Some albums welcome you with laidback ease, like a morning cup of coffee. Other records take that cup of coffee and toss the hot brew directly into your lap. The latest Tyler Childers LP, Snipe Hunter, is an example of the latter. The first song is a bracing class-conscious rocker called “Eatin’ Big Time,” in which the 34-year-old Kentucky native makes a sly reference to government assistance (EBT) while his band (named, coincidentally, The Food Stamps) slams hard into a chunky, organ-spiked groove. “Have you ever got to hold and blow a thousand fucking dollars?” Childers hollers, and you can sense his wide, gleeful grin beaming through the chaos.
It’s an auspicious opener for an album that’s mostly drawn raves from critics since dropping late last month, as well as a vocal backlash from some fans and a reactionary blogger or two. But even among people who love Snipe Hunter, a curious adjective keeps popping up: “Weird.” Sometimes that word is invoked directly (“pleasantly weird,” says Pitchfork) and other times an adjacent term is applied (like “trailblazing” from Rolling Stone or “visionary” from GQ). To be sure, this appears to be by design, given Childers’ admission to GQ that he enlisted Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso to make Snipe Hunter “weirder” sonically. (Which, as far as I can tell, mostly means “add some drum machines, vocoder, and trippy synths.”) And I suppose some of the subject matter (like the “I literally want to bite people who piss me off” song “Bitin’ List”) and cultural references (the Hare Krishna chant laced throughout the mesmerizing “Tomcat And A Dandy”) suit the use of the “w” word.
But at the risk of being annoyingly pedantic, I think what people mean is that Snipe Hunter is weird for the kind of record it is being marketed as, which is not the same thing as the kind of record (I think) it actually is. Which is to say: It’s weird for a country or Americana record, but fairly normal for a heartland rock album.
Admittedly, this is a linguistic hobby horse of mine. (I am about to get very annoyingly pedantic here.) But for years, I have seen artists and albums that at one time — say, back in the 1990s and earlier — would have been called “rock” now get reclassified as “country” or “Americana.” And it bothers me. Not a lot, but more than a little. On my list of pet peeves, it’s up there with people who spell “whoa” like “whoah” and “rock star” like “rockstar.” I’ve conceded defeated on those other two fronts, but I continue to fight for heartland rock. It partly stems from my distaste for “Americana,” which I always type out reluctantly because it’s part of the common nomenclature, even though the “sepia-toned old-timey small-town folk” connotations are corny and kind of gross. (Also, unless we’re talking about the menu at Cracker Barrel, “Americana” just sounds dumb.) Now, heartland rock has some of the same baggage, but at least it’s slightly more specific as a descriptor of music (rather than as a signifier of a rhetorically amorphous hat-and-suspenders vibe).
Let me give you an example of what I mean: The first time I heard Snipe Hunter, I thought about The Lonesome Jubilee, a 1987 album by John Mellencamp. That record was described upon release by the great New York Times critic Jon Pareles as a textbook example of heartland rock, which he defined as “songs about unemployment, shrinking economic expectations and tough luck, set to three-chord rock laced with mandolin and accordion.” That’s also a pretty good description of Snipe Hunter.
Mellencamp doesn’t get talked about much these days, even though a lot of so-called contemporary Americana resembles the music he put out in the late ’80s and early ’90s. (He even challenged the “anti-woke” prejudices of his audience by featuring an interracial couple in the video for “Cherry Bomb,” a gesture as bold for the era as Childers putting a gay couple in his video for “In Your Love.”) After The Lonesome Jubilee, he went on to work with Malcolm Burn, a musician and producer who rose to prominence as an associate of Daniel Lanois on albums like Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy and The Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon. On those records (as well as records later produced by Lanois such as Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball and Willie Nelson’s Teatro) the lines between country, R&B and rock (as well as “authenticity” and “artifice”) were blurred by heavy use of technology and atmospheric art-rock soundscapes, in a manner that points directly to Childers and his current record.
Childers undoubtedly is a defining artist of modern (sigh) Americana, mostly on the strength of his landmark 2017 LP, Purgatory. In terms of the point of the view (lower middle-class Appalachia), storytelling (vivid and raw) and musical delivery (hard-strummed acoustic guitar and heartfelt, unpolished vocals), it’s about as close to a Platonic ideal for this kind of music as you will find in the past decade. It’s also the record that Childers has been running away from ever since. Starting with 2019’s Country Squire, which piggybacked on the psychedelic country aesthetic pioneered five years earlier by producer Sturgill Simpson (who also assisted with Purgatory), Childers has gone out of his way to avoid copying the sound of his most popular numbers. In the case of “Feathered Indians,” his top track on Spotify with nearly 624 million streams, he’s stopped playing it entirely.
(Childers’ explanation for this, which essentially relates to his retrospective discomfort with “Indians” as a term for indigenous people, was the most controversial part of the recent GQ profile. Childers, clearly, is free to play or not play whatever song he wants. And he is obviously a sensitive and thoughtful artist when it comes to complicated cultural matters. I would just gently counter that not playing one of your best songs for any reason might not be a wise decision. Neil Young no longer wholly agrees with the sentiments expressed in “Southern Man,” but he still plays it, perhaps because exposing rather than burying a work of art can be a chance to grow and learn along with your audience if presented in the proper context.)
With Snipe Hunter, Childers attempts (and, in my view, largely succeeds) at integrating the well-intentioned if occasionally clumsy experiments of post-Country Squire efforts like Long Violent History (a mostly instrumental affair that concludes with the George Floyd-inspired title track) and 2022’s Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven? (a collection of eight gospel songs presented with three different mixes) while also leveling up on the relatively straight-forward country of 2023’s Rustin’ In The Rain. It’s the album that, theoretically, gives the most fully dimensional view of Childers yet, mixing stripped-down live favorites derived from the Purgatory era (the appropriately hard-scrabble “Nose On The Grindstone,” the ravishing love song “Oneida”) with more hard-charging material like “Eatin’ Big Time” and the similarly kick-ass title track.
I would argue that the heart of the album lies with those last two tracks, as well as broad-shouldered folk-rock numbers like “Down Under” that showcase his expertly rowdy backing band. It’s crucial here to note the involvement of Rick Rubin, whose influence on modern country music is subtle but extremely important. His most celebrated country projects — Johnny Cash’s American series and the Dixie Chicks’ Grammy-winning Taking The Long Way — involved “rockifying” his patrons. For Johnny, he paired him with Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers and suggested songs by everyone from Beck to Soundgarden to (most famously) Nine Inch Nails. For the Dixie Chicks, he enlisted a murderer’s row of ringers in the supporting cast (John Mayer, Matt Sweeney, Chad Smith from the Chilli Peppers, etc.) while guiding the beleaguered trio toward a SoCal-friendly, Fleetwood Mac-esque sound.
Perhaps even more important, Rubin co-produced Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, another album that would probably be called Americana if it came next week rather than 1994. Wildflowers signifies the Rubin production style at its best: live, naturalistic, loose, and with a heavy emphasis on the interplay of musicians hanging out and entertaining each other. That’s the feeling you get from Snipe Hunter, and that feeling is why it’s my favorite Tyler Childers album to date. It’s also a very “heartland rock”-type sound. And that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.