Sarah Shook & The Disarmers bridge the gap between country and punk
A lot has been written recently about the new batch of women burning down the stuffy boardrooms of Nashville country music. They drink, they smoke, they cuss, they tell the boys to fuck off. These same things are being written now about outsider-country band Sarah Shook & The Disarmers, whose new album, Sidelong (Bloodshot), is out now.
Nashville’s hard-living women are finding a home in a kind of throwback country music that references both the genre’s outlaw roots and, somehow, its outsider status. Music journalists have been having a harder time trying to pin down what’s driving this new movement, but Shook doesn’t hesitate to spell it out. When asked about what ties she thinks bind old-school country with a punk spirit, her answer is one word: poverty.
“I think growing up poor cultivates the most authentic and relevant punk and country artists,” says Shook. “There’s a resilience and a kind of glowering pride that comes from growing up without all the opportunities your friends and peers have. You have to rely on yourself for things you can’t get anywhere else, physically, psychologically and emotionally. It makes for some raw, wide-open art.”
Raw may be the perfect way to describe her new album. This is the portrait of the artist crawling herself back from the brink. It’s a brutally honest, terrified and heartbreaking album. There’s a kind of titillation factor that comes into play with hard-partying female artists, a kind of thrill for them playing the bad girl. But that cheap thrill covers up the hard costs of the music and the life, costs that these women have to bear. The road is a harsh companion to any musician, and you can hear this kind of weariness and fear in Shook’s words to “Heal”: “There’s a hole in my heart, ain’t nothin’ here can fill/But I just keeping thinkin’/Surely, the whiskey will.’”
—Devon Ledger
