Each week the Wide Open Country staff rounds up our favorite newly released country and Americana songs. Here are five new songs we can't stop listening to this week:
"In My Blood," Tenille Townes
Tenille Townes helped kick off National FFA week with the release of her roots-rock song "In My Blood," which celebrates women in agriculture.
"It is an honour to have written this song with the heart of women in agriculture in mind," Townes said in a press release. "These are the women who inspire and shape all of us and it makes me think of the strong women in my life I grew up looking up to. The ones who made me believe anything is possible. Their legacy is something we get to keep building upon and that's what I was dreaming about writing this song."
The song's video features Townes recording the song with an all-female team in the studio and shows clips of the daily lives of women farmers.
Townes released her EP The Road to the Lemonade Stand in early February.
— Bobbie Jean Sawyer
"If Horses Had Wings," Tris Munsick & The Innocents
Cowboy singer and storyteller Dave Munsick's oldest sun Tris leads one of traditional country music's best-kept secrets. Tris' latest song with West Virginia-based band The Innocents pays homage to the ropers, riders and rhymers who inspired country singers long before George Strait or Garth Brooks entered the public consciousness.
—Bobby Moore
"Keep Up," RaeLynn
If not enough co-writes in Nashville result in songs written with women in mind, more taste-makers should be blowing up RaeLynn's phone. She's as good a lyricist as you'll find if an artist needs a carefree song about rowdy times and rural living. Her new song "Keep Up" comes with a music video which, as Entertainment Tonight wrote in the most delightful headline imaginable, co-stars RaeLynn's husband Josh Davis and a pony.
—Bobby Moore
"Slow Climb," Nora Jane Struthers
For something on the Americana and folk end of the spectrum, check out Nora Jane Struthers' new album Bright Lights, Long Drives, First Words. Powerfully positive album cut "Slow Climb" encourages us to stick together through tough times. Although Struthers probably isn't too worried about mainstream accessibility, this fiddle tune's catchy chorus wouldn't sound out of place on a Lady Antebellum album.
—Bobby Moore
"Reap What You Sow," Sarah Jane Nelson
Sarah Jane Nelson channels a little Loretta Lynn attitude on her fiery new song "Reap What You Sow." Only rather than warning her man's mistress that she "ain't woman enough" to taker her man, she's practically begging her to take him off her hands.
"The songs I wrote for the record are about hope, finding the light in the dark, and creating a new life out of the broken pieces. 'Reap What You Sow' is different," Nelson says. "My co-writer Kenny Foster encouraged me to have some fun, and boy is this song sassy! We really went there with lyrics like, 'He's a bag of dirt and honey you're the hoe, and where I come from you're gonna reap what you sow.' As a former actor and writer, the creative process of directing the video was a blast with Jeremy Burchard's cinematography was spot-on as always. We shot the video at the fabulous Dee's Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, Tenn. and the local Nashville actors nailed it!"
Nelson's forthcoming album I'm Not Broken will be released on June 26.
— Bobbie Jean Sawyer
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