Traditionalist Hudson Westbrook Makes Wrong Turn with Marshmello
It was less than a year ago that we were praising young up-and-coming West Texas country artist Hudson Westbrook as one of the names responsible for the surging popularity of traditional country. In the wake of Hudson’s 2024 self-titled EP, the opinion was shared, “If you have any reservations about declaring that the country music revolution is in full force, an assessment of Hudson Westbrook will sell you on the idea fast.”
And the praise didn’t stop there. “[Westbrook] reminds you a lot of an early Parker McCollum: handsome, honest, squared away, and someone you expect to be singing buzzy, radio-centric tracks over 808-beats. You’re pleasantly surprised when instead you hear songs featuring fiddle and steel guitar, and writing that doesn’t look to pander to anyone, and instead speaks honestly about the joys and struggles of love and distance.”
What a difference a major label deal can make. Signing with River House Artists / Warner Music Nashville in June, this resulted in Hudson’s debut album Texas Forever where he started to take a significantly more contemporary/mainstream turn, even if songs from that original EP, and a few other quality new cuts were included. Hudson’s biggest song “House Again” is a great example of a quality contemporary country song with traditional leanings.
But all of that feels like the distant past since someone thought the best strategy to get the already extremely popular and quickly growing Westbrook on even more of a winning path was to drop him in a collaboration with the terrible EDM DJ and producer Marshmellow. I don’t think Hank done it this way.
Yes, “Better Man Than Me” is one of those songs and collaborations that can sully the sentiment on an artist’s entire career henceforth. What does someone like Hudson Westbrook—whose upside potential was already astronomical—think he’s going to gain with this? He’s losing his grassroots fans in Texas and beyond for a silly, sellout collab that doesn’t even feel like it’s headed anywhere significant.
“Better Man Than Me” includes eight songwriters, none of whom is Westbrook, and six producers. This was a Music Row monstrosity they had sitting on a shelf. Then the plugged in Hudson to sing on top of a manufactured “hit.” With programmed drums and Auto-tuned vocals throughout, it’s a meaningless, vapid effort that is so corrosive, it potentially spoils the guy’s entire catalog.
Is this being hyperbolic? Perhaps. But when you’ve built the foundation for your career off of keeping it country and giving hope to traditional country fans, it feels like you’ve broken the social contract with them when you release a song with a guy with a marshmallow on his head. Save this mess for the Kane Brown’s of the country world.
Will this collaboration also create some new fans for Westbrook among pop listeners and Marshmello fans? Maybe. But they won’t make up for those strong, grassroots, traditional country fans who ride or die with their favorite artists, travel two counties over to see them, buy a T-shirt and vinyl copy at the show, and tell all their friends about them. They’re there for you 20 years down the road when the hits have dried up.
You might gain a short-term burst of virality singing with Mr. Marshmallow. But the real question is, what do you lose in the long-term?
September 28, 2025 @ 6:30 pm
Is this his version of Mark Chesnutt’s “I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing” moment?
September 28, 2025 @ 8:51 pm
If Mark Chesnutt was wearing a marshmallow on his head when covering Aerosmith.
September 29, 2025 @ 5:43 pm
To be honest, I actually don’t mind Mark Chesnutt’s cover of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”. I kind of prefer it to the original.
September 29, 2025 @ 7:44 pm
What about Reba’s “If I Were A Boy?”
September 28, 2025 @ 7:52 pm
I wasn’t familiar with him and briefly listed to some of his other songs and I can see where steel guitar and fiddle can fool people into thinking something is “traditional” when it’s really not. This track is the logical next step of his other songs. Every song I heard from him could have just as easily been worked into a track Morgan Wallen uses. Praising him and Parker Mccolum for “bringing back the traditional sound” is like stuffing the family dog after it died – it’s just wrong. Neither of them have ever truly been traditional – they have a slight veneer of traditional that makes them accessible to people who like Morgan Wallen.
Country has become an aesthetic – not a genre with a connection to it’s roots and giants of the past. I can’t fathom how anyone whose favorite artist is George Strait or Haggard and think that this guy or Parker Mccolum are anywhere in the same field as traditional Country. A country-sounding backing track doesn’t fool me. This might as well be Emerson Drive in cowboy chic. There have obviously been artists post 1999 that have tapped into the same heart as traditional Country like Sturgill Simpson, Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, Charley Crockett, Sierra Ferrell, – to name a few – but you can tell there is something more to their music than loosely copying a 90’s sound in the instrumentation. It’s not fair to all the newer artists who are getting it right to mislabel Texas Pop Country as traditional.
September 28, 2025 @ 8:53 pm
The comparison with Parker McCollum was made with his looks, not his sound. I’ve never called Parker McCollum “traditional country,” though he might lean that way compared to other performers. And you’ve made it abundantly clear that you believe he uses seven Auto-tune modulators on stage like Oliver Anthony says.
September 29, 2025 @ 6:37 am
Auto-tune, pitch correction, second vocal track in the mains, those are all lies and don’t exist in Country music. When a performer is jumping around and their microphone is moving around like a Tylenol baby trying to hold onto an ice cream cone – yet the volume on the vocals never drops and the pitch is absolutely perfect….that’s because everyone is so much better now all of a sudden.
September 28, 2025 @ 8:27 pm
Why the hell is a guy like Marshmallow even being allowed to record with country artists? Monstrosity is putting it lightly. To make matters worse he’s going on tour with that manufacturered dipsh*t Bailey Zimmerman
September 28, 2025 @ 10:38 pm
Writing country music is formulaic and easy. Takes me literally five seconds to learn any country song, so if you’re simple minded just say so
September 29, 2025 @ 7:17 am
…and it took eight songwriters to “write” this song.
And yes, country music is simple. That’s what many people love about it, and where they find its beauty. The more simple and honest the sentiment, the better.
September 29, 2025 @ 8:12 am
Simpler is harder, in my experience.. It’s easier to write a complicated song. Like Blaise Pascal said, “I’m sorry for the long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
September 29, 2025 @ 8:40 am
You are either a liar, or you have the world’s greatest over-inflated sense of musical talent (while your handle is EDM ain’t bad…electronic computer-created music)
People who say shit like “Country music is easy” have no clue about music intervals and the Nashville number system and hearing chord changes by ear to songs they heard once. 5 seconds to learn any Country song – bullshit. People with this mindset are the same people posting chords on Ultimate Guitar – which are often wrong. The greatest studio musicians in the world have played on the recordings of Country songs.
September 29, 2025 @ 2:18 am
Sold out – there is zero chance he thinks this is good if he likes country. Country and this specific kind of rap nonsense should never co-exist.
September 29, 2025 @ 3:00 am
…probably his best vocal performance so far – this is the sound his voice actually goes with (is bearable). everything else i’ve heard from him sounded like utter posing. having said that, in between this folly sounds as if a second tab with music on had been opening accidentally in the background. production fail of the year?
September 29, 2025 @ 5:39 am
He wants to be a Nashville star.
September 29, 2025 @ 8:32 am
This.
September 29, 2025 @ 7:35 am
I appreciate the respect you’ve shown by addressing him as Mr. Marshmello. Who knows, perhaps one day he could become Dr. Marshmello, or even Senator Marshmello.
September 29, 2025 @ 8:49 am
I’ve heard that Marshmello earned a lot of money when he first started out by “playing for the door”.
The entrance was free, but it cost you 40 bucks to leave.
September 29, 2025 @ 9:21 am
For the life of me, I’ve never been able to comprehend the auto-tune vocal inflections that are literally everywhere these days. It makes a human voice sound robotic and literally sucks the life and soul out of any song instantly. Usually it’s done overtop someone who’s desperately trying to sound ” urban” as if that gives some sort of sophistication or credibility. That’s indeed the case here.
The entire trend instantly sounded dated from its inception in modern r& b and hip- hop. It most certainly won’t age well, and like those wretched synthesizers that infected 80s new wave, this whole sound will be cringe to most people in a few years. In fact, in its association with so- called country music, it will be laughed at by future generations who will mock it and marvel that suckers and chumps actually ever bought into it. Personally I don’t know anyone that even likes this sound at all. Just curious, when these songs get performed on The Opry, Lord forbid, do they put the auto- tune over the vocal live? I mean if your gonna ” perform” it accurately, don’t you need the robot auto- tune vocal?
September 29, 2025 @ 1:48 pm
That is a good question about if they do the vocal processing and whatnot on the Opry. Hearing live broadcasts on WSM is very humbling because often times I would hear very rough and sometimes downright bad vocal performances.
September 30, 2025 @ 9:08 am
I agree with this whole comment except for the “certainly won’t age well” comment–I’d have aged this trend out somewhere around when T-Pain released his Auto Tune app for iPhone. But it’s still going strong, maybe stronger than ever. Disco elbowed its way into every musical genre by about 1980, which was mostly awful, but had the courtesy to be over and done with like a bad dream by about 1982. THAT didn’t age well. But here we are in 2025 and Auto Tune is still going.
September 29, 2025 @ 9:29 am
No doubt he wants to gain more market share. I have no problem with that but I am not sure it is a great move. He is young and he can recover from a few wrong moves if his music is good enough. I am not sure it is. I am not sure I see him as a traditionalist. I thought his latest album was ok but not special. I thought him a lot closer to Morgan Wallen than Zac Top.
September 29, 2025 @ 12:34 pm
My ears are bleeding from this mumblee rap attempt of a song. You couldn’t polish that turd with a thousand diamonds. This is straight up garbage music, worse than morgan Wallen or Chicken head Childress. Parker McCollum has some great songs and a solid fan base; be he’s not traditionalist in the least and his songs are 1000 times better than this one. I just threw up again from the memory of the video embedded in this article. gotta get some qtips.
September 29, 2025 @ 2:24 pm
I watched that whole video waiting for the Marshmallow guy to show up like an awkward EDM Buckethead crossed with the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. I was disappointed.
Oh, the song was awful too, but it looks like that’s the universal consensus here.
September 29, 2025 @ 7:46 pm
This disappoints me. I still like most of his music, but this is a step in the wrong direction. Hopefully its a one off thing and he sticks with what made people fall in love with his music.
September 30, 2025 @ 5:41 am
Yeah why I never bothered giving him a listen could see through the non genuine act