.” I don’t know if I’ve loved a moment in a song as much in many years as I do that song’s second verse: “I’m like a burnt CD from ’03 in a Mustang/You never knew what was comin’/So I can’t help but be R&B with a touch of twang/Air guitars and dashboard drummin’.” As Brown puts it in the chorus, “Took a trip to Music City/Brought a little bit of everything with me.” He certainly did, and I’d say that exemplifies not just this impressive young artist, but where Music City is here in 2024 as well.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?

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