I picked the album for today because we did the
Brandi Carlile album. I didn't read the post, but I scanned through it and saw a Blind Spots post on
the Highwaymen. I'll come back to that. I ended up liking this album more than the Brandi album. That might be because I had more time or openness to it this week. But it's also this interesting experience of coming into a supergroup album not really knowing any of the artist, not really being into the genre, not really being into the themes.
I listened to the album maybe three and a half times total, but after the first time, I remembered that Blind Spots post, and I went back and read it, and listened to the first song. I was like... oh, I see. It's an homage/parody that the Highwomen are doing. I didn't know about that either. Clearly my adult autism brain paused for a moment, and was like, "If it's the Highwaymen, then it should be the Highwaywomen." Highwomen is something else. Highwomen sounds much better than Highwaywomen, so that probably matters more. But that did get stuck in my craw for a bit.
So rethinking about the album in that sense, through the second and third time, I came to liking it. The first two songs really do answer the question of "what is a Highwomen?" Ya know, "Highwoman, she was in Iran-Contra, and she escaped." "Highwoman, she was in the Salem Witch Trials and hung." "Highwoman, she was a freedom rider in the South." It was nice seeing
Yola in there! What a delight. I was like... okay. I don't really remember what Johnny Cash and
Willie were talking about in the other song, but maybe that's the analogous.
And then Track 2 redoubles into it. I think it's literally called "Redesigning Women." It's like, "Here's what the Highwoman is again." I thought that was good. It's a thesis-based project. Which, again, the project, I don't really care about, but from that detached perspective, I can still kind of enjoy. Then immediate go into Track 3, which is just a typical country radio song. "I'm not your loose change, I'm your lucky penny!" It still falls into the theme of "womanhood," but we're just bouncing around, having country fun.
Track 4, that one even sounds like a parody of country songs! For the next four or five tracks, that's mostly what I noted down—"this feels like a different kind of country song." Like, Amanda has a touch of the
Reba, a little bit of the Reba flair. There's a couple big tracks, "Wild Child," "Old Soul." Big anthems. It ends on a big anthem too. Those were fun, although they were a bit long. But then you had more country standards. "Don't Call Me," which is a swinging, honky-tonkin', jug-tootin'-type song. A couple times I wrote down: "This is another jug-hooter." Which is... it's a country album, so you expect some jug-hooters, but in the relief of this opening of "We're the Highwomen, and that means something!" What
does it mean? Now we're jug-hooters too, I guess.
I'm still enjoying it. I love the "1-800-GO-TO-HELL," I'm gonna use that. Then there's a sad song on death or whatever toward the end. I didn't care for it, but I understand it has to be in there. I really liked the one song that was like "Don't call me mama, I like wine and I'm hungover, and I can't deal with you right now." So if I went ahead and said, "What is a Highwoman?" I guess from the Highwaymen, from what I remember, it was all these men doing crazy stuff. One dude is building a dam and drowns, another guy gets crushed by a steamroller in Looney Toons or something. Whereas the Highwomen were like "I'm going to be my own lady, and go out and do stuff." Which is great! Maybe it's culturally on point.
So overall, good album. Not my genre, but good album. I appreciate the supergroup nature of it. Brandi and Amanda Shires in particular were very good.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joe: I feel like for some of these albums, I go back and I wish Sunny had been part of it. Because I feel like that's the important question: what are they trying to do here? The people who did it that week dismissed it—
myself included—and maybe my thought at the time was an album about power to women. Do they do this enough? Like you said, there are songs that are just fucking country songs, that don't speak to the power of women. So maybe viewing it that way is a sign of failure on their part. Whereas I was thinking today—and what I think you would've gotten to first, if you were there in November 2019—is that this is country album in the way that the Highwaymen did a country album, in that they are taking the tropes of country, and applying them to a certain gender. So the Highwaymen were explicitly masculine in the way they were doing it, because that's what country was at the time, whereas the Highwomen are presenting those same tropes, but from a different perspective. This isn't an album
about women, but it's reimagining the country tropes as centered by women.
Sunny: There's that one track toward the end, I forget what the name of it was. "I love this woman, and she doesn't know I love her." And the first time I listened to it, I was like, are they just doing a cover of a male-perspective song, or is this a lesbian femme-love thing? And by the end of the song it's very clear it's the latter. And I think that reaffirms what you're saying, that it takes the tropes—this is a classic type of country song—and then bringing it to them, and playing on perfume vs. cologne, and all these other little things.
Joe: I don't know why I assumed that Brandi Carlile was the mastermind behind that song, as the lesbian of the group.
Sunny: That would be my assumption without looking into it.
Joe: I looked it up. Amanda Shires and her then husband Jason Isbell wrote that song, and Shires is the lead on that.
Sunny: Interesting.
Joe: This is something I looked up on Wikipedia on the car ride here—
Sunny: As all good research is done.
Joe: —and I think that that speaks toward the togetherness of the Highwomen. That they are expressing empathy toward the whole of the woman experience. Just because Amanda Shires is straight doesn't mean that she can't empathize with her bandmate Brandi Carlile. And in a winking way too.
Sunny: You're right, the song is a little tongue-in-cheek, which definitely plays into that. So all these Highwomen are speaking to this universal woman experience, flush with the country thing. If someone is to be over critical, you could call it tokenizing. The one criticism is, ya know, country is racist, the South is racist, and all these women are white. So on Track 1, they immediately try to combat that.
Joe: "We need Yola!"
Sunny: "We gotta get Yola in there."
Maren isn't in there! She doesn't have a verse about the first woman to discover radioactivity or something like that. It's just Brandi, Amanda, and Yola on there.
Joe: She's not singing about hitting number one on a Chainsmokers song.
Sunny: Exactly.
Joe: I guess it's interesting to think about Maren Morris has purposefully removed herself from the genre of country. Not that she is doing Chainsmokers songs again or anything. But she's definitely been very expressive about how country is dominated by Morgan Wallen types, and I don't want anything to do with that shit anymore. Which makes me sad, in a way, that maybe the mission of the Highwomen has failed. If the purpose of this was to present it from a different perspective, then you have bad faith actors like Morgan Wallen who are purposefully leaning in the other direction. A more traditional direction... not saying that Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash were racist at all, they seemed to be pretty liberal. I guess just the idea that masculinity, like if you value that, then that seems to be more of a conservative thing. So masculinity looks different in country music.
Sunny: And there's a performative nature to everything we're talking about, but these are all performers. So I think to your point, one could say that the Highwoman project, if that was the point, was a bit of a failure. Or they weren't able to fight against all the culture that... I mean, they are one band, with one album, versus the whole country that's gone in a certain direction.
Joe: That genre specifically, I guess. I know that the Brandi Carlile album we listened to came out well before The Highwomen, but that didn't seem very country to me.
Sunny: Yeah, a lot of pop sensibilities, a lot of rock sensibilities.
Joe: Amanda Shires isn't really... she's more Americana, which is rooted in country but removed from the traditional outlaw country. Less familiar with Natalie Hemby. She was more of a country writer. She has since released an album of her own, since this. So I don't know, I can't really speak to her experience. I feel like maybe, instead of seeing this as four country artists that are coming together to reclaim the genre that they work in, it's more like four musicians who work slightly outside the genre, who admire people like the men in the Highwaymen, and are trying to reclaim it for them.
Sunny: And trying to take back a bit of this genre. To your point, they are not all in it all the time. Which is probably why they can produce a project like this. They have a little bit of outside perspective. Did they make any more music after this?
Joe: Together? No. I mean, they probably have worked together, in certain combinations. So, okay, I looked up Yola's most recent album, the 2021 album. What was that called? [
Editor's note: Stand for Myself
.] Rachel S. picked the Yola album before that for Record Club,
Walk Through Fire. And then there was one that came out around the time we covered
Walk Through Fire. Fuck, what was that called? I looked it up because, since then, Yola has also not really done any country stuff. Those two albums were produced by the
Black Keys dude, Dan Auerbach. And she has since said, yeah that dude's a piece of shit, I'm never gonna work with him again. And I wanted to look up her two best songs, "Diamond Studded Shoes" and "Stand for Myself," and they are co-written by Auerbach. So I don't know. Where was I going with this?
Sunny: Artists outside of country... oh, do these people work together again?
Joe: Oh yeah. On that album, Natalie Hemby co-wrote a song as well.
Sunny: So they're still in contact.
Joe: Yeah, they're all pals.
Sunny: But the Highwomen project is not an ongoing thing.
Joe: Right, it is not. They did all they could. And I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with that shit. Like, if they're not within that genre firmly, and they released an album right now that was explicitly pro-feminist, people like us would be like, oh that's cool, let's listen. But that genre...
Sunny: Marketing it in the circles that it would be marketed in would be very difficult.
Joe: Fox News would have a field day. They'd have Morgan Wallen on the talk show to do his thing. They'd have
Jelly Roll on there!
Sunny: It would be an easy target, sure.
Joe: Yeah man, I think I agree that it's not the best album ever. But that's more genre, not purpose behind it.
Sunny: And not talent. Clearly these people are making good music, and displaying it.
Joe: Is that something that comes in time? I know we were talking about how long you've been doing this, how long we've been doing this. I got the sense that, back then, listening to The Highwomen, I did not have the capacity to understand that you can appreciate art, or knowing the purpose behind the art, without liking the art itself. I don't know if that's my way of coping with having to do a review every week for the rest of my life, and the boredom that would come from saying "this is a shitty album, fuck this, I'm never listening to it again," like not considering the depth of it. Or, if it's actually true. Do you get that sense? In book club, film club, whatever, that you're at the point where you can appreciate art even if you don't like it?
Sunny: Yeah. Listen, I don't know anything. [laughter] But I would say two things. One, the repeated process—and Record Club for me was probably the biggest jump, and you've posted about this too—I've certainly previously been an "anything but rap and country" person, and now I kind of like rap and country, in the right context. So that in itself is a marker of change. I think doing art appreciation, art criticism, and just enjoying art, is a muscle like anything else. In the same way you'd go to visual art school and seeing a bunch of paintings you might not like, being exposed to them still helps you develop taste, helps you understand them, helps you understand the history around it, and all of that helps you appreciate all the stuff you do like even more. And so, yeah, I'm big on saying that doing this for however many years has helped sharpen that tool. And it's also revealed the Dunning-Kruger Effect of it all: the more I know, the more I realize I don't know anything. There's even more depth to music and art than I could ever wrap my head around. I try to be humble about that too. But yeah, that's a big reason I keep doing Record Club. It exercises muscles of art appreciation, being able to extemporaneously write, and also being able to take 40 minutes and listen to music intently. Which is a harder thing than you'd give credit for!
Joe: Apparently! Based on the fact that very few people do this. Especially week in and week out.
Sunny: I mean, I know very few people who sit down, put on a record, even one side of a record or album, and just listen to it. Maybe doodle around with it, or write with it, but just listen to it. Not do their chores or their laundry while they're listening, not thinking about work while they're doing it, not being on the computer while they're doing it, or on their phone. Just listen to the music. That speaks to more our greater culture, but I think this project does ask for it. I don't do it every week, and there are definitely some weeks I just listen to it on the way to work. But the weeks that I do, it's nice.
Joe: Do you feel like you like the album more when you have those moments for concentration on the music? Is that just a given?
Sunny: I think it's hard not to. In the same, if it's a piece of music, one that I don't like in the same way, it's not as sweet or enjoyable, I might like it or appreciate it more, having given it that time and attention, and find at least something... even on the worst album, there's usually at least one track or one chorus or verse where I'm like "that's kinda catchy and fun, they're doing something."
Joe: I wonder if you—and I know we've talked about a similar theory with the Reba thing, but more specifically to liking something, as opposed to the more philosophical stuff—does that argument become "I don't like this because I did not devote enough time to it"? Could any album improve, could any album get to the point where you like it for what it is, not what it tries to do, if given enough time and space? And should the assumption be that if somebody who doesn't do Record Club every week, and decides to pop in, and says "You know what, this Highwomen album kinda sucks!" Can we assume that that is because they didn't listen to it forty times over six years?
Sunny: I can almost definitely assume that they haven't. [
laughter] I think so, though. I think there's something to that. So the question is, what does it mean of the quality of music that it's able to hook somebody, maybe a lot of people, in that first time? I guess that's
Taylor Swift. She's able to, for millions of people on the first listen, people will be like, I like this. Whereas there's a lot of other music, like Buckethead for example. There's a lot of depth in there, but a lot of people here would be like "I'm not going to bother with any more of this, and don't bring it up to me again."
Joe: [
laughter] Amazing
example. Nah, it just feels like there's a responsibility, if like... I don't want Record Club to be a conduit to irresponsibility, that this would just be a place to talk shit on something you don't know about. Which is fine, ya know, it happens. And sometimes there are albums that I listen to 20 times and I still fucking hate them.
Sunny: Sometimes I totally understand where they're coming from, and I hate that they came from that place.
Joe: It's just the limiting nature of Record Club, it just feels like too much of a constraint sometimes. You have five days to do it. And then something like the Highwomen comes along that... I didn't like. At the time. I literally said in my review, this is a bad album. But I... I don't do this anymore, but at the time, Martha was being born, and I wrote it in advance, because I knew I wasn't going to be dealing with this stuff in the hospital. I have since had another child, and
dealt with it in the hospital, because that's what I do now. But I certainly did not give this the time that it deserved. And now, I've been listening to it again, a couple times this morning, all these years later, and it just feels something was missing. Which isn't fair to these artists, and it isn't fair to my experience, our experience...
Sunny: Yeah, but like you said, one of your daughters was being born that week, you know what I mean? Everything you said is true, and also it's in contrast with having some value in a project that is time-constrained and runs every week. And that creates a different experience. I guess you can't have both. Or you can't have both at the same time. You do summer projects that run a bit longer to have that space. For Record Club, which one is better? Or which one would you get more engagement? Or more interesting writing from? That I'm not sure.
Joe: I don't know why I'm hung up on it for this particular one. Maybe because we covered a couple of the Highwomen's, and a couple of the Highwaymen's, albums since then, and I treated them with more respect, as a piece of art. And I don't like the idea of someone going back and reading my November 2019 review of The Highwomen, and being like, oh no, you didn't do this right.
Sunny: Sure, but that's why they can look at your November 2024 reappraisal. [laughter]
Joe: There you go. I took that as a syllable thing, by the way. Highwomen vs. Highwaymen.
Sunny: These are musicians first, not literary majors.
Joe: Is "highway woman," could that be misconstrued as a prostitute or something?
Sunny: It could be, I guess. But maybe that would be an appropriate person to sing a song about. And redeem.
Joe: What are you giving this album?
Sunny: I'd probably give it a 3 out of 5. I like two or three tracks a lot, I appreciate what they're doing, but there are at least four or five tracks that I thought were just stupid. Or, if it is a parody, then I get it! I don't have to keep watching it!
