Ashley McBryde expresses frustrations over the state of mainstream country radio with her new song. “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs” arrives as a smokey, gentle ballad that funnels her lingering pain into a poignant, timely tale. “There’s a few of us left trying to circle the wagons, but we’re barеly holding our ground,” she laments, “’cause we ain’t got pistols or shiny tin badges / Wе ain’t the law in this town.”
Co-written with Chris Harris and Patrick Savage, “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs” shakes the ground on which McBryde treads. “I’d love to ride into the sunset, but there’s no wild out west, no prairie to roam,” she sings in the chorus, “or a high enough lonesome to get far enough gone.” As the song fades in the last moments, McBryde samples Eddy Arnold’s lonesome “Cattle Call,” a bonafide cowboy tune.
In a conversation with Kelleigh Bannen on her Today’s Country Radio show, McBryde further detailed her mindset heading into the songwriting session. “If you think about our job now, I think about the songs that made us want to make music, who made us the songwriters we are,” she shared. “The Kristofferson songs we heard. The Townes Van Zandt that we heard. The Van Morrison that we heard. The Janis Joplin that we heard.
“We are all just the sum of every song that we’ve ever heard and every movie that we’ve ever seen. I’m so happy for the things that created me,” she continued. “And then when I look at who’s coming up and who’s coming to town, and I listen to the songs that are responsible for shaping them… I’m not saying they are bad songs; I’m saying they are farther from their own touchstone.”
Listen to “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs” below.
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