I guess I'll do it myself

I'm gonna be insufferable with this line for the next year or so, sorry folks.

I mean I don't think the songs themselves are all that important, to be honest. If i cultivate the right vibe, I think that's the most important thing.” - anonymous person who really pissed me off by saying shit like this with a straight face.

I began writing this essay as an expanded commentary on Do It Myself, my new single which is ostensibly about the end of a relationship. It’s actually about departing from a certain way of thinking about myself, my values, and what I should expect in partnership, love and friendship. A departure from being the helpmeet in my personal life has also lead to a comfort in making folks a little uncomfortable.

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2025 already feels like the year of the vibes.

I’ve been told — several times — I that am giving off “killer” vibes. The Tours! New Music Coming out! A couple little feathers in my cap via sold out shows or a cool article. I am absurdly grateful; every little win surprises and delights me.

On the flip side of that coin, I am starting to feel a little burnt out and shunned from financial opportunities and business partnerships that might take this little business I have built to the next level. I am still 100% independently managed, and while I have some help with booking from time to time, no agency has expressed any interest in taking a cut of my profitable touring business in order to help me scale. And some gigs are simply out of the question without that infrastructure.

I have been purposefully trying not to complain publicly because it is a bad look. And anyhow, my inner child sits in awe of my country-folk underdog status, my little festivals and house concerts, my long drives to nowhere but then there are thirty-to-seventy people sitting quietly and listening to my little songs at the end of each little rainbow. Thirteen year old Olivia is sitting shotgun in the van with me, sipping diet coke and absolutely jazzed; singing along to Fountains of Wayne when we get too tired because despite my hillbilly bona fides I was just a dorky kid in 2003 and actually my dad had a copy of Utopia Parkway so I even knew about them before Stacy’s Mom (allow me to adjust my glasses).

At that time, liking country music was deeply uncool, especially if you were iffy on the notion of our country bombing the Middle East to smithereens. But dad always reassured me that John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams (a controversial figure in the Lloyd household!) — they were the good guys. It was okay to like their music.

Now it’s not cool to like sincere music, in general. Sincerity is overridden by authenticity. It has to be authentic.

Authentic Country goes kind of like this: She puts on a gunne sax dress. He drives a vintage car. She does something that she calls a yodel but by technical definition is not a yodel (singing yodelayhee does not a yodel make, people!) He is yelling at me. The man is always yelling at me from a corner with a guitar that needs a setup. He sings about drugs and his truck and the boys back home and the good ole days and — i get it. It’s all Super authentic.

I think that this type of authenticity is boring. It is the poor cousin to being a nepo baby - what could be more predictable than someone who looks like they crawled directly out of a Wrangler ad claiming that they are here to deliver us the sweet manna of authentic country music?

What makes it worse is that these people are almost never “actually” poor or from a rural place, but they will do every Marketing 101 tactic to get you to believe that they are (or they might be). Folks from New England emphasize that they’re from “rural” New England. Regional accents that were lost to our grandparents’ generation suddenly crop up inside the mouths of people from…not that region. We’ve all discussed the Carhartt-as-fashion phenomena to death.

Listen: nobody is saying that playing dress up and singing alongside some pedal steel is solely for people who grew up in a holler like Dolly Parton. Nobody staked the claim that in order to write confessional country songs you had to be a hillbilly intellectual like Tyler Childers. Well, Maybe the music industry at large is hunting around for those people because they’re mad that they couldn’t create generational talent in a proprietary lab so that they never have to stoop to the unenviable task of paying artists for their work again. But nobody else is saying that in order to love this music, play this music, embody this music- you have to win the Poorest Most Rural Kid award.

And I should know! I score pretty high points on the poor/rural scale, with a lifetime 4H membership, tiny childhood home in an impoverished state, and string of victim-of-circumstance tragedies under my belt that would make any redneck troubadour proud. But I’m more complex than all of that. Shepherdstown is - to quote my own mother and every other person in West Virginia - “bougie”. I went to college - like a really nice college (on a scholarship). I have a deep knowledge of bluegrass music but almost all of that (like, at least 85%) comes from my time living in Hillbilly Heaven AKA Brooklyn New York. Shout out to all of the Michael Daves acolytes in the house! Sunny’s Bar Raised Me! Etc. etc.

Whenever I catch a whiff of hardship porn in the profile or interview of a rising (or risen) indie artist in this broad sea of genres we might call Americana, I feel a bit sick. The amount of money, sheer money and time (which is really just more money) that this career takes is staggering. It is actually nearly impossible to do this job and do it successfully EVEN if you have a lot of money, time and talent. Half of the time I feel like I am spinning a roulette wheel when I dream of reaching any type of financial solvency. One does not need to pretend to be poor to have a valid reason to feel that this job is unbelievably difficult and worth celebrating any win you get.

And it’s (almost) always somebody who is twisting the truth, infusing their image with the idea of poverty or rurality (but nothing to really back those claims up). Working class people typically don’t want to pad their resume (so to speak) with working class bona fides because, to put it plainly, being working class in the United States fucking blows. It is hard, and exhausting and more often than not quite dangerous. We don’t want to talk about it any more than we have to because living it is exhausting enough.

I try to talk about my relatively humble background more often these days - but then again, I work a pretty stable job to pay for the privilege of building a music career and without that decidedly white collar job I would be playing open mics once a month while chasing down enough money for rent. I’m also, incidentally, in a lot of debt because I am just delusional enough to believe I am worth investing in (major and indie labels do not yet agree, maybe I should work on my outfits).

While positing this broad issue to another musician friend on a long drive, he pontificated on the value of being a musician. It is a privilege, he said, to write and play music and therefore it should stand to reason that we weed people out by their ability to wait it out, to pay to play until that investment returns on dividends. What is it hurting, if some gal or guy with a juiced up accent and a fat bank account has the resources to pour daddy or mommy’s money into a music career? Who is it really hurting, after all?

I think it’s hurting us. I think it is hurting our culture. To subject art to the same corporate rat race bullshit that has caused numerous economic collapses is to gamble with our collective conscious, to say the quiet part (that we care more about spending and making money than anything else) so loud that it reverberates on our radios, on our spotify playlists, in the 400 cap rooms that these people tour through.

I think that when Upper Middle Class people (or literally anyone who ever uttered the phrase “we were comfortable” in reference to their childhood upbringing) pretend to be some hard scrabble kid from the sticks, all they succeed in doing is telling working class people that their stories are not interesting or valid enough to be told directly by them. That they are comfortable with telling that community’s story, with giving their perspective, as long as it assures them a spot in The Music Industry. And the music industry likes that! People with a strong visual brand are easier to commodify. They’re easier to sell. They are less likely to write songs with teeth in them, to take risks like Childers’ Long Violent History, or like much of Guthrie’s toothier work (think All You Fascists!). More content, less mess. If you’re in the business of making boring rich people more boring and more rich, I suppose then that I wonder why you are playing music. Marketing departments across the world await your visual eye and flair for drama.

I kindly, lovingly, gently - do not have space in my world for people who are looking for a gimmick inside of country music. I don’t need you to prove to me that you “deserve” to be here or that you are some old timey cowpoke resurrected from the beyond. I need to know what you’re about, as a person, so that I can assess how I feel about your music, as an artist. If being a part of this current tapestry of alt country and indie country and whatever-the-fuck you wanna call it country means divorcing my politics and identity from the working class aesthetic that folks timer really into these days (without having to contend with the discomfort of actually living inside of that working class body/reality), then I have to say a gentle No Thank You. I’d rather do it myself.