The Curmudgeon: The CMAs and the Tricky Job of Balancing Quality and Sales

Like the film world’s Oscars, the Country Music Awards is an industry-sponsored event that’s not always a reliable guide to the year’s best work. But also like the Oscars, it’s not merely a confirmation of box-office champs. It’s an uneasy mix of quality and sales, and that’s what makes it so fascinating. Because that’s what we want: we want our best artists to find a large audience.

Take Chris Stapleton, for example. Like Tyler Childers and Jason Isbell, Stapleton is a gifted, rough-around-the-edges singer-songwriter who regularly plants his albums near the top of the Billboard country charts. Unlike Childers and Isbell, however, Stapleton plays the country radio game and has had enough hit singles to win 16 CMA trophies out of 34 nominations.

His latest award is for Best Male Vocalist, his seventh victory in nine years in that category. That makes sense, for his gruff baritone is one of the most distinctive voices in a genre full of soundalikes. Like the classic country voices of Willie Nelson, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Stapleton’s is immediately identifiable and unfailingly personal.

He’s not a great lyricist (the words to those great songs by his bluegrass band the Steeldrivers were written by bandmate Mike Henderson), but it doesn’t matter. The standard-issue romantic situations that dominate his new album Higher (released two days after the November 8 CMA Awards) come alive because that voice can bring out the depth of feeling that the words only hint at. Savvy Nashville super-producer Dave Cobb sets the stage for the singing to do what the words can’t.

His recent #1 single, “White Horse,” for example, warns a lover not to expect a fantasy cowboy hero, because he’s “not there yet.” In that “yet,” however, one can hear the struggle between want-to and not-able-to that gives the song its drama. Another track, “Think I’m in Love with You,” is the familiar confession of a guy who realizes too late that he’s in love with a woman. What redeems this version of the scenario is the sound of genuine surprise and panic in Stapleton’s voice, as if the epiphany has just occurred.

Stapleton is popular, but not as popular as the genre’s two biggest stars right now. Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs not only top the country field but also join Taylor Swift, SZA and Drake in Billboard’s ranking of the five best-selling artists of 2023. Combs, who won this year’s CMA Award for best single (a likable remake of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”), has been marketed as a kind of Stapleton Lite, a teddy bear compared to the former Steeldriver’s grizzly bear.

The two men share shaggy, rotund physiques, raspy voices and blue-collar personas. But Combs’ latest album, Gettin’ Old, is as underwhelming as Stapleton’s is impressive. Combs’ songs are as formulaic as titles such as “The Beer, the Band and the Barstool,” “My Song Will Never Die” and “Love You Anyway” imply. His singing is overstated, his rhymes lazy and his sentimental prescriptions unconvincing.

Morgan Wallen is a more complicated matter. He was initially dropped by his label after getting caught up on tape shouting a racial slur and made it worse with a stilted apology. But, like the politically incorrect Toby Keith, Wallen is genuinely talented—more so than even Keith. Wallen, who had three CMA nominations this year and no wins, has perfected a unique, laidback vocal style—part Don Williams drollery and part Snoop Dogg drawl—that disarms a listener and lures one into whatever story he’s telling. And those stories are compelling, for their Everyman protagonists confess their frustrated loves and thwarted ambitions so realistically that no hype is needed.

On his previous album, Dangerous: The Double Album, Wallen transformed Isbell’s “Cover Me Up” from the plea of a tortured artist into the plea of the neighborhood sad sack. Wallen’s new album, One Thing at a Time, offers 13 originals in a similar mode, but there are 23 other songs as well, and this two-disc extravaganza wears out its welcome in a way its predecessor didn’t. But when Wallen connects with a song—such as one of the seven top-10 country singles from the album, four of them co-written by Wallen, another a duet with Eric Church and another the double-platinum maybe-break-up song, “Last Night”—he commands your attention without seeming to even try.

Zach Bryan was nominated for the CMA’s New Artist award this year with his unconventional fourth album, Zach Bryan, which begins with a Woody Guthrie-like spoken-word poem, followed by a Springsteen-ish rocker. With those two tracks, he establishes the persona of a word-drunk, road-wandering, iconoclastic romantic, a country outlaw for a new century. Bryan has a modest tenor, but he spits out syllables so crisply—a rush of words punctuated by strategic pauses—that you can absorb every image, every aphorism.

On his hit single “I Remember Everything,” written and sung with Kacey Musgraves, he demonstrates his photographic memory while recounting a youthful romance on the poor side of town. That devotion to detail—the ugly as well as the alluring—allows the listener to accompany Bryan on his travels from Montana to “a place they still put sugar in their iced tea.” That latter line comes from “Hey Driver,” a hitchhiking ballad sung with War & Treaty and convincing in its assertion that any corner of any highway is a good place to wrestle old demons and/or new lovers.

Lainey Wilson was the big winner of this year’s CMAs, sweeping four awards, including the two biggest: Entertainer and Album of the year. She’s pleasant enough, but far more interesting is her friend Ashley McBryde, who had three nominations and no wins. McBryde’s 2022 project, Lindeville, had a great back story: six friends holed up in a rural cabin to invent a fictional small town and write songs about its residents. But her new release, The Devil I Know, is a better record, the best mainstream-country album of the year.

When she lists on “The Coldest Beer in Town” all the sweet-talking lies she once believed—love lasts forever, lovers stick around, and a cold beer makes everything better—it’s unclear if she’s complaining about ex-boyfriends or country radio. She even gets mad at herself on “I Learned To Lie.” But she never sounds defeated; with each lesson learned, she’s wearier but wiser, determined to press on, even if it’s with “The Devil I Know.” Producer Jay Joyce avoids the loud-all-the-time trap of most country singles, and the music shifts from intimate to rocking and back again as McBryde’s moods change.

The tattooed, short, stocky McBryde is the exception to the skinny-model look of most female country singers, and her tart, punchy vocals are an exception to their American Idol sound. She doesn’t have to overdo the vocals, because her songwriting is so good: smart turns of phrase on the dilemma of young women who want both career success and true love and find both elusive in the tall office buildings and low dives of Nashville.