Why so many artists are going country.

The lyrics of country star Lainey Wilson’s latest single are as slippery and tongue-twisty as the mystery they’re trying to decode: “Must be something in the water flowing out of the holler/ Blue collar must’ve caught a new wind,” she sings. “Doggone, dadgum it, didn’t see that comin’/ Country’s cool again.” The song was released less than two weeks after Wilson won the prize for Best Country Album at the Grammys, a gratifying triumph after she’d spent many years being rejected in Nashville as “too country for country.” It was also only a few days after Beyoncé had revealed, the night of the Super Bowl, that her next album, the second “act” of the Renaissance trilogy (which we now know is called Cowboy Carter) would come out March 29, this Friday. The bombshell that it would be a country-themed album, with two advance singles putting proof in that pudding, got the whole music world talking, nowhere more so than in Nashville. That included talking, as some of us have been for years, about the country-music industry’s dismal trajectory on gender and race and whether even Beyoncé’s cultural gravity could bend it.

But of course Wilson hadn’t written and recorded “Country’s Cool Again” in instantaneous reaction to that February decree from pop royalty. In fact, she had debuted the song in a live show at Red Rocks in Colorado in September, a month after country music achieved a historically unprecedented feat: The week of Aug. 5, three country artists had the most popular songs in the nation, holding the top three spots on the Hot 100. Again, there was plenty of problematic stuff to debate there, counterbalancing the joy of Luke Combs’ helping bring “Fast Car” and Tracy Chapman back into the national consciousness. But the facts were striking on their own: As Billboard noted earlier that summer, country listening in the first half of 2023 had risen more than 20 percent compared with the previous year; this was the continuation of an ongoing trend being driven by Gen Z and millennials, and not just domestically but internationally, as far afield as the Philippines. That chart-topping threefer was far from the only record set by country music in 2023. To name one more, “Something in the Orange,” by the popular self-styled outsider Zach Bryan of Oklahoma, became the longest-charting country song by a male artist ever, even though it never rose above No. 10.

After that kind of year, with country music reaching further than ever, no wonder a bevy of pop stars started talking about reaching back and themselves “going country,” as Alan Jackson scornfully described it in his 1990s hit. Besides Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey has announced she’ll put out a countrified album (called Lasso) next fall, Post Malone has been teasing fans with a similar prospect (complete with a collaboration with country megastar Morgan Wallen), Ed Sheeran has mused about making such a transition, and ex–One Direction star Zayn Malik has been recording with rootsy Nashville producer Dave Cobb.

That’s not to mention the ongoing successes of artists like Jason Isbell and Brandi Carlile in the adjacent realms of Americana, and all the folky or twangy but hardly strictly country sounds emanating from Noah Kahan, Maggie Rogers (hear her gorgeous single “Don’t Forget Me” if you haven’t), and the War and Treaty, as well as some of the brightest in indie-rock circles. Nothing tickled me more in 2023 than hearing indie supergroup Boygenius cover Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One” for BBC Radio One. Artists such as Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee (who put out one of the albums of the year last week with Tigers Blood) and Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff (ditto for February’s The Past Is Still Alive) deliver their story-songs with styles, attitudes, poetics, and unapologetic drawls that make them feel like the proudly bastard children of Lucinda Williams.

Meanwhile, Western wear is back on the runways, and there have even been reports of a grassroots honky-tonk groundswell in as utterly urban a location as Los Angeles. The boundaries between all these cultural zones seem to be growing ever more breachable, as much as some forces resist. As biracial country hitmaker Kane Brown sings in his hot new single “Fiddle in the Band”: “I’m just like you/ I was raised on the radio/ From Memphis blues to Hollywood rock ’n’ roll … I’m a little bit of bass, 808s, a little bit of clap your hands/ I’m a little bit of six strings on a backbeat/ With a fiddle in the band.” (That’s a follow-up, by the way, to Brown’s recent country radio No. 1 “I Can Feel It,” which interpolates Phil Collins’ 1980s epic-fromage landmark “In the Air Tonight.”)

Darius Rucker, the former Hootie and the Blowfish singer, was way ahead of the game when he turned to country back in 2008, and has established himself as a constant, more beloved in the genre than any Black country singer since Charley Pride. Still, he’s noticed the shift lately himself, telling the Associated Press’ Maria Sherman last month, “People just didn’t want to embrace [country], and so many people are embracing now. … It just shows that country music is not rock and roll’s little sister anymore.”

What fewer people seem to be asking is how and why this is happening now. As Beyoncé reminded the world last week, along with her country birthright as a Texan, she has a very specific casus belli in confronting and laying claim to country’s legacy—the racially charged non-welcome she got when the Chicks brought her on the 2016 CMA Awards to perform her country track “Daddy Lessons” from Lemonade. Although she made it clear that if Cowboy Carter has a true genre, it’s “Beyoncé,” not country, many anticipate that the album will reassert the Black roots of country much as the first Renaissance album did for house music.

But what’s motivating everyone else? Contrary to many misperceptions, country is far from ideologically monolithic, so despite the likes of Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony Music, it would be too simple to ascribe its recent surge to right-wing retrenchment alone. In the past, country has had major upticks in liberalizing periods like the “outlaw” 1970s and the Clinton ’90s, as well as during reactionary ones, like the early Reagan 1980s and in the wake of 9/11. Still, when Lainey Wilson sings “Country’s Cool Again,” no country fan can help but be reminded of Barbara Mandrell’s signature tune “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.” That summer 1981 hit, with an uncredited cameo by George Jones, was her answer song to the “Urban Cowboy” fad sweeping both music and fashion at the time.

That fad was sparked by the romance-and-mechanical-bull-riding movie of the same name, starring John Travolta and Debra Winger, which aimed to do for country what Saturday Night Fever had done for disco, and came pretty damn close. The soundtrack featured Kenny Rogers, Mickey Gilley, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Buffett, among others, and spawned six Top 40 hits, including Johnny Lee’s classic “Lookin’ for Love.” Gilley’s country nightclub, outside Houston, became a tourist destination, and bolo ties were suddenly everywhere.

But like Saturday Night Fever with disco, Urban Cowboy only accelerated trends already well underway, from the California country rock scene the Eagles and Ronstadt came out of, to The Dukes of Hazzard’s “good old boy” TV misadventures narrated by Waylon Jennings, to crossover hits like Rogers’ “The Gambler” and Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” which of course was a movie the same year. If that country renaissance had to do with Reagan’s cowboy affectations and 1950s nostalgia, it also was just filling in a gap left by the commercial flameout of disco and the not-for-everybody rise of punk and new wave in rock.

It allowed country to become one of the bestselling music categories for a couple of years, until the inevitable backlash. Part of that was from within—many country musicians and fans resented the whole phenomenon as city folk playing dress-up. In a cycle that’s never-ending in country, this helped spur the subsequent harder-twanging “neo-traditionalist” movement (which could be as straight as George Strait or as inventive as Rosanne Cash and Lyle Lovett), a shift that in turn led by stages to the next big country crossover moment (Garth Brooks), in the 1990s.

The “Urban Cowboy” era includes a lot of parallels to what’s happening today, with the exception of the hit movie. Some would argue that Taylor Sheridan’s popular Yellowstone series should count, both for its rugged Western aesthetic and for providing a musical platform to artists, including Wilson. Or perhaps we’ll look back and consider Cowboy Carter the equivalent of a Hollywood juggernaut. What’s certainly true is that the momentum has been underway for years. For much of the past decade and a half (especially after Taylor Swift left the genre), country radio was dominated by the macho party anthems of “bro country,” a sound that rarely appealed outside the core country audience. But signs of change began cropping up. The R&B-influenced and almost anti-pop Chris Stapleton seemed like an outlier when he emerged as a major figure in the mid-teens, but he turned out to be an early indicator of a coming batch of artists with rougher edges, such as Combs, Bryan, Tyler Childers, and Bailey Zimmerman—and further out stylistically in every sense, of complete mold-breakers such as Jelly Roll (a face-tattooed ex-con and white rapper turned aching country-gospel stylist) and the raspy, heavy metal–influenced vocalist Hardy, both of whom have now had several genuine hits.

For just as long, tensions between pro- and anti-change forces in and outside Nashville have been accumulating. “Tomato-gate,” when powerful radio consultant Keith Hill openly acknowledged that women were considered mere garnish to the main course of male country artists, helped provoke more open feminism in a city and a genre that’s long been averse to it. That was nearly a decade ago now. Likewise, the controversy around Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” being shut out of the country charts in 2019 brought about a spike in racial awareness, followed up by artist-activists in groups like the Black Opry. You can’t argue there’s been a lot of substantial progress, but I do think that it’s created media attention and a roiling undercurrent of energy, and it certainly means that Billboard chart-makers this year (and many, if not all, country radio programmers) were not about to repeat their 2019 error and try to bar Beyoncé.

It’s easy to forget now that in the same year that “Old Town Road” made its record-breaking gallop up the Hot 100, Beyoncé’s own sister Solange centered the visual identity of her album When I Get Home (by no means a country record) on the image of the historical Black cowboy, Cardi B came out in chaps, Mitski declared that she would Be the Cowboy, and fashionistas started talking about the “yeehaw agenda.” (A somewhat unfortunate turn of phrase—the TikTok “yeehaw challenge” associated with “Old Town Road,” fun as it was, was also an exact illustration of country fans’ fears of outsiders wearing the culture as a costume.) This was also the same year that Ken Burns released his documentary series Country Music, which may have made some converts and also, whatever its flaws, foregrounded an argument for a more inclusive vision of the music.

If the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t struck in 2020, in fact, I wonder if we might have seen last year’s country breakout come along a bit faster. But it did strike, putting all kinds of culture in a holding pattern. One thing that actually sped up in those months of being stuck at home, however—and it might be the most crucial factor of all—was country listeners’ adoption of streaming. As Sony Music Nashville CEO Randy Goodman told Billboard last year, “Some of the more mature demographics of country weren’t in their cars, they weren’t going to the office, and they used that time to say, ‘OK, I’m going to figure out what streaming is all about.’ ” This effect was combined with a lot of younger, more streaming-native listeners getting deeper into country, often under the influence (whatever you think of him) of the massively popular Wallen, whose “Last Night” would later become the biggest song of 2023 and the second longest-running hit of all time. Billboard reported that from 2019 to 2022, “country audio streaming jumped 58 percent, according to Luminate, outpacing the industry’s 48.5 percent growth and increasing faster than every other genre besides Latin music.” In 2023 some 36 percent of the streams of Spotify’s top 50 songs in America were country; in 2016 it had been just 2 percent.

If observers have been right for decades that part of what keeps country from developing in more interesting and progressive ways is the stranglehold of country-radio gatekeepers, then this switch is monumental. For the first time, rather than investing money and time into visiting radio stations and charming DJs and programmers into playing them, artists can reach fans with their songs directly, via playlists and social media—and radio will be obliged to follow. Lainey Wilson’s own recent success, for instance, is due not just to her growth and persistence as an artist but to a viral TikTok video that showed her butt off to advantage. Streaming is surely the only way as improbable an artist as Hardy becomes a country star.

It’s a lot like what happened in 1991, when sales tabulations for the charts stopped being based on phone surveys of selected record stores and started using the SoundScan digital database. It immediately became clear that the previous information regime had concealed just how much hard rock, hip-hop, and, yes, country America was listening to. What came next? Nirvana and Snoop Dogg, on one hand, and Garth and Shania on the other.

All that seems to explain country’s internal evolution and breakouts. It says less about why artists from other fields are eager to go country, aside from wanting to get in on the action (a powerful reason in itself). Here, it helps to recall that the “Urban Cowboy” moment was facilitated by the decline of disco. While not to the same extent, country is, I think, benefiting from a dearth of innovative energy in the rest of pop. Consider that the two biggest stories in mainstream pop last year were the Taylor Swift and Beyoncé tours—worth the attention, of course, but both involving artists who’ve been famous for a very long time. Aside from Olivia Rodrigo, it’s hard to name an incandescent newcomer all eyes are following. Even more significantly, mainstream hip-hop has seemed stuck in a relative rut of downbeat-looped angst for the past several years. For a quarter of a century, hip-hop has been where pop artists (and non-pop ones too—including country artists) have gone looking for fresh infusions of ideas. But at this point, it’s washed to seek to improve your sound by sprinkling in breakbeats, cybernetic vocals, etc. As musicians seek out new sources, country seems to be the spring where they are dipping their cups. What else are they to do, turn to A.I.?

In fact, that might be a final key to country’s current appeal: At a time when people feel so terminally tethered to our devices, country foregrounds the offline, sometimes even off-grid life. Of course, it’s not actually more “authentic” than any other commercial music—it’s created with equal calculation and deliberation, maybe more so given Music Row’s weakness for hierarchical groupthink. But with its instrumental palette, repertoire of stylistic gestures, and lyrical focuses on place, domesticity, and nostalgia, it can feel more grounded. You might listen to it on your phone, but it doesn’t tend to sound as if it was made on one. (Though Morgan Wallen kinda does.) As one of my favorite newer country acts, Megan Moroney, told the AP, country’s commitment to honesty (or the veneer thereof) can act as a counterbalance to the “fake stuff” of social media. At the least, the narrative-forward way the songs are constructed, whether by singer-songwriters or by groups of pro writers checking in to sessions, contrasts heavily with the studio-based method of “punching in” disconnected phrases over loops in a lot of contemporary song creation.

It’s difficult to read the entrails of a pop trend when it’s in motion. In retrospect, a lot of what was most lasting about the “Urban Cowboy” moment wasn’t what it brought directly but what followed in its wake. Today we’re all waiting to see what Cowboy Carter truly turns out to be like. And time will tell how much country-streaming listeners’ choices ultimately do differ from what the so-called gatekeepers have been dictating—though stats show that 63 percent of the country-streaming audience is female, for instance, most of the left-field rising stars still seem to be male. Maybe the main effect will simply be to deprive us of country programmers as a scapegoat.

As for how long it will last: The only safe bet is that whenever Taylor Swift finally makes her own country comeback, then for sure it’s over.