Saving Country Music’s 2014 Song of the Year
See Saving Country Music’s Song of the Year nominees
Every true music fan craves those moments when a song and story truly disarm you and make rudimentary rubble of your capacity to keep the saline fountains at bay. Fiction can sometimes achieve these results, but there’s something deep inside the listener that is sparked when they intuitively know they’re hearing a true story being told by the one who lived it. This is the key to allowing the emotions to flow with an extra ferocity.
“That’s the problem with that song. I guess it’s so much easier to write these sort of tragic love songs that I’m not afraid to talk about, but my personal history I guess is a little more scary territory,” Lydia Loveless says about Saving Country Music’s 2014 Song of the Year “Everything’s Gone,” from her album Somewhere Else released by Bloodshot Records. “It’s about my family for one reason or another losing our home, and it was probably the hardest thing I ever went through. I think it was one of the first [songs] I wrote for ‘Somewhere Else,’ and I wrote it and kind of didn’t think about it for months because I just didn’t want to, or play it for anyone. And I was playing with the band and we had drums on it, and I think I started crying and threw a fit as I’m want to do, and that’s why it ended up being so stripped down because I didn’t really want it to be touched.”
Lydia grew up on an 80-acre farm outside of Coshocton, Ohio, feeding cattle, bailing hay, and being home schooled. The home and hearth, and the kinship she felt with the land that was instilled into the very fabric of who she was from a formative age, ensured a piece of her would be left behind when the family was eventually relocated. And that wrenching, aching sense of loss and the inability to recoup that part of herself orphaned on that land that has now been pillaged and parceled is where the inspiration and emotional potency of “Everything’s Gone” comes from.
But like all great songs, “Everything’s Gone” has the capacity to mutate and fill in the crags and crevices of an individual’s own personal narrative to mean something completely different to every ear. For example my first impression of the song was one for the concern of the disappearance of open spaces for young men and women to get lost in and find themselves—almost an opposite emotion to a sense of home. And it turns out, this message is also rooted in the tune.
“I think that day I had gone hiking,” Lydia says about the day she wrote the song. “It had been so long since I had just unplugged. I was on the road all the time or constantly on the phone or on the internet, and I just went hiking and was alone with my thoughts. And I got really sad that it had been so long since I had just gone out into the woods and been alone. It just reminded me, because when I grew up that was my backyard. You could go out and watch a meteor shower and go hiking and camp and have a fire, and it’s just totally different now. And I was just thinking about the urbanization of everything. Now there’s not a lot to go to get away.”
“Everything’s Gone” could speak very intimately to people who’ve dealt with foreclosure, or the loss of anything that can never be gone back to and re-attained, and the cavalcade of emotions and imbalance this realization can result in. “Everything’s Gone” also shares its ugly realities with blistering truth, and unchecked anger.
Lord, now I’m sick of seeing the fear in my family’s eyes
I need to find the man who put it there and set his life on fire
“Everything’s Gone” affords the listener no resolution or closure. You’re left in the forlorn state, not only coldly realizing there’s no going back, but that the entire world is slowly succumbing to this fate of lost and forgotten fragments of what makes us whole in the headlong charge of priority and progress, and the blinding of rage that overtakes us when this reality sinks in.
Oh, the place where I grew up and my little brother was born
And if I strike it rich again, I’ll go and buy it all back
Well I’ll drop a bomb on that bitch and watch it turn to ash…By the time I get the money, it will be all gone
Lord, it’s already gone
Well, by the time I get the money, it will be all gone
Lord, everything’s gone
Everything’s gone, everything’s gone
As for Lydia Loveless and the real story behind “Everything’s Gone,” she says, “I haven’t been there for almost 10 years…it’s really painful to go back, and I think I’m just a little scared. So I don’t know.”
But despite the pain and emotional distress listeners feel while listening to “Everything’s Gone,” they keep coming back to it because of the comfort of commiseration that makes music its most beautiful when it is able to covey raw pain of an artist in its purest form.
In the honesty and personal unburdening of “Everything’s Gone,” Lydia Loveless achieved the crowning moment of her young career, and the crowning achievement in song for all of 2014 … in Saving Country Music’s estimation.
Two Guns Way Up.
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Purchase Lydia Loveless’ Album Somewhere Else from Bloodshot Records.
December 30, 2014 @ 1:15 pm
Hell yes! An excellent, raw and emotional song. This write-up is great too ”“ I’m glad you got the chance to chat with her about it.
December 30, 2014 @ 1:25 pm
Actually in fairness I borrowed her quotes from other sources (linked in the article). They got to the heart of the matter enough, I felt my efforts might be redundant.
December 30, 2014 @ 1:37 pm
Her album was a favorite amongst favorites this year, reminding me of nothing so much as classic Petty and Westerberg at their most heart on the sleeve. There was a lot of music I liked in 2014, but this is one I think I’ll still be playing in a decade.
December 30, 2014 @ 2:53 pm
We’ve had a lot of great songs this year and this is a good one but “Turtles All the Way Down” by Sturgill Simpson is my pick for song of the year. In a genre where so few artists are willing to take risks and so many songs are marketed to the lowest common denominator of mass appeal, Simpson bravely went in a direction few country artists dare to.
December 30, 2014 @ 3:01 pm
Agreed… assuming Trig wasn’t going to give song and album of the year to the same artist. Sturgill is the absolute lock for album of the year. 100% positive, no questions about it!
December 30, 2014 @ 3:34 pm
I agree and it’s an excellent song. That is why it made the select class of nominees, despite being quite polarizing amongst some listeners. But unfortunately I can only pick one winner, and I really felt like Lydia Loveless went the extra mile with this song.
December 30, 2014 @ 4:24 pm
First, I agree with David about Turtles but hugely respect your choice here. Raw emotion, written from the heart, can almost hear the tears hitting the studio floor.
But here’s what I don’t get:
Turtles is “quite polarizing”? Because it disses the old man in the sky? Calls blood and wine nursery rhymes?
Yet I never hear a word of objection or objectivity when “Mom” is aired or written about (babies come from heaven?), when “Something In The Water” tops the charts (hello baptism!), or the putrid God Made Girls, which glorifies the latest/greatest concept in “modern” theological preaching that a woman’s role is to please the master in the relationship, to know that she’s a second banana who’s mandate is to subjugate “self” for the greater good of the marriage.
Oh well, you know what they say about opinions. Just needed to vent mine.
December 31, 2014 @ 1:05 pm
Let’s not make too much of this issue. I didn’t say that “Turtles” was “quite polarizing,” I said it was “quite polarizing amongst some listeners.” And trust me, if I had named it Song of the Year, we would have seen those listeners giving their opinions in full force here, as we saw when I nominated the song, and mentioned the song in the “Best Of So Far” post back in June. I’m not saying they’re right, I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m just saying that it is an element to the song, and ideally a Song of the Year would be something that could create more of a universal consensus, though this isn’t essential. Though there’s some people who may not like “Everything’s Gone,” nobody is going to find it offensive, again, whether finding “Turtles” offensive is warranted in your mind, or not.
As for the other songs you listed 1) None of them were even close to being considered for Song of the Year. 2) ALL of them were reviewed by Saving Country Music, and ALL of those reviews gave mention to the religious connotations in the song and how that could be taken as a polarizing matter.
For example, as I said in my Garth Brooks ‘Mom” review,
“Where it”™s supposed to deliver people to this warm place, instead it instills this rainbow of conflicting emotions, and even weird thoughts of personhood and conception””somewhere a country song shouldn”™t go.”
https://savingcountrymusic.com/song-review-mom-by-garth-brooks
So I know you may be talking about commenters or other critics, but when you say you “never hear a word” of “objection or objectivity” about these song’s religious content, you can’t be talking about Saving Country Music.
“Turtles” is a great song. One of the best of the year in my opinion. But I felt “Everything’s Gone” was just an inch better in a difficult field to pick from. Sturgill has received tons of love from this outlet and others, and I’m sure will continue to get love in the future.
December 31, 2014 @ 1:14 pm
Fair enough, thanks for the response (even though I wasn’t criticizing you.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
January 1, 2015 @ 12:07 am
To be fair, it takes some serious bravery to come up with a line like “I’ll find a rich man’s house and I’ll burn it down”, as Lydia does in “Everything’s Gone” 😉
On a serious note, this brings up the issue of what types of themes belong under the umbrella of country music. When touching on social issues, country music has always affirmed traditional views of religion and patriotism. However, on bread-and-butter issues, country has always had room for strong economic populism (this explains why Woody Guthrie was so popular with country fans, for example). As such, I would argue that “Everything’s Gone”, with its economically populist theme, fits the spirit of country music better than “Turtles”, with its culturally liberal questioning of traditional religion.
January 1, 2015 @ 12:34 am
“Everything’s Gone” is about a family losing their farm, sung by a young woman who personally lived through it. To me, that’s about as country as it gets.
January 1, 2015 @ 12:36 am
Exactly. And as a result, it fits the spirit of country much better than an abstract song about exotic religion.
January 1, 2015 @ 1:41 pm
That was kind of my point. Whether you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing, the country is changing. We’re becoming less religious and more religiously diverse at the same time. If country music is going to remain committed to pandering* to traditional views of religion and patriotism, it’s market will continue to shrink. That’s why mainstream country music has started to include more Rap and EDM. It’s a desperate attempt to expand a dwindling market. You don’t have to agree with Simpson’s point of view but the fact that he’s achieved the success he’s had while espousing something so different from what we normally hear is a very positive thing for the future of the genre in my opinion and it took courage to record that song.
*Pandering is a strong word and I chose it intentionally. Adding a song two with religious or patriotic themes to your album filled with songs of drunken debauchery has become a tradition in country music but with a few notable exceptions it’s nothing more than pandering to a specific subset of the artist’s target audience.
January 1, 2015 @ 7:21 pm
Leaving aside my own strong personal preferences for a while, let me delve into some demographic analysis.
It looks like country music, like any political party, is at a crossroads now over the direction in which to expand their fandom while maintaining their long-time base of rural and Southern whites. It can expand either sonically or thematically. However, with the former, we have already seen what happens when outside sonic influences like rap infiltrate country. For those of us who love the traditional country sound, this leaves open just the option of thematic broadening. From a political angle, given that the country fan base is already disproportionately conservative (though far more so socially than economically), the two possible directions of expansions are in the economically populist and the socially liberal directions.
The strategy of appealing to social liberals is being pursued most prominently by Kacey Musgraves, and perhaps Sturgill Simpson with “Turtles”. The first problem with this is that this will alienate the strongly socially conservative existing fan base of the genre.
Secondly, country will become even more reliant on young fans, perhaps pushing the genre even more in a pop direction (witness Kacey Musgraves’s collaboration with Katy Perry, for example). Specifically, the greatest growth area for the genre if it moves in the socially liberal direction would be with upscale young people who, as the “hipster” phenomenon shows, have notoriously fickle musical tastes and would not necessarily constitute a stable long-term fan base.
On the other hand, songs like “Everything’s Gone”, along with Ronnie Dunn’s “Cost of Livin”, John Rich’s “Shuttin Down Detroit”, and any number of alt-country songs of the past going all the way back to Woody Guthrie, serve as great examples of economically populist themes in country music. As I said above, country music fans are much less conservative economically than they are socially, and they know the strong history of populist themes in the genre. As such, the core older fans will not be significantly alienated by a populist shift.
At the same time, growing economic inequality and the loss of middle-class jobs has led to a dramatic rise in the working poor, primarily employed in low-wage service industries such as fast food and retail. If country music follows the populist route, it can significantly expand its appeal with the urban, non-Southern cohort of this struggling class of Americans. For example, the working poor constituted the bulk of foreclosure victims, and as such a song like “Everything’s Gone” would deeply appeal to them. About the only problem I foresee is the lack of buying power on the part of the poor and working-class, but music is shifting toward an advertisement-based model anyway.
It is also worth noting that folk music has gone through this entire experience before. Back in the 1930s, when Woody Guthrie was using strong populist themes of economic struggle and class oppression in his songs, folk music grew significantly in popularity by establishing itself as the music of the working class. In the 1960s, though, the focus of folk shifted to counterculture themes, which caused it to shed many of its old fans and bring in a new base of upscale young people. Unfortunately, the fickleness of this new group of fans meant that they abandoned the genre just as fast as they had found it, and folk music was essentially dead as a popular form of music by the end of the decade.
To boil this all down, the question is whether country music will try to appeal to the broader working class with economically populist themes or whether it will try to reach out to a younger, more upscale audience with socially liberal themes. I would argue that the best way to create a new group of loyal fans while maintaining the core identity of the genre is the former. As for cultural issues, it would be best for country music to either just avoid them entirely or address them only subtly.
December 30, 2014 @ 3:03 pm
Fantastic pick, and while it’s not quite my favourite country song of the year, it definitely notched a well-earned slot on the list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4BSuzc6nBQ
December 30, 2014 @ 3:30 pm
You’re REALLY fond of Eric Paslay, aren’t you Mark? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you seem to be much more ecstatic about his material than any other critic I’ve seen. Everyone else has given his debut album a decent rating, not much more.
January 1, 2015 @ 8:06 am
I wouldn’t say I’m huge on him – his debut album missed my year-end best list – but ‘She Don’t Love You’ was one of my biggest songs of the year and he’s really become a songwriter I can respect and count on across mainstream country. There aren’t many others that have delivered his consistent quality.
December 30, 2014 @ 3:40 pm
Great choice, Trig.
December 30, 2014 @ 3:55 pm
So happy for her…saw her on a win at Iron Horse in Northamton MA just before a tweedy show done the street. She certainly is part of strong crop of female artists this year
December 30, 2014 @ 6:03 pm
all do raspect trigg. song of the yeer was a ty betwen american kids by keny chestny an day drinkin by lil bigtown an people lovin people by garth.
all so I wanna say thanx to trigg an all the grate comentars on the site for makin 2014 a grate yeer and makin scm my faverite web site. God bles yall an ROLE TIDE!
December 30, 2014 @ 7:48 pm
one hyphenated word . spell-check !
December 30, 2014 @ 8:00 pm
Dent yew mean spill-Czech?
Oar watt a-boat auto-Phil?
Jest wandering…
🙂
December 31, 2014 @ 2:51 am
Lil Dale has set a record impressive even by his own low standards. In a mere two sentences, I count 37 errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation and capitalization. That is even allowing for his textspeak.
May 2015 find him in a remedial English class so we can finally begin taking his nonsensical ramblings with the small degree of seriousness they deserve. We’re not asking you to be Shakespeare, Lil Dale. We’re just asking you to not make U.S. public schools look so bad.
December 31, 2014 @ 12:39 pm
Got to admire Lil Dale’s dedication to these posts. It would take me a long time to figure out how to screw up as many words as he does. Always brings a smile to my face 🙂 Keep em comin Lil Dale!
December 31, 2014 @ 6:13 am
Cool, another Lil Dale post for 2014! You’re the best, friend…
December 31, 2014 @ 8:46 am
Still. Looking. For. Punchline.
December 30, 2014 @ 7:46 pm
Love her voice .
Good lyrics and title .
As a ‘package’ including arrangement , dynamics, melodic hooks , this one escapes me. I’m bored a minute in ….not a lot of movement in the melody – monotonous , to my ear .
Saying all of that ….I’d listen to it before I’d listen to most of mainstream country radio and I think Lydia Loveless has a voice we need to hear a lot of . I’ll look for the CD .
December 31, 2014 @ 2:41 am
It’s a fantastic album as a whole, but most of it is a lot more rock than this song. When I’ve told friends about it, I’ve often pointed to the old Tom Petty/Stevie Nicks hit “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” It kind of sounds like that. Her previous records have a stronger country vibe. Fans of Drive By Truckers/Old 97’s will find a lot to like here.
December 30, 2014 @ 8:40 pm
Up to this point I have not paid any attention to Lydia Loveless, but after hearing that excellent song I may have to check her out. Good choice trig.
December 30, 2014 @ 10:15 pm
Ha! From my place in Akron, coshocton is a short hour drive where you’ll find the best deer hunting in Ohio and the whole damn country at that! Love so much great music coming from my home state!
December 30, 2014 @ 10:27 pm
I doubt these two were in consideration, but unheralded great songs from Metamodern were Just Let Go and Panbowl.
Panbowl gets me. Every time.
December 31, 2014 @ 5:19 pm
Panbowl is the best song on there.
December 30, 2014 @ 11:33 pm
Excellent choice!
December 31, 2014 @ 7:01 am
As big of a Sturgill fan as I’ve become, I’ve go to say that I’m glad Turtles didn’t get the nod. It’s the best song on the album, maybe even not top 3, in my opinion. It’s a great song that the world needed to hear, for sure, but I’m glad that another song and artist were chosen for the sake of exposing yet another great artist some may not have heard, yet.
December 31, 2014 @ 7:35 am
Wasn’t Bottoms Up by Brantley Gilbert released this year?
December 31, 2014 @ 8:13 am
Great choice and nice validation for Bloodshot’s stable and commitment too. Hope she stays with them and that they can afford her going forward.
December 31, 2014 @ 8:27 am
good song for sure, but Chris Issac, Wine Lips, and Head, were the songs that jumped out at me on that Album. More for melody and composition as opposed to subject matter I suppose.
December 31, 2014 @ 8:58 am
A worthy choice from among a lot of deserving songs. Well done (as always) Trigger. Thanks for shining the spotlight on so many awesome female artists this year.
December 31, 2014 @ 11:57 am
Good choice
December 31, 2014 @ 5:38 pm
Absolutely fantastic choice, Trigger. I don’t want to be too boastful, but I am proud that I was one of the two votes for “Everything’s Gone” (along with Hank).
This is exactly the type of song that country music so desperately needs in today’s economic environment.
January 1, 2015 @ 2:48 pm
Definitely not best song of the year but
January 1, 2015 @ 7:05 pm
Great choice. Caught her in Atlanta last fall
http://youtu.be/-EXKeRGdsVY
January 3, 2015 @ 6:34 pm
How have I never listened to her before? This song is amazing. Thank you for choosing this, because I probably never would have bothered to look her up otherwise.
As much as I have heard her name come up sometimes I just have too many names on my mind and I overlook the best ones.