A Love Hate Relationship with Country Music – Featuring Benjamin Tod

I’ve had a love hate relationship with country music for a long time and I’m sure I’m not alone. In the 90s and early 2000s it was mostly on a wholesale level. For months, I loved all of country music. Then the pendulum would swing back to the complete other side. Back and forth my tastes would go. I’ve never thought through the cause of such bipolar musical preferences but since then and for the last decade for sure, the love hate I feel for the genre is mostly on a per song basis. Maybe that’s because there’s such a wide range of music under the “country” umbrella and I still tend to gravitate to the more traditional sounding stuff versus the country that has pop music qualities.

Over the years I’ve tried to pepper in some country music with my nieces and nephews (who are part of the TikTok generation). Needless to say, in their early teen years they weren’t having it. For them, it was rap, hip hop, or nothing. Thankfully, as they’ve grown up there are country songs they want to listen to, even if it’s only from being exposed to songs from Morgan Wallen (and a few others) on TikTok.

What’s that verse in the Bible about being lukewarm? It’s better to be hot or cold and the longer I live, the more I realize how true that is in so many areas of life. Can that apply to country music, too? I think so. It’s why artists like Benjamin Tod are so dang refreshing! From the music I’ve heard of his so far, he isn’t playing the pop country game. He’s fully on the side of traditional country music, so much that I’m liable to call his upcoming album a “Country & Western record”. Check out the pleasant harmonies that sound like they were plucked right out of a mid-1980s jukebox in the corner of a smoky bar. Here’s Benjamin Tod and Sierra Ferrell’s duet “One Last Time.”

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This is just my second post about Benjamin Tod (have you seen his trashy video for “I Ain’t The Man”?) but the folky harmony between him and Sierra Ferrell is a great example of what I love about country music.

More of this please!

-Out of the Wilderness