daddykool

Joshua Hedley is �a singing professor of country & western,� he declares on his raucous and witty new album, Neon Blue. It might sound like a punchline, but it�s not. An ace fiddle player, a sharp guitarist, and a singer with a granite twang, he�s devoted his entire life to the study of this genre. Ask him about it and he�ll explain: �When all my friends went off to college, I went to Nashville. I was 19 years old playing honkytonks and getting an education.� His 2018 debut, Mr. Jukebox, showcased his deep knowledge of country�s history, in particular the beery ballads of the 1950s and �60s. His mentors were George Jones, Ray Price, and Glen Campbell, but his most remarkable accomplishment was putting his own spin on their style.

Neon Blue, on the other hand, examines a very different, often forsaken era: the early 1990s. �The last bastion of country music,� says the professor, �was the early 1990s, roughly 1989 and 1996. You could turn on the radio and immediately know you�re hearing a country song. You could still hear steel guitar and fiddle. But there was a hard fork around 1996 or �97, when country veered off into pop territory. Neon Blue asks, What if that fork had never happened? What if country kept on sounding like country?�

That era may have been dismissed by traditionalists at the time as slick or overproduced, but Hedley finds something exciting in that old hat-act sound, and Neon Blue plays up the excitement of bigger-than-life choruses, the relatable emotions of those sad-eyed ballads, and the inventiveness of the lively production. �The sound is modern,� he says, �but it�s still discernibly country.�