How Tyler Childers Made the Most Polarizing Country Album of the Year

Random Notes 134 Comments


When the history books regard this era when the independent became the mainstream in country music, Tyler Childers will play perhaps the most important, and most pivotal role in that story. Though it was Sturgill Simpson who started the fire, and Zach Bryan who brought it to the top of the charts and the stadium level, it really was Tyler Childers and his 2017 album Purgatory that introduced the masses to the alternative universe in country that radio and the awards shows were refusing to represent. He truly is a pivotal character in the history of country music, and a songwriter for the ages.

But ever since that 2017 album, the going has been shaky for Childers, at least when it comes to studio output. Country Squire from 2019 was certainly a strong offering as well, though in some respects, more like an addendum to Purgatory since both albums were produced by Sturgill Simpson, and this is when Childers started to be more economical with his output, only including nine songs when he had so many others he’d performed live without studio renditions.

From there, it’s been one polarizing album release from Childers after another. His pandemic offering Long Violent History was more of a political statement than it was a legitimate studio record. It included some very novice fiddle tunes performed by an entry-level Childers just learning the instrument, along with the title track that was Tyler’s answer to the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

2022’s Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven was a confounding work that took the same eight songs—including previously-released tracks and cover material—and recited them three different ways. Though the vision was ambitious, the execution was confused, and many simply took issue with the album from a marketing and packaging standpoint. Though Take My Hounds did somewhat well upon release, it quickly fell out of charts as fans continued to favor Purgatory, and to a lesser extent, Country Squire.

2023 saw a return to at least a slightly more conventional approach to album making with Rustin’ in the Rain. But now at only seven songs, including covers of S.G. Goodman’s “Space and Time” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night”—and previously worn-out live standards like “Perheron Mules”—people felt like they were receiving diminishing returns from Childers, while pre-order people felt outright mislead once the track list was revealed.

The pinnacle moment for Rustin’ in the Rain was also the most polarizing of Tyler’s career up to that point. It wasn’t actually the song “In Your Love,” but the video that featured two male miners in a same sex love story. While this earned Childers major praise from political pundits and certain critics, it also parsed the Childers fan base into two halves, with one side now constantly citing “gay miners” any time Tyler’s name is merely uttered.

Though outright homophobia was certainly part of the backlash against the video, similar to Tyler’s Black Lives Matter stance, it wasn’t the opinion itself, but the preachy, hectoring, parental, and down-looking notions of it, and the misconception that exposure = acceptance that made so many of Tyler’s own fans feel like it just was inappropriate. The video was ineffective at softening hearts or broadening perspectives. In many respects, the effect was the opposite, giving many fans of country music and Tyler Childers an off ramp from his career.

Meanwhile, how has the overall career of Tyler Childers fared over this tumultuous time? It’s been generally spectacular. As critics lauded his studio releases while the public summarily ignored them to keep spinning Purgatory, Tyler Childers graduated to the arena level, and continued to build cultural cachet as an Appalachian country music revivalist. But it wasn’t due to his recorded output. It was in spite of it, sans Purgatory, with an honorable mention to Country Squire.

These aren’t opinions being shared. This is the statistical certitude verified by chart placement and success of the various Childers album titles. Even here eight years after the release of Purgatory, the album sits at #30 on the Billboard Country Albums chart, selling and streaming better than all of Tyler’s other albums combined. In fact, it’s Tyler’s earlier records before Purgatory, namely Tyler’s first album Bottles and Bibles (2011), and his Live on Red Barn Radio I & II (2013, 2014) that tend to find more favor with listeners.

All of this is what led to the release of Tyler’s most recent album Snipe Hunter, which despite all of the other criticisms each of his recent studio releases have garnered, might be his most controversial yet, even though unlike his most recent releases, it mostly avoids controversial political subjects, it does include more original material, and comes with a whopping 13 tracks. So the next question is, how did we get here?

The truth of the matter is that for some country music listeners, it wouldn’t matter what Tyler Childers released on Snipe Hunter. After the video for “In Your Love,” and perhaps for some the Black Lives Matter stance, his name was mud to a major cross section of country fans, and so would be anything he released.

But the acrimonious political reaction some immediately have for Tyler Childers was sent into hyper drive when the day before the release, a major puff piece spread was published in GQ, authored by Marissa R. Moss. Titled “How Tyler Childers Made The Most Visionary Country Album of the Year,” it was the subheading that really set people off, reading,

“He’s an arena-filling Nashville outsider who wrote a Black Lives Matter anthem and put a gay love story in a music video. Now, fresh off a pilgrimage to India, he’s releasing his spiritual and artistic opus, ‘Snipe Hunter.’ ‘If I’m trying to talk to another young Tyler out there, he needs to know he’s not going to hell for thinking something else different.'”

This was the only interview/feature-length article to accompany the album release, centering it in the public consciousness, and immediately seeding a politically polarizing environment for the album to be released in, which was a bit ironic since the album isn’t really political—and with some exceptions, neither really was the majority of the GQ feature. But the way it was introduced ripped the scabs off of old wounds, while then inadvertently creating an entirely new one.

The GQ article very much fit the formulaic style of the media puff piece, down to the meaningless observatory language, and the interjected quote at the beginning, following Saving Country Music’s generic puff piece template perfectly. The problem with these kinds of media pieces is that without bringing any kind of journalistic rigor or scrutiny upon the subject—and simply presenting a hyperbolically positive narrative—you falsely present the subject as being above reproach.

As we know now, “Black Lives Matter” (uppercase organization) was catastrophic for “Black lives matter” (the lowercase phrase/idea/movement) by siphoning off dollars from well-intentioned donors for real-estate schemes, while not successfully passing any significant legislation for criminal justice reform in the United States. Ultimately, the main goal of the Black Lives Matter movement was to create fealty to the Black Lives Matter movement as opposed to social change.

The GQ article even attempts to assert the disputed notion that the Black Lives Matter protests remained nonviolent. Simply the term “Black Lives Matter” has fallen out of favor with many on the left side of American politics for the previously-stated reasons. Leading off the GQ feature with such a lightning rod topic was an incredibly poor choice, and doomed the feature.

But this was not the biggest reason that so many country fans went apoplectic over Tyler Childers on the eve of Snipe Hunter‘s release. Near the very end of the GQ feature, Tyler Childers broached why he chose to stop performing his now Double Platinum-Certified song “Feathered Indians” live. Though Childers himself and writer Marissa R. Moss do a great job explaining the complexities of Tyler’s decision in a way that comes across as thoughtful and understandable, the information was condensed down, turned into a meme, and blasted all across social media via viral accounts.

Here is the portion from the GQ feature about “Feathered Indians” in its complete form:

Childers thinks often about that place, and about what the choices he makes mean—about how to use the position he’s found himself in, as a representative of Appalachia, of rural America, as a white boy from Hickman.

Case in point: He has not played one of his most-streamed songs, Purgatory’s “Feathered Indians,” live since March 2020. He wrote it when he was young, referencing a Red Man Chewing Tobacco belt buckle he owned: “My buckle makes impressions on the inside of her thigh.” Fans have speculated that him omitting the song had something to do with his wife, or an ex—theories ran rampant online.

The real reason was more complicated, and more revealing. When COVID hit, and Childers released “Long Violent History,” he did a lot of reflecting on harm and intent. One scholar, who posts to Instagram as Not Your Mama’s History, reached out to him, and he started reading her posts, thinking about what makes something problematic, particularly when filtered through a lens of white supremacy. And he thought about the word “Indian,” and whether or not he wanted to keep using a term that Indigenous groups themselves often reject and debate. “If there’s conversation amongst those individuals about whether they should be using that word or not, then it ain’t for me to be using. It’s not mine.”

He takes a long, deep pause as his eyes well up: He doesn’t apologize for his emotion, only waits until he’s gathered himself enough to speak. The tears fall anyway, and he starts telling a story about a time a few years ago when he took a hide tanning class out in Montana and met an Indigenous man named Shawn who lived on the Blackfeet reservation. He wondered what Shawn would think of “Feathered Indians” and realized that he hoped he never heard it—he wanted Shawn to feel safe in his presence, and know Childers respected him and his heritage. When he found out Shawn’s nephew was a fan, he went back to his Airbnb and cried.

“That song has some of my favorite lines I’ve ever written, some of my favorite melodies,” he says, wiping his eyes. At this point, the table of people setting up for his radio duties in the background have all quietly stopped to listen. “Not playing that song is going to make people think.”

Now he and Senora donate royalties from the song to support grants for Indigenous communities and organizations, through their foundation, the Hickman Holler Appalachian Relief Fund. It’s crucial to model this kind of thing, he believes: We must leave behind that which causes harm to others, even if we never meant harm to begin with. We must all be willing to change as part of this journey on the road.

“I’m really glad we talked about that,” he says, shaking his head and blinking himself back. Right now, he just wants to get into “good trouble.”

However, this is not how it was presented to the vast majority of the public. Very few people read publications such as GQ anymore, and those that do come from the upper crust of American society that tend to look down their noses at all things country music to begin with. It was social media memes where country fans discovered the information about “Feathered Indians” in an out-of-context form.


The “Feathered Indians” information set off a country music firestorm that even reached Saving Country Music’s comments section, even though it was never broached directly. What made the situation so scandalous for some Tyler Childers fans is now one of their most beloved songs from Tyler’s untouchable album Purgatory was now being politicized as well. This resulted in the strongly polarized political environment that Snipe Hunter was released in.

And this political polarization ran both ways. Along with right-wing reactionaries writhing at the idea of a “woke” Tyler Childers participating in language policing, people on the left immediately began praising the record as the “Most Visionary Country Album of the Year” and the “opus” and “masterpiece” the GQ puff piece declared. It became a virtue signal, and an act of moral preening to praise Snipe Hunter to the hilt.

It’s also important to note that the GQ article wasn’t the first time Childers explained why “Feathered Indians” wasn’t being featured in his live set. It was also revealed in a 2023 article for the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. If the information hadn’t been turned into a meme, there is a good chance the “Feathered Indians” commentary would have been an afterthought of the GQ article since it came near the end of the lengthy spread.

Amid all of this, much of the actual music of Snipe Hunter got lost in the shuffle. To many, how they felt about Tyler Childers and the album became a political litmus test as opposed to a question of musical taste. But this wasn’t true for everyone. Others listened to the music and judged it on its own merit, or weighed whatever culture war issues swirling around the album as secondary.

But even for many of the folks who tuned out all the noise to hear the music of Snipe Hunter, it’s fair to characterize their reception for the album as mixed, or maybe even mixed to negative. This is not to say there isn’t genuine appeal in the album with certain listeners too. But generally speaking, the general public has mixed feelings about the album, especially when it comes to the production on certain songs.

For example, one massive Tyler Childers fan account on Instagram queried followers on their initial thoughts on the album. The two most liked comments read, “I want to love it so so much but it just sounds too overproduced to me,” and “I think this is probably his worst album yet and I hate to say it because I love Tyler.” And these opinions are coming from self-described Tyler Childers fans.


Despite the politically-tinged preamble to the GQ article and the puff piece nature of it, the article otherwise was quite thorough and articulate, including a lot of good biographical information about Tyler, his motivations, and the making of Snipe Hunter, including how songwriter Caroline Spence played a significant role in introducing Sturgill Simpson to Tyler Childers, ultimately resulting in Tyler’s big rise in music. The GQ article is probably the most detailed print featured on Childers to date.

Rick Rubin was the primary producer for the album—and a man that many music fans have a love/hate relationship with for making some of the greatest, and some of the most disappointing albums in the careers of favored artists. But as the GQ article explains, Tyler Childers also solicited the help of Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn on certain tracks.

When they were done with the first batch of songs, the recordings went to Sanborn to, per Childers, “put the drugs on it.” Childers and Sanborn had stayed in touch sporadically since Sylvan Esso opened some dates for his Mule Pull Tour in 2024, and, one day, he got a text from Childers, who wondered if he might help put some production touches on the record. “This album needs to be weirder,” Sanborn remembers Childers writing. He’d never worked on a country project before, but it was a fast yes, especially when tasked with that kind of marching order. Childers sent the album opener, “Eatin’ Big Time,” and asked him to get to work. Sanborn did a pass.

“Nah, man,” Childers responded. “Go harder.”

“Then I just went,” Sanborn explains. “I was like, ‘All right, what if I totally do all this crazy stuff on it, and really have fun?’ And I sent it back. He said, ‘That’s perfect, and I just wrote four more songs. Let’s do the whole rest of the record.’” They worked for two additional days at Sanborn’s in North Carolina that fall, finishing the rest at Rubin’s Shangri-La studios in Malibu.

Sanborn aimed to take the songs to a place where space and time felt fuzzy. “Did it come out 10 years ago? Did it come out 50 years ago? What even is it? It removes itself from a point in time,” he says. Everett was then tasked with mixing to “paint a picture, not just get a snare drum to sound good.”

This insistence on “weirdness” is very specifically what is turning so many fans off of Snipe Hunter, while Sanborn’s attempt to insert time as a dimension to the music is what resulted in the inconsistent aspect of Tyler’s vocals on the album.

There is a very big difference between pushing the creative boundaries of country music and finding new avenues of expression, and simply being “weird” for weirdness sake while presenting it as “creativity.” The fact that some, if not most of Nick Sanborn’s “weird” production came after the fact as opposed to an organic part of the recording experience might explain why it hits so many ears as distracting.

But to a certain cohort of Tyler Childers advocates, there are only a few handful of excuses why anyone would ever find any fault in Snipe Hunter.

1) People hate it because its not 100% country.
2) The only want Tyler Childers to make Purgatory over and over again.
3) They’re inferior human beings.

This third excuse is what a certain segment of X/Twitter users have been leaning on especially, actively shaming anyone who dares say a negative word about Snipe Hunter in a very down-looking and elitist manner, which ironically, only feeds into a negative perception that Tyler Childers and his fans have become supercilious. The political quotient with Tyler’s music, and how it was presented via the GQ article certainly plays a role in all of this.

One particularly viral tweet claimed,


One of the ways an artist can break through all the noise and political acrimony is simply by making a great album, and shutting up their critics. Perhaps no performer is more polarizing in the independent country and Americana realm than Jason Isbell. But when he released his 2023 album Weathervanes to widespread appreciation and acclaim, even some of his loudest opponents fell in line, or at least fell silent, even if temporarily. Songs like “King of Oklahoma” created consensus with listeners.

Though the reception was a little more mixed, a similar sentiment can be said for Sturgill Simpson’s 2024 album Passage Du Desir. Though there were a few songs that were certainly “country” on the record, many fans were more permissive of Simpson bounding beyond country to rock and jam band moments because the music still came across as being made with sincerity, and exhibited true creativity in its scope as opposed to simple “weirdness” as a creative facade.

The “Nah man, go harder” decree by Tyler Childers on the “weirdness” is what pushed certain songs on Snipe Hunter over the limit, and has made the album a letdown to some, if not many, and frankly, for completely unnecessary reasons.

But that doesn’t mean the album is not without merit, or good songs. As Saving Country Music said in its 6.8-graded review for the record, Snipe Hunter still has some quality tracks as-is, a lot of good writing throughout even where the production gets in the way, and benefits from subsequent listens. Despite some perceptions, Snipe Hunter received a positive review here, just with some fair criticisms.

If advocates for Snipe Hunter and Tyler Childers really want to have an impact on public sentiment for the album, they shouldn’t be participating in ad hominem attacks on anyone who doesn’t like it, degrading them as stupid or inferior. Instead they should do what Saving Country Music’s album review did, which was speak to the strength of the songwriting, and say how subsequent listens tend to favor the album.

Unfortunately though, some people, especially on X/Twitter, are taking any criticism of this album as entirely incriminating, demanding fealty from listeners similar to Beyoncé Stans. Where a virtually universally-acclaimed album like The Price of Admission by the Turnpike Troubadours strengthens the independent music community, an album like Snipe Hunter divides it and weakens it from creating infighting and back biting.

If you believe in Snipe Hunter, participate in the conversation around it as opposed to issuing thought-terminating clichés about how uneducated people must be ignorant for hating it. Sure, in some instances, you’re right about the ignorance. But to many, they just don’t like the production, or the GQ article was the nail in the coffin, and they must be convinced to listen to the album despite the preconceptions.

But the primary reason Snipe Hunter has become the most polarizing album in country music all year (which of course, is hyperbole meeting hyperbole, because after all, it’s still only July), is due to the irrational head space politics breeds in people, and how the GQ article played right into that.

As one especially loud right-wing commenter said on the review for Snipe Hunter,

The idea that the right hates Tyler because he is for gay rights is not only an ignorant take it also is straight up disinformation. Prior to last week, conservatives had no issue being fans of Tyler Childers. Even given his open and public political stances up to that point.

Tyler even made that blm bulls-it album. And conservatives grumbled and thought it was a moronic take but they never abandoned him. Most conservatives just went on well he’s a silly pinko commie but at least we still have feathered Indians which fu-king rocks.

It’s also pretty much settled law for BOTH parties. The irony being Trump announced support of gay marriage in 2000 if not earlier. He was a friend of the Howard stern crew. Obama and Hillary didn’t support gay marriage until well into 2010 if not later.

The idea that the right hates Tyler because he is for gay rights is not only an ignorant take it also is straight up disinformation. I know this to be true because the reaction on the right to that music video a few years back was nothing compared to the reaction to the GQ article.

The writer of the GQ article, Marissa R. Moss, has a long history of participating in the failed political project that believes that if the media can simply compel country music artists to come out for left-leaning causes, this will create a blue political wave sweeping across America’s rural landscape. But as we have seen over and over and over again, country fans are way more apt to relinquish their fandom for a performer than their political ideologies often forged from birth.

This political project has not only been a colossal failure, it has been aggressively counter-productive, verified over and over again, especially through vehicles like the Tyler Childers GQ feature specifically. It is elite media, and political apparatchiks larping as country journalists that has very directly resulted in mainstream country going from politically agnostic in the aftermath of the [Dixie] Chicks cancellation, to now being a center-right mouthpiece, with major stars like Jason Aldean outright dining with politicians.

To read more about this very important topic, and how this political project only continues to reeve apart the country music community, you can read “The Failed Political Project To Reshape the American Electorate Through Country Music.”

You must convince people of the importance of political issues, which is a hard and arduous task, and best handled through the music itself as opposed to public pronouncements. You can’t insult and chastise people into submission, or expect them to change their political alignment simply by the goading of a pop star.

But even beyond the GQ article, Snipe Hunter is a curiously angry album. Whether it’s Christianity, Hinduism like the kind Childers embraces on the album, Buddhism, or some other spiritual guidance, a guiding tenet is that you get out of the universe what you put in it. Snipe Hunter starts off with an “MF” bomb, and Childers telling the story of hunting a billionaire for sport, while later braying on about his $1,000 watch.

The overcussing on the album is rather striking. If you regard the example tweet above from an individual referring to the “dumbest motherfu-kers in your high school,” you see directly how Tyler’s aggressive language and energy is being reciprocated back into the universe. And of course you’re seeing this same unchecked anger from detractors of the album as well. Snipe Hunter is extremely, extremely polarizing.

And how ironic it is that the problematic term “Indian” is what is drawing so much ire, when this album is full of triggering, problematic language that is completely superfulous to the songs themselves.

GQ calls the album a “spiritual and artistic opus” when the spiritual is only circumstantial—Hare Krishna chants in the background of a song. But with songs like “Bitin’ List” about going after haters, and “Poachers” where Childers utters self-referentially, “He’s the one with the video of the coal mining gays,” anger is really the most obvious human experience shared through the record, not spirituality. And what exactly do Koalas with chlamydia have to do with spiritual enlightenment?

You can blame political acrimony for the polarization of this album, you can blame Marissa R. Moss and GQ and the publicist that orchestrated that public relations debacle, you can blame Rick Rubin and Nick Sanborn for the shortcomings of this album. But ultimately, it’s the name of Tyler Childers on the cover of Snipe Hunter, not anyone elses. And once again, country fans are faced and confounded with an album that feels lesser than what we know one of the most important artists to perhaps ever ply the craft of country is capable of.

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