Taking it slow: the welcome return of the country ballad

Nashville labels and country radio programmers love to talk about the importance of tempo in today’s biggest hits. Flip through industry publications like Country Aircheck or Billboard Country Update and you’ll see that labels frequently buy up ad space to encourage radio stations to play songs like Brad Paisley’s Crushin’ It by promoting its “Superstar Tempo!” or Drake White’s It Feels Good by asking things like, “Thirsty for Tempo? Ranked #2 BPM [Beats Per Minute]!” The praise is so detached and mechanical that it calls into question whether corporate executives have become so deluded by money that they now really think of BPM metrics as legitimate and positive ways to describe art.

Despite the fixation on song speed, though, listeners in 2015 have frequently chosen to sit back and enjoy some of the slowest hits on the airwaves. The year’s two biggest smashes, Little Big Town’s Girl Crush and Sam Hunt’s Take Your Time, are both romantic ballads. The next biggest seller, Eric Church’s unconventionally infectious organ-driven sex jam Like a Wrecking Ball, is only a few weeks away from becoming 2015’s third country song to surpass 1m downloads, and its rhythm is in no hurry at all. On the current chart, ballads like Maddie & Tae’s Fly, Luke Bryan’s Strip it Down, and Chris Young’s I’m Comin’ Over have been thriving for a few months, but three newer hits drive home the point that listeners who have been pummeled with beat-driven party songs for the better part of five years are now seeking the shelter of country’s slowest, sparsest, most sensitive ballads.

After a long slog in the lower tiers of the airplay charts, Jana Kramer’s I Got the Boy has finally found traction with radio, and it’s about time. Co-written by Jamie Lynn Spears (yes, Britney’s little sister has a burgeoning country career of her own), the song contains some of the finest lyrics of the year. As Kramer looks back on a dangerous, doomed relationship from her younger years with a guy that has since grown up and moved on, she sighs: “I got the class ring/ She got the diamond and a wedding band/ I got the boy/ And she got the man.” It’s a line that’s rife with both under-the-bleachers nostalgia and late-night-Facebook-stalking regret. The painful duality evokes the same winsomeness as Kramer’s breakout country single, Why Ya Wanna, from 2012.

Kramer’s not the only “tomato” succeeding with a ballad, much to a certain lettuce-loving programmer’s likely chagrin. Newcomer Cam is soaring with Burning House, which, after receiving surprise national attention from the influential Bobby Bones radio show, cut through the noise and became a mega-success this summer and has since resided in or around the top five of the iTunes country section. Without a drumbeat anywhere in the song, Cam’s lovely voice dances like a flame over elegant guitars and background harmony as she reflects upon a dream she had about her ex.

Notably, it’s the pensive Burning House that launched Cam into the mainstream, rather than her cheeky, uptempo debut, My Mistake, which failed to take off earlier this year. I can only hope that this bodes well for Cam’s future in country music. She spent her early adult years spent pursuing a psychology career in California, and she thus sings (and writes and speaks) with a perspective that’s squarely outside the hackneyed small-town-kid-chasing-big-time-dreams that’s often sold around Nashville. Check out Half Broke Heart for another side to her style.

And then there is Charles Kelley, of Lady Antebellum fame, who released his first solo single, The Driver, this week as the trio takes a hiatus. (The band say they’re not breaking up. “This [project] was just a pure musical detour, to take myself out of my own head and off the treadmill for a minute,” Kelley said. “I hope and think it can bring in a fresh perspective when we go back in to make the next Lady Antebellum record.”) The Driver is the lead song ahead of an EP set for release in early 2016, and it also features expert balladeers Eric Paslay and Dierks Bentley, the latter of whom is currently working hard to take his own ballad, Riser, up the charts.

Kelley sings with a throaty conviction on The Driver not heard since he was releasing songs like I Run To You in the early days of Lady Antebellum. Although his band, like so much of country’s A-list, has lately veered away from earnestness and into a more bar-stomping direction, The Driver, suggests a shade of discontent with this trend. Lyrically, it articulates a clear belief that making and performing music, whether it’s about partying or dreaming, love or heartache, country culture or universal experience, is a genuinely valuable endeavour. Admittedly, that’s not the deepest argument in the world, but for all the hemming and hawing that male artists have given reporters in the bro-country era, no artist has bothered to make one like it.

Most stars stand behind their fans, saying they only make music that their audiences want to hear. But what makes the The Driver such a disarming reflection is that, even as it sings to “all the drivers and dreamers” out in the crowd, its perspective is projected from the stage, and it lets the men that stand up there and sing to thousands every night speak their truth. It’s simultaneously about the exclusive experience of entertaining masses (“I’m the driver, bringing their circus to town,” Kelley sings in the opening line) and about aspirations to become that kind of performer yourself (“Looking back, when I was younger/ Sitting right there where you are/ Sending a prayer to the highest star/ And here we are,” says Bentley in the final verse).

Country fans have reacted strongly to The Driver’s surprise release, and along with the success of country radio’s other ballads, they may be temporarily driving the genre out of its summer party haze and into a welcome season of introspection.