[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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