Review Summary: To the stars on the wings of a pig.
If you don’t like country music,
Raised isn’t going to be the one to be the album to change your mind. If you’re just on the edge of liking country music, in that you like when it gets weird or experimental or “post-country” or whatever,
Raised also isn’t the album for you. If you’re looking for some perfectly good country music that you can listen to while driving through the Midwest, then
Raised is the album for you. Hailey Whitters isn’t on some mission to change country music or become the face of the recent revival the genre has seen - She’s more “Same Trailer Different Park” than “Golden Hour. She also isn’t afraid to throw some pop sensibilities into her music, which makes sense looking at her compatriots at Big Loud Records, a label that also boasts Morgan Wallen and the kid who yodeled in Wal-Mart. Fortunately, there’s no generic snap-along beat and nothing that sounds formulated for a Levi commercial. Whitters maintains a very accessible, Nashville sound while still remaining true to her roots of Shueyville, Iowa, population 772.
What Hailey Whitters hopefully is is the sound of radio country to come. There’s a realness to her lyrics and songwriting that is, at worst, uninspired but fun, and at best, genuinely moving. [i]Raised[i] has some hardcore smalltown, Midwest nostalgia at work and, as a guy who’s family is also scattered across smalltowns in Iowa, it works for me. You can see it just in the song titles - “Raised”, “Middle of America”, “Boys Back Home”, etc.. The former two are examples where this nostalgia works well, conjuring up summer days, revisiting events from childhood, and reflecting on the fact that, even if you leave them, small town sensibilities rarely leave you (for better or worse). “Boys Back Home” sees Whitters at her strongest musically and lyrically. It’s a beautiful ballad about the boys she grew up with and the complicated views of masculinity in these rural areas. The song starts with talking about how they “
ain’t more than stone’s throw from from a six-pack, pinch of a wintergreen skoal” and “
how they won’t be caught dead in no electric car”, but ends with her sharing that they “
they taught me to kiss and they taught me to cry.” Whitters is at her best in songs like “Boys Back Home”, “Pretty Boy”, “The Neon”, and “Beer Tastes Better”, where she isn’t just playing fully into the nostalgia, but is pointing out the flaws that come from these towns, but admitting that she (and we) still misses them anyway.
However, for every song that has Whitters wistfully reminiscing, there’s another song that takes part in the proud country music tradition of listing off things that they like or that’s all about how small town people are different from all y’all big city folk. In fact, there are enough of these songs that it makes me worry that I’m being too generous with my interpretations of the social commentary within the songs that I believe have a more balanced approach to this nostalgia. Ultimately, your enjoyment of
Raised really will come from whether or not you can relate to the experiences (or lists) that Whitters is singing about. Because, past that, the majority of the album is just good. And good is ok! The music is fun, the songs are well done, and I’m sure I’ll sing along to a few as I’m breathing in the smell of cow manure through rolled down windows. Not every album has to flip the expectations of a genre on its head. Sometimes what’s needed is a basic album that’s all about how “
beer tastes better in your hometown” and
Raised delivers on just that.
