Trisha Yearwood returns this week.
Sam Williams
ACT II: COUNTRYSTAR [EP]
As an extension of his evolving artistic persona, it doesn’t really work and isn’t a patch on his most distinctive, legacy-challenging songwriting. But as a whip-smart parody of contemporary “countrystar” posturing? Hoo boy, is it ever savage.
Every tired narrative trope of current radio country is here, set to the exact type of hip-hop appropriating arrangements that have made the men of the genre’s A-list so interchangeable for years now. Thing is, Williams actually half-raps better than they do. So does it become what it’s parodying?
Joe Stamm Band
Little Crosses
As ever, there’s nothing revolutionary about their brand of corn-fed heartland rock, which they play better than just about anyone in this space today. It’s the songwriting here, though, that makes this one a new career-best: The title track, especially, is a stunner.
Ketch Secor
Story the Crow Told Me
To the consternation of the authenticity fetishists, he’s throwing his hat into the ring as the heir apparent to Marty Stuart (who guests here, and it’s great) as a preservationist of the genre’s off-trend variations. No surprise he has the goods to pull that off.
No surprise, either, that he’s doing so in ways that are a lot more ribald and seedy than what Stuart, who’s perhaps too prone to playing stuffy museum curator, typically offers. The self-mythologizing elements are smart, too, in how country acts have historically crafted a persona. Great stuff.
Scotty McCreery
Scooter & Friends [EP]
He and his friends are all game, but the quality of the songwriting here went off a cliff after last year’s career-best Rise & Fall. Troubling that this seems to be working in terms of keeping him in prime rotation at radio, when he’s capable of so much more.
Niko Moon
American Palm
This overserved, underwritten beach-themed atrocity had me sneering, “Or we could go home,” like Goth Kid On Vacation long before the worst cover of “Margaritaville” you’ll ever hear closed it out. For the love of Jimmy Buffett, listen to Joshua Ray Walker instead.
Cam
All Things Light
A wild, heady ride that plays as a natural follow-up to her genre-spanning contributions to COWBOY CARTER. No matter the sonic palette she chooses, she remains a singular, recognizable singer and writer and a major talent that Nashville should never had written off.
The best tracks here are the most straightforwardly country: “Everblue” and “Kill the Guru!” are hits in a better timeline. Some of the folktronica tracks sound as dated as that term implies, even if it’s a great fit for her idiosyncratic sensibilities. And she takes a few big swings that connect.
Dylan Gossett
Westward
This week’s This Exact Guy is notable for a mostly acoustic and intermittently twangy aesthetic and for the unearned confidence to open his album with 45 seconds of a capella singing that should’ve had someone saying, “Bro, don’t.” A few strong melodies here, for what it’s worth.
Riley Green
Midtown Sessions 2025 [EP]
The “mid” joke’s right there in the title for the low-hanging fruit. This acoustic set demonstrates that he clears the low bar of being a more competent singer than most of his new A-list peers, but little more than that.
Trisha Yearwood
The Mirror
Already the finest vocalist and the deepest albums artist of her generation of country A-listers, she’s now dropped an album that recontextualizes her entire career. She does so not by making a “roots music” pivot like others have done; this is contemporary country.
Instead, she unveils a heretofore hidden gift for songwriting that impresses for a fearless personal candor (there’s a line about her first marriage that stopped me dead), a shoulders-back confidence, and an unapologetic feminism. She’s pulling the threads on these career-long throughlines.
The result is an album about fully claiming one’s agency and owning both good and occasionally questionable decisions. It’s as inspiring as it is instructive. Here, an icon of the 90s country boom puts the current generation of stars on notice about the compassion and empathy missing in their work.
The aesthetic of the album is important, too. Yearwood is not ceding one single inch of space here: Instead, this album reaffirms that her values belong in the center of the country mainstream and always have, and that the genre is all the better when those values show up in the music.
Yes, I’m loving the Trisha Yearwood album! I heard an interview where she said that Leslie Satcher is the one who kept pushing her to write songs with her and that’s what got her to really start writing. I wish I could find songwriter credits for the album though. I’ve been doing a very deep dive into songwriters lately and it’s frustrating when albums don’t have the writing credits readily available.
01. Bringing The Angels [Trisha Yearwood, Leslie Satcher, Bridgette Tatum, Bethany Barnard]
02. The Wall Or The Way Over [Trisha Yearwood, Maia Sharp, Emma Lee]
03. Little Lady
04. The Mirror [Trisha Yearwood, Leslie Satcher, Bridgette Tatum]
05. Fearless These Days [Trisha Yearwood, Leslie Satcher, Makayla Lynn]
06. So Many Summers [Trisha Yearwood, Erin Enderlin, Jim Moose Brown]
07. The Record Plays On (feat. Charles Kelley) [Trisha Yearwood, Chard Carlson, Melissa Marie]
08. Girls Night In [Trisha Yearwood, Rachel Thibodeau, Rebecca Lynn Howard]
09. Drunk Works (Duet) (feat. Hailey Whitters) [Trisha Yearwood, Chard Carlson, Hailey Whitters]
10. Fragile Like A Bomb [Trisha Yearwood, Chard Carlson, Melissa Marie]
11. The Ocean And The River [Trisha Yearwood, Leslie Satcher, Makayla Lynn]
12. The Shovel (feat. Jim Lauderdale) [Trisha Yearwood, Bobby Terry, Matt Rossi]
13. When I’m With You [Trisha Yearwood, Leslie Satcher, Brett Boyett]
14. Goodnight Cruel World [Trisha Yearwood, Erin Enderlin, Sunny Sweeney]
15. When October Settles In [Trisha Yearwood, Leslie Satcher, Steve Dorff]
Thank you, Jordan!!!
Check out Pam’s Every Time album from 1998. She was the first champion of Satcher and cut three of her songs for that album. (I Said a Prayer, You Put the Lonely On Me, Whiskey On the Wound). Satcher also wrote “Something Burning Out” on Rhinestoned.
My favorite Satcher track is the hidden one on her album, “White.” I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t heard it.
My favorite Satcher track is the hidden one on her album, “White.”
Oh, YES. That was a hell of a way to cap off a set of such great recordings. ”Alright, so we’ve got some really good stuff here, how do we finish it? Oh, with a hidden track about -redacted-, that’ll do the trick.” Yeah, anyone seeing these comments who hasn’t heard that, go listen. Now.
Hidden tracks are one of the things I rather miss about the cd era. They were always such a cool little surprise. Satcher’s ”White,” Gary Allan’s ”No Judgment Day,” Lee Ann Womack’s ”Just Someone I Used To Know”…there have been some great ones over the years.
Holy cow, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. That’s a stunner of a song and echo that everyone should listen to it.
I had no idea Niko Moon was still around. I had the misfortune of hearing “Good Time” on the radio in my car yesterday. One of those trainwreck songs that’s so bad I feel like I have to listen to it just for the spectacle when it plays.
I had no idea Niko Moon was still around.
Yeah, I am baffled and aghast that he is still a thing. I saw Farce the Music making fun of him about the time he came along and I went to listen to ”Good Time” — the song, not the album, I am not that big of a glutton for punishment — just to see if he was as bad as FTM made him out to be.
Spoiler alert: he absolutely was. And still is, apparently.
Niko Moon would’ve had the worst album I heard and reviewed in 2024, if not for Jessie Murph.
Niko Moon would have had the worst album I’ve heard and reviewed thus far in 2025, if not for Jessie Murph.
A hat tip to both of them for making new albums somehow worse than their prior ones.
Niko Moon is the only country singer who ever blocked me on Twitter.
It’s no secret to this group that I’m a diehard Trisha Yearwood fan. That said I’m not afraid to say when her material falls below my expectations. This album absolutely blew the roof of what I expected. This is quickly in my top 3 if not top 2 of my favorite albums from her. For an artist who hasn’t written for her album, this songs are all classic Trisha. It shows the lengths she went to when finding material for her previous releases. I originally expected a big shift from her usual style when I heard she was writing. This is the exact opposite. As someone who lost both of their parents, “When October Settles In” perfectly captures how those anniversary’s hit. I also love her ripping loose on “Little Lady”, as soon as I heard that track I knew Leslie Satcher had to be one of the writers. It has “Pistol” written all over it.
I’ll go all the way here. I think it’s the best album of her career.
I think you might be right!
Trisha has had one of the better track records of any singer, female or otherwise, in the country genre since the end of the 1980’s, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this album sells a lot. What may be a bit concerning is whether country radio will give her enough of a lift at this time since she is 60 years old–not, by the way, that there’s anything wrong with that. But it would be nice if a certain amount of love came Trisha’s way for this album.
And as a note, tomorrow (July 22nd), Trisha will be hosting a salute to the L.A. country-rock movement of the 1970’s in general, and to her spiritual role model Linda Ronstadt in particular, at the CMA Theater in Nashville, along with Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Patty Scialfa (of the E Street Band), and James Taylor.
MCA Nashville is supporting the album from a distribution standpoint, but there’s not been any effort to get any of the singles through the “proper” channels for country radio play. She’s relying more on daytime TV promo (Kelly Clarkson, of course, has already had her on to perform) and paid algorithm placement bumps, which is probably the better strategy at this juncture. Country radio is still paying lip-service to 90s country without having a real connection to that era’s artists or substance.
I’ve not heard the Yearwood album, but I would like to say it does me good to know that people still remember Leslie Satcher. She is actually a very good singer, too. I have her 2000 album Love Letters and it is excellent.
I agree. As I said, I’ve been doing a deep dive into songwriters lately and I am a big Leslie Satcher fan, as a songwriter and singer.
…”the mirror” is a collection of good songs, of which the yearwood/satcher penned ones stand out. the title song is a great one that has some of the power of her best ones that could stop you in your tracks, that good they were. nonetheless, it is first and foremost a testament of a life that went very well. yearwood and satcher made it – no wonder, they can be “fearless”, or like yearwood, ponder about how many (sweet) summers there will be left. to me this album fits perfectly into her album discography which has always been reflecting her progress as an artist and human being over time. i always liked the song “real life woman” – incidentally written by the most gifted bobbie cryner, who got a well deserved shout-out here just the other day – “the mirror” feels like the series that follows that pilot belatedly. enjoyable status report by one of coutry’s greatest vocalists.
Yearwood is candid on this album about multiple traumatic experiences in her life, especially on “Fearless These Days” and “So Many Summers.” It’s funny that you quoted those titles to support such a fundamental misunderstanding of this album.
I’m interested in the Yearwood album. I didn’t like “Every Girl in This Town” or “PrizeFighter” at all. Those two songs in particular suggested she was going to go the same route Mary Chapin Carpenter did after 1999 and just record sleepy pretentious acoustic ballads that all sound the same.
The involvement of Leslie Satcher also had me questioning, as I loved early Satcher but I hated “Politically Uncorrect”, “For These Times”, and “Troubadour” and just thought she’d lost that spark.
But today, what would have been the second anniversary of my mom and stepdad’s anniversary — and the death of Ozzy Osbourne, a musician both of them loved — coincides with a very low point at my current job, a search for a new one, and a couple other life changes all pressing down on me at once. July has been a hellish month for me, and I just needed some positivity.
And “The Mirror” gave that positivity to me right when I needed it. It reminds me in a way of “Letter to Me” in terms of showing that the future is going to be better because the past and present were better than you thought they were.
Ha. I’d say that both Prize Fighter” and “Every Girl in this Town” still have a ton of tempo compared to anything on Mary Chapin Carpenter’s recent albums.
I’m sorry about the difficult period of time that you’ve been having. I’m glad music is a good escape and a way to try to make sense of the tough parts of life.