There's tons of new country music out right now — but is it any good?

The past two weeks have seen many new country music releases, from Nashville bad boy Morgan Wallen's epic new album, to Maren Morris's pivot to pop, to Lana Del Rey's honky-tonk makeover.

Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud sits down with music writers Carl Wilson, Andrea Williams and Sarah Boesveld to get their honest thoughts on the latest tunes and news around these singers. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: The title track of [Morgan Wallen's] new album [is] I'm The Problem. He's just saying it at this point. He's going to be like, "It's me. I am the guy. I am the problem." 

He's got two albums in the Billboard Top 10 — not Top 40, not Top 100 — two other albums, one of them came out in 2023, the other one came out way back in 2021, and they're still in the top 10. And then he just put out a third album, it's presumably going to go straight to No. 1. Also, I think it's fair to say, he remains one of the most problematic figures in country music. He draws a lot of attention. He does not go very long without a particularly bad headline. 

Sarah, this new album has 37 songs on it. Every one of his albums is incredibly long. Let's talk about your relationship to Morgan Wallen and how this album is landing there.

Sarah: I have tried to quit Morgan Wallen. I see the headlines. 

He has a 37-song record, which again is not unusual for him. He might need an editor. That said, they are straight bangers, so many of them. I can imagine them going, "No, I can't put that one on the cutting room floor. We need two hours and three minutes of Morgan Wallen." And people are eating it up. 

He has been a problematic figure. He has really self-styled himself as this outlaw. I think, potentially, by accident, because he's trying to find his way through being a young, Southern man in the country music world, where young, Southern men are actually quite embraced and adopted and loved and celebrated. [But he's] coming up against a cultural moment where there has, quite rightly, been a lot of concern about some of the white supremacist, patriarchal, racist behaviour that has been dog whistled for so long. 

His persona is very interesting, because I think with naming it, "I'm the problem," it's defensive. Is he the problem? Is it country music, the industry? Is it all of us that's a problem?

Elamin: The line actually resolves in: "I'm the problem, but you might be the reason." And I think that itself is also revelatory. And also this album ends with a song called, I'm A Little Crazy. He's like, "Yeah, I might be a little crazy, but the problem is out there. The problem is the world." 

Carl, what sort of story do you think Morgan's trying to tell about himself on this record? 

Carl: There's been this defensiveness ever since the incident in 2021, where he was caught on tape saying the N-word. And he apologized rapidly and took some steps to reconcile — not enough by a lot of people's views, but at the same time, he took some steps. But ever since then, there's this sense that radiates off him that he's coming in unfairly for scrutiny and criticism compared to other people — which is what happens when you're one of the biggest celebrities in the world. 

Taylor Swift deals the same line a lot of the time. They've both got the, I'm-the-problem-it's-me syndrome going on on both of these albums. But Wallen's way of coming at it is still not reckoning with his own entitlement, and there's this kind of passive-aggressive thing. And it's not even directly addressed to his real world critics, the way that Swift does. It's always personified by some woman that he's in a relationship with, which also sours a lot of the tone of a lot of the songs to me. I tend to compare him to Drake in the sense that this is a kind of Certified Lover Boy side of him, and this whiny, "I'm drunk or stoned in the middle of the night, thinking about how I've been done wrong by this woman" side of him. And it kind of alternates between those things. 

I agree with Sarah about the voice and all of that, there's definitely strengths here. But I've always found him very hard to love. 

Elamin: I'm gonna just run quickly down the laundry list of stuff that Morgan Wallen has been in the headlines for. Back in 2020, he openly flouted to the COVID guidelines before he appeared on SNL…. In 2021, he was caught on video using the N-word. He's been arrested a couple times for disorderly conduct, including this incident where he threw a chair off the top of a rooftop patio, nearly hitting a police officer.

Andrea, what gets me about Morgan Wallen is that these are all incidents — each one of them is an incident that would derail a career. Yet consistently not only has he been in the Billboard top 10 for years for albums that came out years ago, but consistently Nashville has had an inability to give up on Morgan Wallen. 

He's got the right to continue to make music. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the machinery that continues to bring Morgan to the top. Why do you think Nashville has a hard time giving up on Morgan Wallen?

Andrea: First of all, Morgan Wallen makes Nashville a ton of money. I mean, you guys seem like perfectly reasonable people, and yet here we are talking about how much you love Morgan Wallen, right? So this is no longer just: "How do we target that core demographic or that core base that country music always goes after, that middle America, that Southern, that 'forgotten,' as they would say, in this era of progress and DEI and all those things." Like we've spilled so far outside of that, that even folks like you guys are like, "Yeah, I can't let him go." So he's making a ton of money for the industry. 

This list that you just ran down, these are not issues that his core base has a problem with. Again, if we go back to that 2021 record, that record does as well as it does, in fact, because of the N-word and because his fans are like, "Oh my gosh, please don't cancel him. So let's drive up the streams and let's push sales." And he and his team have admitted this, right? This was part of the apology tour and the "let me cut some checks to some organizations" because he fully understood that the N-word actually pushed him into greater success. 

I think people outside of [country music] tend to misunderstand how this industry works. And people tend to think about it from a traditional business perspective in that: "We want to reach as wide an audience as possible, and so that means that we're going to have to toe certain lines, we're going to have to not do certain things." This is not how country music works. In the same way that Porsche is not going to all of a sudden sell a $50,000 car so they can reach more people, that's just not what they do. Country music is like, "This is who we are. This is who service. And if we get Elamin to jump on board [for Morgan Wallen], even though this guy says the N-word, then all for it, right? And it's just more money in our pocket."

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.