Switched on Pop - Questionable Country

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

For the first time in history, five country songs were at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Ella Langley, Morgan Wallen, Taylor Swift and Stella Lefty all have songs that range from two-stepping hits to borderline Americana: what do these songs say about the state of country music? CREDITS Reanna Cruz: Producer  Iris Gottlieb: Illustrator  Charlie Harding: Host, Executive Producer  Dion Lee: Art Director  Brandon McFarland: Audio Engineer  Nick Ripps: Video Editor  Nate Sloan: Host  Lissa Soep: Editor  Zach Tenorio & Jocie Adams: Theme Composers  Switched On Pop is a co-production of Vox Media Podcast Network, Vulture, and Rock Ridge Productions. Links: ⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠  Songs discussed: Dolly Parton, “9 to 5” Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers, “Islands In the Stream” Dolly Parton, “Rockstar” Ella Langley, “Choosin’ Texas” Ronnie Milsap, “Smoky Mountain Rain” George Strait, “Amarillo By Morning” Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues” Brad Paisley, “Cluster Pluck (feat. James Burton, Vince Gill, Albert Lee, John Jorgenson, Brent Mason, Redd Volkaert & Steve Wariner)” Buddy Holly, “That’ll Be The Day” Stevie Ray Vaughan, “Texas Flood” George Strait, “All My Ex’s Live In Texas” The Pointer Sisters, “Slow Hand” Conway Twitty, “Slow Hand” Morgan Wallen, “Been By Now” Ella Langley & Morgan Wallen, “I Can’t Love You Anymore” Taylor Swift, “I Knew It, I Knew You (From ‘Toy Story 5’)” Squeeze, “Tempted” The Velvet Underground, “Sweet Jane” Taylor Swift, “I Knew You Were Trouble.” Taylor Swift, “cardigan” Stella Lefty, “Boston” Noah Kahan, “Stick Season” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Nespresso.com. Nate, I want to play you three quick clips and I want you to tell me something. Are these country songs? Ooh, a vexing question. Song one. That is what we are. No one in between. Song two. And song three is a bit of a twist. Obviously, these three songs are by Dolly Parton. After Jolene, Island in the Stream, and 9 to 5 are Dolly's most streamed songs. The last song, Rockstar, is off of her 2023 album called Rockstar. Sadly, we just lost Dolly moments before taping the show. You know, she was a huge trailblazer.

She was the one thing that we could all agree on. She grew up in rural poverty, but went on to write over 3,000 songs in her life becoming a star on the screen. an entrepreneur and I think a visionary with a really expansive vision of what is country music and what country can be. Are these songs country? Such a simple question and yet I'm sweating bullets trying to come up with an answer here. I'm going to say yes, they are country. Well, in the spirit of Dolly, today we're going to be looking at the current boom and country music and the boundaries that it's exploring. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Okay, so in August of 2026, country music for the first time ever took the top five hot 100 slots. Wow. Yeah, right? So what I want to do is listen to these five songs and see what they tell us about country music. And I want to ask that same question. Are these country songs? I feel like the question of what is and what is not country is endlessly fascinating, sometimes combative.

And yet it's pretty important in a way, not so much for ultimately deciding, is this thing country or not, but what those conversations say about what we value in music and how we define genre itself. You know, so often country music is thought of as being in a particular geography, maybe from the south. It's thought of as being traditional, maybe Lorese conservative. But country music is also one of our foundational American popular genres. Yeah. It does maybe move a little more slowly. It's interested in the present, but also the past. And, you know, it cares a lot about working class people.

It cares about multi-generational storylines that, you know, you can be of many different ages and be a country star. Okay, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to listen to the top five songs in the order that I have chosen most country to least country, beginning with one of the most important songs possibly ever now. Ella Langley's Choosen Texas So Chosen Texas is a song that hasn't just grown on me. It's grown on the entire country. As of this recording, Chosen Texas is a song that hasn't just grown on me. It's grown on the entire country. As of this recording, Choosin Texas is tied with two other songs for the longest running number one song in the country.

And when I say in the country, I don't mean country music. I'm saying in the entire country. Yeah. On the Hot 100 tied with Old Town Road, Little Nas X. And another country crossover, Shibuzi's Bar song, Tipsy. The fact that every song to set these record-breaking, runs at number one is a come out in the last six years and be if not full country country adjacent in some way is kind of a wild statistic and to be clear there is someone who is reigning supreme

at number one that is moria carry all i want for christmas is you but not counting holiday songs these three are tied actually by the time that this episode comes out it's entirely possible that illo langley is going to break that record and be the longest running number one for a non-holiday song I'm not totally surprised, given that Billboard has changed the way it calculates the success of songs that we're seeing kind of more songs in general stay at number one. I'm kind of surprised that this song might be the record breaker, though, choose in Texas. Not because it's not a great song, just because it's kind of chill. It's a little lugubrious. I'm like, why is this song resonating with people so much?

I have to know. I honestly think this is a really great track that can appeal to. a lot of folks. It uses Texas as a stand-in for another country woman. Yeah. There's a real tension in this song set up between Tennessee and Texas, which is real and country music as well.

You know, Nashville is the hub of recording. Texas is where real ranching cowboys reside. And so in Chusin, Texas, we have this entourage of Tennessean and Texan Symbology. On the Tennessee

side, we have Memphis blues, we used to sing. Ella Langley also is drinking Jack all by herself. Jack Daniels is made in. Tennessee. Yes. And then there's all of these great references to other country songs. Langley sings,

well, I guess he forgot about the Smoky Mountain Rain. The Smoky Mountains aren't just in Appalachia, Tennessee, but also Smokey Mountain Rain was a number one single from 1980 by Ronnie Millsap. So on the side of Tennessee, we've got its whiskey, we've got its cities. We've got its mountains and we've got its songs.

Texas also has its iconography in the song. We have Two Steppen, of course, a style of dance done in Texas. We have another country song reference, Eastbound and Down by Jerry Reed. And a throw to I-40, the road. you can take from Tennessee to Texas. He's pounding down, loaded up and trucking. Are we going to do what they say can't be done? But my favorite Texas reference in Jews in Texas is her nod to the song Amarillo by Morning.

Amarillo by Morning, a 1973 song by Terry Stafford, but made famous by George Street. Up from San Antonio, everything that I got is just what I've got on. I actually think that as great as this lyrical reference is, there may be a subtle nod to another George Strait song going on here from 1987, the song All My Exes Live in Texas. Tennessee. Oh, I see what's going on here. What's going on?

It's a little reversal of the choosing Texas dynamic. Exactly. George Strait has to hang out in Tennessee because all his exes have chosen Texas. And Ella Langley is feeling sad because her beau has chosen Texas over Tennessee. So this is a longstanding rivalry between these two states. Interesting. Yeah, and I love it. She has turned it kind of into the other woman.

kind of song. Hearing all these references and choose in Texas to folks like George Strait and Ronnie Millsap reminds me that Miranda Lambert is one of the co-writers on this song. And that's something she loves to do in her work as well as like shout out folks like Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson in the course of her lyrics. So there are so many different nods to historical country songs going on in Ella Langley's Choose in Texas. But there's one moment in particular that really stands out to me as exceptional song rating that isn't so much a reference to another song, but rather a clue to where the song is going to end up that plays at the very beginning. You and I just recently did a series about song form in which I had sort of derided the intro,

thick-headedly as something we should move right past as fast as you possibly can. Not in the case of Ella Langley's Jews in Texas. Whoa. Are you saying there's some secret message in this beautiful intro of these chorus of guitars playing together? Yep. Please enlighten me. So what you're hearing are the guitars of Tom Bukovac, also known as Uncle Larry, one of the great session guitar players in Nashville. And he has a great YouTube channel, 501 chorus echo, a nod to a famous effect device. And he recently posted a video of the isolated sounds of this recording, talking about how he got this iconic riff. Now, typically, if you're going to play electric guitar in a country song, what guitar and sound are you anticipating to hear?

Like pedal steel, perhaps? Definitely pedal steel. If you're going to play electric guitar, though. Oh, like Telecaster, I guess? Telecaster. Yeah. Telecaster has got that twang. You know, the telecaster is that really bright guitar sound, and it has this long-running history with country music.

Going back to its debut in the early 50s, the guitar player, Jimmy Bryant, was a famous country sort of Western swing player who was seen on TV alongside Speedy West. That is a Fender Telecaster. It is seen on TV in the early 50s. Other people start picking it up. James Burton, who played famously with Elvis. Luther Perkins, who played with Johnny Cash and is really known for making that boom-chuckabum sound. Whelan Jennings played a telecaster. Brad Paisley plays a Paisley painted Telecaster on his track Cluster Pluck.

Telecaster has the twang, the bite, the snap. It imitates some of those pedal steel kind of sounds as well. But when we're hearing L.Langley, we're not hearing the sounds of the telecester. Caster. Da-da-da-da. Nate, I hate to break it to you. That is a Stratocaster. Ah!

Insanity. People running, screaming, tearing down the walls. What? A Stratocaster? The Stratocaster, of course, is the guitar that Fender releases after the telecaster. It has the sort of famous two little horns coming off of it. The Stratocaster is often associated with Texas and Texas. Roadhouse Blues. It has a more

nasal quality, a little brighter and people might have first seen a Stratocaster in the hands of Buddy Holly, the famous pop singer from Lubbock, Texas, played a Stratocaster. The Vaughan brothers, Jimmy and Stevie Ray Vaughn, both

played Stratocasters. So that's Stevie Ray Vaughan's Texas flood. I'm telling you, Stratocaster, Texas. Now, why is our friend Steve Bukovac picking up the Stratocaster at the beginning of the song, Choose in Texas? It's like the siren song of Texas that is beckoning the guy in this narrative to come back to the Lone Star State. This is a song that knows its references all the way down to what guitar to play. Bukovac in his video about making the record said that when Ella Lengly came into the studio,

she had a whole playlist. She had a playlist of all these, like, great old, like 80s, 70s, 90s, country records for reference for tones for everyone. Right. And I think I might have identified one of the essential references that is hiding in the background. It's Conway Twitty's song Slow Hand. So not only does it share a very similar strat style opening riff. It even uses the same harmonic progression moving from that two minor chord back home to the one chord.

Okay, but even cooler, Twitty's song, Slow Hand, it was a number one hot country song from 1982 was in fact a cover of a non-country song. The 1981 song Slow Hand by the Pointer Sisters. Originally went to number seven on the hot R&B slash hip-hop song chart. So, Nate, are we hearing country music? Oh, Charlie, I don't know. You've scrambled my brain at this point. What is genre, Charlie? I feel like this conversation is reminding me that there are definitely musical cues that point to genre sounds, you know, a stratacaster, a telecaster, a twang in the voice, a certain rhythm or feel.

But then there's also, like, lyrical cues for genre. There's even, you know, the way an artist dresses or presents themselves that might signal a genre. Yeah. Genres can't be so easily contained by saying like, oh, it's, you know, this sound. It's, it's this whole, like, matrix of complex associations that we have with a single style. Well, I think Ella Langley really lets loose on this idea of genre on another one of her songs that has been in the top five. It is for song, I can't love you anymore to duet with Morgan. Wallen.

This one's a bit more of a slow burn, a feud between two ex-lovers. Can they manage this thing anymore? We've got all kinds of metaphors of things burning down. There are cigarettes. There are pictures that are burnt up. There are burnt lips left behind. Is this country music? Oh, man.

This one feels like more. of a stretch, like the vibe is very soft rock to me in a lot of ways. Yeah. And yet we have that familiar twang in both of their voices. We have these like kind of country-esque harmonies and kind of a lyrical narrative structure that has the sort of sense of loss and nostalgia that so many country songs have. So yeah, why not? I think it's country. Why not?

Yeah. Importantly, if you're going to write a country song, there's all kinds of cliches you can write about. You got blue jeans. You've got whiskey. And of course, you've got trucks. Now, we don't quite have a truck in this song, but we have a nod to a truck. Here's Morgan Wallen's verse. A dusty photo on the dash. So, yeah, it's not covered in dust on the dash.

So you let it up just to say the smalls. Role me plus you. A dusty photo on the dash. So, yeah, it's not calling out. you know, a Ford F-150 as some other of Morgan's peers might, but, you know, it's implied. Indeed. New from an espresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range infused with functional

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at A and W. at participating A.N.W. Locations in Ontario. Country is a much broader genre than we might think. I mean, frankly, every example we've heard in the course of this episode points to that. So many of these songs, when you start to think of them in this way and listen to them as a blank canvas rather than a country iconic track, you go, huh, country has always been pretty expansive, hasn't it? And, yeah, Dolly is like the poster child for that. Well, let's see if we can challenge this idea even further on I Can't Love You anymore.

Ella Langley is singing with Morgan Wallen, who also has one of those top five songs. Been by Now is the song. It is his follow-up to his huge album, I'm the Problem. He's planning the release of his fifth album, and so this is the first single off of that. It is Been By Now. This is wild. I mean, it feels like we are on the far borders of country at this point. It feels more like Coldplay with the twang. Oh my God, I was going to say the same thing.

It is so Coldplay coded this track. We have references to being out in the stars. Coldplay loves being out in the universe. We've got synth pads, sequences. Yeah. The drums feel like they're super-todied. tightly quantized, almost sequenced drums,

very ambient guitars. There just happens to be some vocal twang. That twang is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I get why it's in the top five. It's got a very catchy melody. Indeed. It's very smooth. I mean,

this is clearly a crossover song that is going to play on adult contemporary. It's not just a country track by any means. It's got twang, but it really shows that, you know, country music plays everywhere and does sort of bleed into other genres.

amongst the country songs that have broken this record, there is a return to country. Taylor Swift has a song, I knew it, I knew you for Toy Story 5. Yeah. And it has been codified a country song. Taylor, of course,

debuted as a country artist. And then gradually over her career to much controversy. and consternation sort of abandoned her country roots to move into a more mainstream pop direction. So the fact that this latest song for the Toy Story franchise is being categorized as country is kind of an interesting step in her career arc. Is it simply that the character Woody from Toy Story happens to be a cowboy? Maybe there is a little bit of country in here. there is a banjo but primarily we're hearing the sound of bleachers

this is another collaboration with Jack Antonoff, his band Bleachers, and many of the musicians from that band are here, so we're getting sax and harmonica mixed with that banjo. It's a very different kind of country sound, if you will. There's other references here as well that I'm not sure if it supports country, the very introduction of the song. A lot of people have noted that it sounds quite a lot like

squeezes tempted. Wait, played again, the Taylor. Yeah, country-esque. I heard one more nostalgic reference, Sweet Jane in the Taylor Swift track. What have you? What have you done, Charlie? If you take Sweet Jane, if you take Sweet Jane,

by the Velvet Underground, and you stem remove the vocals, and you put Taylor Swift's on top. You have a very similar kind of vibe. At the end there, the song actually switched back to the production of I knew it, I knew you, but with the synth solo of the ending of Sweet Jane, which kind of mimics the horn stabs and the harmonica stabs in the Taylor Swift song. I love hearing that because not only does it work so well together, but it really highlights. the lack of twang in Taylor's performance, you know. This is not our song era Taylor. This is like 20, 26, Taylor, and there's no twang to be found.

But there are other Taylor references, arguably. Tell me more. If Taylor is going to make musical citations outside of her world, of course she's going to also do so internal to her own enormous catalog. Taylor was recently talking about this song. She brought it to Max Martin and Shelbach as a burning slow ballad, and they were like, what if it were dubstep? I think that there is a tiny lyrical nod. I knew you were trouble, a lyrical refrain that she also uses in the song Cardigan.

So when we hear, I'm a leaf eyes drunk under a streetline. So when we hear I knew it, I knew you, we're hearing the larger Taylor universe. And even though some of these references might be towards other throwback Americana, perhaps what we're getting is an Easter egg of what's to come. Is Taylor going to return with a full-on country force? That'd be quite an era. We'll see. All right.

I've got one more track for you, Nate. And this is a country song, according to Billboard, about the city of Boston by the artist Stella Leyen. On a train back to Boston and we're jumping the gun. Oh, baby, this is a part where I'd run. But I like it when you're nice. Like it when you're nice to me. Well, in terms of the countryness of it all, I mean, I do hear some subtle pedal steel guitar in the background. I do hear some country style pronunciation, call it the diphthong.

effect. One of the hallmarks of the southern twang is you diphthong vowels that is like sing between two vowels. I hear that especially when she sings. There's elements here for sure. Yeah. Though Boston is probably not this first city you'd associate with country lore. We're far from the abelines and amarillos of our choosing Texas world. I want to come back to the countryness of Boston in a minute. But first, there has been a lot of other discourse about this song. Many commenters have talked about the privilege that Sella Lefty comes from.

Yes. Her father is a billionaire of the group on fortune. There's been questions about, you know, can you write a country song if you've grown up in Chicago and you're writing a song about Boston? Does that make sense? The song was written about a date with her boyfriend. She first posted it as a demo to TikTok and it blew up. We've got a lot of positive reception.

Before she even released it, though, she had someone reach out and say, this sounds familiar. We're from Noah Kahn's team. This sounds a little bit like stick season by Noah Kahn. And I heard her mom, but it's the season of the sticks. And I saw your mom. She forgot that I existed. And it's half my fault.

But I just like to play the victim. I'll drink alcohol till my friends come home for Christmas. Nook Han is a named songwriter on Sell Lefty's song. They gave credit before releasing it to the public. And I'm curious, you know, you do some forensic musicology work. Yeah. How similar are you actually think these songs truly are. I've maybe to help you out mash them up.

On a train back to Boston and we're jumping the gun and I'm telling you, baby, this is a part where I'd run. But I like it when you're nice. Like it when you're nice to me. So that's Stella Lefty, singing against the music of Stick Season. Here's Noah Kahn singing to the music of Boston. And here they are singing together. I had to put them in the same key. And here they are singing together. I had to put them in the same key. That's really cool

I'm trying to That's more My phone But I just like you when you're nice to me Alcohol Till my friends come home for Christmas That's really cool hearing them back to back I mean

Kind of more discrepancy Than you might initially anticipate When you hear them like that They don't align perhaps Quite as much as I'd thought And yet from a forensic Mucicology perspective

if we transcribed these and put all the notes on, you know, a musical staff, I think we'd see that there's a lot of overlap, a lot of moments where we see the exact same melodies. Not only that, it's like the same overall structure of these phrases, the way they're broken down into smaller measures and how each of those repeats in the kind of same way as the other. So, yeah, it's not maybe as much of a slam dunk. in terms of the similarity as many on the internet would like to claim.

Yeah. But it's enough, and especially in this age, our post-blurred lines age of increased copyright litigation that you don't want to get caught out without just extending an olive branch to someone like Noa Khan, I think. So here we have Noah Khan getting a songwriting credit and sell a lefty song. You know, Noah Khan, I think of as the Prince of New England. Right now, if you want to see Noah Khan at Fenway, good luck. Everybody else in New England is trying to catch Noah Khan. He is singing about all of the trials and tribulations of growing up in New England,

and people really have connected with it. I hadn't thought of him so much as a country artist as more of like an indie folk, maybe Americana. Right. Probably where I would even place Stella Lefty's music, if not for the pedal steel and that twang. and yet, I was trying to think, like, is there a way that we could assess whether or not New England and country music belong together? I was able to find a geolocating website that can look up all of the radio stations in your zip code. And it turns out, in my zip code in Brooklyn, no country radio stations. In Back Bay, Boston, there are two country radio stations that you can pick up.

In my hometown of Maine, you can pick up three country radio stations. And if you go to Burlington, Vermont, you can pick up six. six country stations more than any other genre. Well, that's surprising and revealing. It's almost like country isn't a state. It's a state of mind. Yeah. See what I did there?

That could be a country lyric, couldn't it? That is a good country lyric. Thank you. Despite the inherent issues of inclusion in the genre that have plagued it for years, I think it's a very large tent. Like, you know, country draws from Mexican guitars and cowboy hats, West African banjos, those Ukrainian embroidered suits. It's not surprising that all of these number one country songs that Silla Langley is competing with have been songs about who is included in country.

You know, Shibuzzi's bar song, Lil Nas X's Old Town Road, have raised those questions. A lot of ways, I think that the fact that country music is so popular just shows that it really is the people's music. And for so many people, the work of Dali Parton brought them there. Yeah. She's someone who talked about rural poverty. and equity in the workforce and complex human relationships in the 3,000 plus songs that she published into her life. So I'm really saddened by her loss,

but also really delighted in going through the work of contemporary country music and still seeing how it is such a broader tent, maybe the view that Dolly Parton brought to the genre, not the more stereotypical narrowness. It's not just twang trucks, whiskey, Dirt Roads, Blue Jeans. It's all of us. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer.

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