The Powerful Message to Take from New Tyler Childers Interview

Tyler Childers does not give audio or video interviews these days. He just doesn’t do it. Simply seeing Tyler Childers speaking extemporaneously on camera this week in a video released in partnership with the Newport Folk Festival was a little jarring almost, though not in a bad way. We’re just used to only hearing from Tyler Childers when he’s singing, along with the often purposely-awkward stage banter that’s become one of his endearing signatures.

Beyond the fascination of simply seeing Childers in his mule barn in Kentucky as he answered questions from Newport Folk producer Jay Sweet, Tyler also had some excellent answers that give us quite a bit of insight not just into Childers himself, but into the moment we’re living in, and how music can help us navigate through it, and actually solve some of the problems that plague us.

It feels important to first set the context for this discussion. Jay Sweet has very much made the Newport Folk Festival into a political institution. One caption released earlier this week from Rolling Stone recapping the 2026 Newport Folk Fest read, “Hayley Williams, Father John Misty, Lauryn Hill, Dave Matthews, Wednesday, Tom Morello, and more of the best of the New Port Folk Festival 2026 performances.”

But of course, none of these performers are folk artists in really any capacity. Not to say there aren’t any folk musicians who played Newport in 2026. But there certainly seems to be a lot of clout chasing happening in a way that can cast actual folk musicians as second class. That’s one of the reasons the Grammys thankfully split the Folk Album category this year into “Contemporary” and “Traditional.”

What the artists touted by Newport Folk and Rolling Stone do have in common is political leanings. This really seems to be the curation point for Newport Folk these days. Hey, if Kid Rock is out there curating his summer series based on alignment to Trump, why can’t Newport Folk? But ultimately this is bifurcating American society, and specifically using music as the wedge instead of using it to unite people, including sometimes for political causes, which can be music’s greatest asset. As we’ve seen recently with the opposition to data center construction, sometimes opinions aren’t as stratified as the media likes to portray.

Interviewer Jay Sweet seemed to be trying to get Tyler Childers to commentate on America in a way that would make his answers come across as politically appealing to the demographic that the Newport Folk Festival curates to and attracts in the new interview.

“What is it like being a musician in America on 250?” was Sweet’s first question.

His second was, “I’m gonna read this quote, ‘It’s a folk singer’s job to comfort disturbed people, and to disturb comfortable people.”

Granted, part of the premise for the interview series is tracing the footsteps of Woody Guthrie “From sea to shining sea,” and so these questions are certainly relevant. Woody Guthrie definitely had his political leanings, and put them into his songs.

To start off answering the second question, Tyler Childers talked about how after his grandpa died, he found comfort in John Prine songs, and specifically the song “Souvenirs.” Childers talked about how he never really understood the lyrics until listening to them in that moment. Childers went on to say,

“I think all of our hope as songwriters is to be able to have those songs that gives people that listen to us that hug when we’re not physically there to and can’t be. And I’ve met a lot of people that ‘Follow You to Virgie’ has done that for. And I’ve been blessed and thankful that I’ve been able to do that in other people’s lives. In the same token, at least in my own catalog, there’s been moments like ‘Long Violent History’ where it’s ruffled some feathers. But hopefully, the relationship I’ve created with those people to listen to me has given me the space to touch on some things where it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re all here together, but some things aren’t cool, and here’s why.'”

Of course, Rolling Stone chose the “Long Violent History” comment as what to primarily highlight from the new Childers interview, because it was political, and works to wedge people apart, even though it it was only three sentences in a nearly 14-minute interview.

The ultimate take from the interview with Tyler Childers is how he sees music as a unifying element in society, and sees his responsibility as a musician to use music to create those unifying moments as opposed to wedging people apart like the media and politics often labor to do since it activates individuals and drives online engagement.

The third question Jay Sweet asked Tyler Childers was, “If you were to pick a song or artist that makes you think about America when you hear it, or makes you feel American when you hear it. Do you have one that might come to mind?”

The answer that Tyler Childers gave was the James Booker song called “Make a Better World,” written by Earl King.

“Society has no priority, we’re all one part of the whole. Whenever people shout, you have to hear them out. Everyone is a beautiful soul,” was the lyric Chiders quoted before saying,

“It’s talking about some really serious stuff. We all have to get along. But it’s got that strut, that feel good vibe to it that allows for you to not feel preached to so much as you’re being talked to about the importance of something in celebration of that. James Booker was an artist that had a lot of pain. He had a lot of loss. He had a lot of struggles. But he’s smiling through that and finding the beauty in life, which is the same super power that John Prine had where he could have you laughing about things. But that opened your heart up to talk about these more serious pressing matters in life.”

Childers went on to say, “You’re not telling somebody, ‘You need to feel this way.’ You’re making them feel something. And through the experience of feeling that movement, they’re moved to maybe just listen, maybe subconsciously. But now they have that message. It might be a really powerful book. But you have to read that book three or four times. And if the book is big, then it’s like ‘When do I have the time to get through that?’ But you’ve got time to get through a three minute song over and over and over again.”

Tyler Childers then went on to talk about how fans of his music can meet each other at shows and create lifelong friendships that often bridge across political divides.

“That entry point right there allows for both sides to disarm themselves and just start being less concerned about the foreign policy and all of that, and just being like, ‘How’s your mom?’ How as this friend of yours that we’ve shared all these experiences together in the pit of this Tyler Childers show? … No matter what you feel one way or the other political-leaning, if you’re both living in a community, and there’s a pothole in between your house and town, the pothole doesn’t care if your tire voted one way or the other.”

Tyler Childers goes on to say most importantly, “Music is kind of like a medicine to allow us to see those things in life that affect all of us no matter what.”

Whenever Saving Country Music broaches political matters, it’s often under this same very philosophy, even if it’s often misconstrued by people on both the right and the left as taking a side. The most important stance is that music as an institution is kept free of political stratification so that it can work to broaden the perspectives of people, and soften hardened hearts. But this can only happen if it isn’t overtly politicized like so often the media loves to do, and sometimes, if not often, artists do themselves, even inadvertently.

It wasn’t Tyler’s album Long Violent History that was the most polarizing leverage point when he released it. It was the accompanying video where he said at one point, “We can stop being so taken aback by Black Lives Matter if we didn’t need to be reminded that there would be justice for Breonna Taylor, a Kentuckian like me, and countless others.” In fact, the accompanying video released on September 18th, 2020 was really the last time we saw Tyler Childers speak on video for any expanded period.

The problem was that Black Lives Matter wasn’t just a term, it was an organization that at the time was advocating for the disillusion of the nuclear family, and ultimately was found to have been running a real estate embezzlement scheme with much of the money that was donated to the organization used to enrich its leadership. By adding that political specificity to his Long Violent History project, Childers didn’t let the music speak for itself, and he did come across as “preachy.”

As similar diagnosis can be made for Tyler’s song “In Your Love.” Though many on the right love to lambast the song being about “gay miners,” the song has nothing to do with that. It was the accompanying video for the song where a pair of same sex miners were shown in a relationship. But as opposed to challenging homophobia as was Tyler’s intent and the way it was portrayed by the media, the actual effect was to likely stoke homophobia. Whether Tyler heart was in the right place was irrespective of the outcome.

Oliver Anthony recently released a new song called “Hank” that says “My songs might be missin’ to ol’ boys kissin’,” in reference to “In Your Love.” Childers himself even references the controversy in a song on his new album Snipe Hunter. Again, the video felt less like telling a relatable story, and came across more as “preachy,” even of Tyler and many of his devoted fans feel otherwise. Tyler Childers has become an extremely politically polarizing performer, fair or otherwise, where simply mentioning his name comes with floods of comments about “gay miners,” and how he’s a “hick lib.”

But ultimately, Tyler’s instincts about the transformation power of music are 100% correct. We’ve seen this effect from music over the decades. It’s often things like the social media presence or the conventional media portrayal of performers in puff pieces that puts the ability of music to be transformational in jeopardy, and often for completely selfish reasons for clout, attention, and engagement.

“For a long time as a young’un, I was told, ‘You got to get out of here,'” Tyler says at the conclusion of the interview with Jay Sweet. “But that really doesn’t change the place. If you’re maintaining a garden in a spot, and every year you’re pulling from that patch of ground and you’re not putting minerals back into that, eventually you’ll end up with dead soil. In a lot of places throughout Appalachia, and in a lot of places in America, that’s what we’ve created. I really hope that other artists and other people that ‘make it out’ don’t go out, that they see the worth, that they see themselves as the mineral, they are the nutrient that place needs.”

Childers continues, “The biggest thing that you could do with your music is to take all the beautiful things that have happened to you through that powerful blessing you’ve been given, and give it back to the community that you came from, because that’s how you make a better world.”

Tyler Childers is 100% correct, and you can see how that philosophy has guided his career. But this only works when music maintains its ability to unite people as opposed to being used as a weapon to divide.

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