“I walk where others fear to tread … I walk into darkness without knowing that you and I will ever meet again,” Dwight Yoakam sings on A Dream That Never Ends, a wonderful blend of ELO- and Beatles-style guitar-driven pop, down-home, can-kickin’ country and his signature stories of vulnerability and, ultimately, resilience.
Yoakam has never been one to fit easily into anything he didn’t care for. In the early 1980s he quickly discarded Nashville, his initial choice of location to pursue a career in country music, for Los Angeles, where his love of hard-driving honky-tonk and rock’n’roll – a subdivision of the genre known as the Bakersfield sound – fused into the California city’s clamorous music scene. Within a few years his aversion to streamlined country/pop steered a stripped-down approach. The die was cast. Yoakam was country music’s saviour until he was passed over by a succession of singers who, he implies, took the easier route to commercial success. In the 1990s he veered into acting, starting a parallel career that continues to be a success.
Brighter Days, his new album, picks up from the signposted name of his 2016 album, Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars, with songs that are his most rooted and melancholy since Population Me, his 2003 album.
The notion of country as a genre that would cross into the mainstream wasn’t one that was being discussed much in recent decades: it wasn’t going anywhere beyond its dusty borders. Yet here we are: collecting names from Kylie, Gwen Stefani, Miley Cyrus and Cyndi Lauper to Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Post Malone along the way, the music is now a staple of top 20s and sold-out arena-sized shows.
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But have opinions really changed? For many, country showed an immovable conservatism in September this year when the Country Music Awards snubbed Beyoncé’s album Cowboy Carter. Despite its typically authentic reimagining of country and Americana through the lens of the black experience, as well as its becoming the first album by a black woman to top Billboard’s country album chart – the double-A-sided single Texas Hold ’Em/16 Carriages also became the first country song by a black woman to top the Billboard Hot 100 – the body politic of country music rejected it.
The genre has been consciously subdivided and shaken up before, of course, notably in the 1960s and 1970s, when the commercial frills of mainstream country, which included multimillion-dollar successes such as Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, Kenny Rogers, Charlie Rich and Tammy Wynette, were snipped away at by the emergence of outlaw country and country rock. Cue the ragged arrival of Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, ornery critters headed by the ever-headstrong Johnny Cash.
Alt country came next, typified by the music of Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, and then cowpunk, whose throw-sharp-tacks-on-the-ground approach was spearheaded by bands such as Jason and the Scorchers and The Blasters. Into this blend came Yoakam.
With Brighter Days he returns to an evolving country landscape that just might make space for him. If that doesn’t happen, then it certainly won’t be for the want of trying, as the album is stocked with terrific songs. Its whiskey-soaked ballads Hand Me Down Heart (”could be yours to steal if you can look past its history”) and I Spell Love (”I heard in France that they all say amour; well, okay, as long as that still means to forever adore”) are classy examples of the form.
Quickening the pace are a handful of country rock songs influenced by the explorations of ringing, psych-pop Americana by Michael Nesmith of The Monkees. Time Between is The Last Train to Clarksville imbued with bluegrass and honky-tonk flourishes; California Sky is drenched in west-coast harmonies; and Wide Open Heart is a guitar-driven rush.
I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom) features Post Malone, whose 2024 country album, F-1 Trillion, includes the likes of Tim McGraw, Morgan Wallen, Dolly Parton and Hank Williams jnr. Here he throws C&W shapes amid fiddle, pedal steel guitar, piano and the twangiest guitar this side of a George Jones tune.
What goes around comes around? Dwight Yoakam has been there and back too often to be overly concerned. Such stress-free thinking grounds these songs, and he and they sound all the better for it.
