Where Has All The Folk-Rock Gone?

Following pop music — especially at the stratum just below the A-list — sometimes feels like following a neverending dance of musicians' pivots. Artists, looking for a breakthrough and having less insight than ever into how to get one, don't develop linearly so much as trade sounds with one another. They shift toward or away from bedroom pop, '80s pop, acoustic pop, and so forth, and sometimes those pivots sync up well enough to look like a trend. This year, that trend is supposedly country music, which, if you believe the headlines, is steadily changing the charts. But that wasn't quite true the last couple of times we did this, and it still isn't. Sure, a few real-deal, deep-fried country artists like Ella Langley have blown up recently — or at least, with apologies to Kenny Atkinson, they've analytically blown up. A few pop artists, like Post Malone or (temporarily) Beyoncé, have deliberately set out to make real-deal country music of their own. Shaboozey is happy to carve space out of the middle.