A world interested in country
LOS ANGELES — Singer-songwriter Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine,” plays out like a whispered dirge.
The song is gothic lounge music for a listener who only has about two minutes to have their heart broken — a silky-soft slow burn stacked with a choir, organ, bass and most critically, pedal steel guitar, the kind favored by country and western purists.
In no way does that description scream “mainstream hit,” and yet, for 12 weeks, it has been on the Billboard Hot 100, an unusual metric of success for a wholly independent artist. And for 10 weeks, her indie rock-meetschamber pop-meets-country held the No. 1 position on Billboard’s TikTok trending chart.
Mitski is not from the American South, though her discography has long considered Smalltown, U.S.A. and she relocated to Nashville a few years ago to mine the geography’s humanity. (“Valentine, Texas” from last year’s “Laurel Hell” album is an example, but there are many.)
She is, of course, not the first indie artist to explore weeping Americana sounds. Many of the leading acts in contemporary indie rock pull from the South or hail from there, like soloists Angel Olsen and Waxahatchee, or groups like Plains, Wednesday and two-thirds of the Grammy-nominated band boygenius. Lucinda Williams’ “too country for rock ‘n’ roll, too rock ‘n’ roll for country” style is a clear predecessor, and every few generations, it seems like a great new band pulls from alt-country’s narrative specificity.
Interestingly, indie rock’s current adoption of country comes at a time of increased global interest in country music. According to the Midyear Music Report for data and analytics platform Luminate, country music experienced its biggest streaming week ever this year, a whopping 2.26 billion.
The genre has historically been enjoyed by English-speaking Americans, but their reporting shows growth in non-Anglophonic territories such as Philippines, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Germany and Vietnam.
In March 2023, Spotify launched a new playlist dedicated to the phenomenon of country-influence in indie rock titled “Indie Twang.” It’s curated by Carla Turi, Spotify’s folk and acoustic music editor, who says the playlist was the result of conversations dating back to summer 2022, when they noticed growing “country influence in indie rock,” as she calls it. It’s a legacy that extends to the late 2010s, when country iconography started cropping up in spaces not traditionally considered country: everything from Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” to Mitski’s 2018 album “Be the Cowboy.”
“I also think through the lockdown we experienced in 2020, listeners sort of emerged craving more organic-sounding music as a way to connect with others,” she continued. The indie twang playlist was born out of all of that, amplified by successful indie artists like Ethel Cain and Plains.
“I’m seeing this space as a kind