Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium hosted its first broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry radio show in 1943. It’s since been dubbed the “Mother Church of Country Music”—a sanctimonious epithet, but one justified by the number of artists, young and old, who decided to become musicians after witnessing shows there. Tucker Beathard, a 22-year-old from nearby Franklin, Tennessee, is one of those artists. Only it wasn’t Loretta Lynn or Alan Jackson who showed him the light. It wasn’t even Brad Paisley. It was Paramore, on his 14th birthday.
“That show honestly changed my life,” says Beathard, now one of country music’s hottest young acts. “I got butterflies watching it, thinking about how that’s what I want to do someday. That whole night I stayed up thinking about it. I realized that that’s a job they’re doing up there—it kind of clicked for me.”
This emphasis on work is a very country approach to Paramore. Now Beathard is crashing the industry with a very Paramore approach to country, creating a sound that threads together two seemingly disparate genres: country and pop-punk. “Rock On,” his debut single, explodes with big, distorted guitars. In a genre where male singers define themselves through their headgear, Beathard wears a flat-brimmed ball cap tilted slightly to the side—much to the frustration of those tasked with managing his image.
But for other people in Nashville, Tucker’s odd fusion—as well that of similar ex pop-punks like Ryan Follesé and Cassadee Pope—are cause for excitement. “Every time I watch Tuck play I go, ‘Man, if this doesn’t work, we’re missing an opportunity to have another version of country music,’” says Jonathan Singleton, one of Beathard’s regular cowriters. “This is what I moved to Nashville for. If I grew up listening to Blind Melon and Counting Crows and then punk stuff, and I get too old to listen to that anymore, I may want to turn over to country radio. But right now there’s nothing for me to listen to.”
Country’s sonic code has always been malleable. That was true when Jimmie Rodgers recorded “Blue Yodel #9” with Louis Armstrong in 1930, and it remains true today. The latest album by Keith Urban includes not just rock guitar solos but also flashes of R&B and synth-pop, plus a collaboration with Nile Rodgers and Pitbull. Pop-punk, meanwhile, had infiltrated country even before Beathard did. Pope, formerly of the band Hey Monday, switched genres after auditioning for “The Voice” in 2012, and she quickly scored a No. 1 album, Frame by Frame. Follesé, formerly of Hot Chelle Rae, is now attempting a similar move.
And behind these faces are an untold number of songwriters, producers, and session musicians who have at one point, if not played in pop-punk bands, sang along to the lyrics of New Found Glory’s “Hit or Miss.” How else can you explain, say, the fact that Kenny Chesney’s astounding 2014 chart-topper “Til It’s Gone” is filled with production tricks and guitar phrases that seem to be lifted, perhaps unconsciously, from Saves the Day’s Through Being Cool?
“Til It’s Gone” wouldn’t have reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay if it weren’t reaching an audience like the one Singleton describes. According to a Nielsen/Scarborough listener data, over a third of the people who listen to country radio also listen to Top 40. Meanwhile, on average, over the last decade, those listeners have steadily gotten younger—closer in age and taste to folks like Tucker.
Beathard was born in 1994. His father, Casey Beathard, is one of the more successful songwriters of the last 20 years, penning Chesney hits like “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem” and “The Boys of Fall.” Casey’s 2011 song “Homeboy,” written with Eric Church, is a textbook example of country song form, concluding the story of a wayward kid with a pun on the title: “Homeboy” becomes “Won’t you come on home, boy.”
The boy, in question, is Tucker. The younger Beathard drummed in his first rock group at age 10 and switched to guitar when he was 14. His biggest influence? Blink-182. “That’s always been my favorite band,” he says. “I’m kind of introverted and had a lot going on internally, and I wanted to put thoughts and feelings to melodies. When I found Blink-182, there was a connection that made you feel like you’re on their team, that they’re your voice.”
Though Beathard was offered a baseball scholarship to play shortstop at Middle Tennessee State University, he skipped college to focus on music—specifically, country with a slight twist. Rather than study the polished songs on the radio, the aspiring singer had been picking up tricks from his dad’s rough demos, where he found a sound closer to his own.
“Growing up around my dad, that’s what I thought all country music was,” he says. “I loved country music for the storytelling, but I guess my influences didn’t come from country so much as country song structure and lyrics.”
“Rock On” proves it. The song, written with the help of his father, follows a similar structure as “Homeboy”: In the chorus’ final line, the title is flipped, from “Baby, rock on” (like music) to “I should have put a rock on” (like marriage).
Because the lyrics of the song were so country, Beathard and his team had more room to experiment with the music. According to Singleton, they walk this same tightrope in nearly all his work. “When we started, Tucker had a lot of rock songs that we were trying to figure out how they were country songs,” says the writer. “Then we changed our thinking: He’s from Nashville and his dad’s a country songwriter, so whatever he does, maybe that is the new country. We quit trying to put acoustic guitars and banjos on there.”
When acoustic guitars do appear, they’re often drawn from unlikely sources. “We do sometimes go, ‘That Weezer song “In the Garage” has the acoustic guitar that poked over the big distorted guitars. Maybe we can do that trick,’ Singleton says. “The examples we were using were Nirvana songs and Weezer songs and Kings of Leon songs—instead of what we usually do, which is, ‘Oh, that old Tim McGraw song that does this thing, let’s do that.’”
A decade ago, this sort of sound might have been smoothed out by session musicians. But because of recent advances in technology, Singleton—like most Nashville songwriters—now has access to his own studio where he and Beathard have been able to cut record directly.
“Before we used to assume that someone would take our songs and make them more country,” says Singleton. “Tuck has been really adamant about keeping his songs from being too slick. There’s the Keith Urban version where everything is in the perfect place, and that’s the country equation. But Tuck actually wants it to be human, a little messy.”
Ryan Follesé describes a similar process of experimentation. The singer, who recently toured with Florida Georgia Line, entered the music industry as the frontman of Hot Chelle Rae, a threesome that brought pop-punk closer to dance music and back to TigerBeat, thus setting the stage for both DNCE and 5 Seconds of Summer. Outdoing even Beathard, he is the son of not one but two country songwriters: Keith and Adrienne Follesé, who have written hits like Faith Hill’s “The Way You Love Me” and Tim McGraw’s “Something Like That.”
His self-titled country EP, released last year, approaches the genre with snappy production suitable for Top 40 radio. On every song, he and his cowriters—his parents, his brother Jamie, and the pop-trained songwriter Cameron Montgomery—tried to calculate a sort of genre-arithmetic.
“The way the music sounds these days, you have to check yourself and make those decisions as you’re going,” he explains. “That sounds too pop or that sounds too rock—or maybe this sounds too rock and it’s cool for the song.”
Like Follesé, Cassadee Pope first found success fronting a band: Hey Monday. The group accomplished a sort of pop-punk triple crown: They’re from Florida, they played Warped Tour, and they were signed to Pete Wentz’s Decaydance Records (now DCD2).
Pope’s country transformation began in 2012, when she appeared on “The Voice” and picked Blake Shelton as her mentor. She won the competition largely on the strength of her country covers, yet when she arrived in Nashville the following year, she was encouraged to be, if anything, less country. “My first album has some songs that could be Hey Monday,” Pope says. “There’s some angst in there, too—certain melodies that are a little bit more obscure and less honky-tonk.”
For Pope, the border between these genres is both indistinct and constantly shifting. “You can turn any country song into rock and you can turn any rock song into country, if you really try,” she continues. “I think if you go back a few years and listen to rock and then listen to country now, they’re so similar. If you take Jason Aldean’s voice out and put Billie Joe’s in, it’s gonna sound like Green Day.”
What, then, is country music? The genre began to crystallize in the 1920s, though even then it was often defined in the negative, by what it wasn’t. Columbia issued all its early “hillbilly” records in its 1500-D series, but this was a racial grouping more than musicological one: Recordings by black artists, regardless of sound, were segregated into 1400-D. When the term “country music” became standard in the 1950s, it signified a less a single sound than a catch-all to the could unify—and market—everything from cowboy ballads of Eddie Arnold to Western Swing jazz of Bob Wills and the pop crossover of Red Foley.
Today, the production of country music is remarkably centralized—particularly when compared to genres like punk, which is completely diffused. The shifting bounds of country music are maintained primarily by country labels and radio stations, which work in synchronicity and gauge the input of country fans, an amorphous group, by monitoring listening habits. This creates a certain circularity: “Country” is what country labels release and country radio plays and country fans buy.
That’s why questions about what country music is—as in, what are the characteristics that make music ‘country’?—has no set answer. Yet what critics often miss, even when they reach this conclusion, is that answering the question doesn’t dissolve it. It’s an illusion to think that there’s something essential at the bottom of country music, but it’s this illusion that holds the genre together, gives it coherence.
For Beathard, as for many pop-country artists, country means a revised form of authenticity—not fidelity to the sound of country music’s past, but fidelity to the persona created by artist. “Country is about expressing a song emotionally through a lyric and telling it like it is, and actually standing for something,” he says. But this answer is also unsatisfying. I ask him what, then, is punk about. His response is similar: “I think it’s the same idea, honestly. Punk rock is punk rock because it’s standing for something. And it’s a movement.”
Lately, Beathard’s toughest stands have been in arguments with his label, Big Machine Records, home of Taylor Swift and Florida Georgia Line. Big Machine has proven willing to try new things, but the struggle comes when it’s time to decide, for instance, what song to release as Beathard’s next single—the likely hit, or the one that best represents the singer’s punk visions.
“It’s a constant battle,” he says. “If I did it my way, I’d release three albums tomorrow, because I have a whole bunch of music. When you don’t have the ability to speak through your music because they’re holding it back or whatever, it’s really frustrating. There are certain songs now that I don’t even show ’em, because I know it’s not even worth trying to fight over.”
But Beathard is optimistic. Both he and the people around him remain confident that country pop-punk is possible. “He’s trying to do something different, and luckily everybody understands that,” says Singleton. “A lot of other artists are selling singles. Tuck’s selling a brand and a live show and a feeling that you can be different in a genre that has historically not been different.”
Either way, Beathard is sticking with his sound. “Punk and being cool and being badass, in my opinion, is nothing more than sticking to what you believe in, no matter if anybody is doing that or not,” he says. He cites Green Day. “Billie Joe talked about how when they came out with their song, the ‘fork in the road’ one, whatever the title of that song is”—the song is “Good Riddance”—they were getting some heat for it. But then they were like, that just means it’s the most punk rock thing we could have done.”