My Life In 35 Songs, Track 28: “Dibs” by Kelsea Ballerini

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If you got a Friday night free and a shotgun seat/I’m just saying I ain’t got nowhere to be

Sometimes, in life, it’s nice just to stop for a minute and take a breath.

That’s how I felt in the spring of 2015. For the preceding two years, everything in my life had been moving at the speed of sound. Graduating from college in April 2013 and moving in with my girlfriend; trying and failing to find a full-time job; striking up a career in freelance writing; proposing to my girlfriend; planning a wedding and juggling all the festivities that come with it – from showers to bachelor/bachelorette parties; actually getting married.

I thought things might ease into a slower pace after the wedding and the honeymoon, but they didn’t. A month after that, my wife was interviewing for a new job, and we ended the summer of 2014 by turning in the keys of our Illinois apartment and moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan to start another new chapter. And shortly after that, my grandpa passed away, throwing my whole extended family into a tailspin that lasted through the holidays.

The whirlwind of changes kept going into the New Year. On the first day of 2015, my wife and I adopted a tiny kitten, the first pet we’d ever shared together. She was (and is) a beautiful little troublemaker and she stole my heart immediately. And then, that winter, we got so sick of living in a cramped apartment that we found a realtor and started shopping the housing market. We closed on our first house in March of that year, and moved in the next month, right as Michigan was bursting into springtime bloom.

By the time we’d completed our second move in the space of eight months, I was ready for a downshift – a change of pace into a slower, more carefree lifestyle. What music would provide the soundtrack to this new mood? Why not the genre that spends more time extolling the virtues of life’s simple pleasures than any other? Why not country music?

If you’ve followed Chorus.fm closely over the years, you probably already know this, but for half a decade, from 2015 to 2020, I became completely immersed in the tides of country music and all its little offshoots, from Americana to folk, roots rock to southern rock, bluegrass to red dirt. I went so deep on this genre galaxy that, for a time, I had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of all the movers, shakers, and up-and-comers in those scenes. Pop-country superstars; left-of-the-dial critical darlings; indie country torchbearers; totally under-the-radar do-it-yourselfers. I knew the country bloggers, rubbed shoulders with all the major country music journalists, and struck up cordial social media friendships with some of the artists themselves. It was the closest I had ever come to being a subject matter “expert” on any one particular music scene, and that includes the emo/pop-punk sphere that AbsolutePunk.net always covered. For those 5-6 years, I listened to little other than country-leaning music.

I’d always had a soft spot for good country music, mind you. I’ve talked in this series already about how that ‘90s roots-rock sound, popularized by bands like The Wallflowers and Counting Crows, shaped my musical identity and made me a sucker for anything that had banjo, mandolin, steel guitar, dobro, or B3 organ on it. And, well, a lot of country music is made up of those sonic building blocks. When artists like The Civil Wars, Kacey Musgraves, Sturgill Simpson, and Jason Isbell began to emerge in the early 2010s, it was probably only a matter of time before country music – at least the version those types of artists were practicing – became a big part of my listening.

Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t those artists that ultimately sent me down the country music rabbit hole. Instead, I viewed them as the “exceptions” to the “most modern country is bad” assumption that had been drilled into me for years. In other words, they didn’t give me much urge to explore the genre further. Instead, it was a trio of more mainstream-leaning acts that all happened to drop their debut albums in consecutive months in the spring of 2015 that got me to think differently about country music, and that sent me on the musical journey that would define the next five years of my listening.

The first of those three albums was Traveller, the now 7x platinum debut from Chris Stapleton. Nowadays, Stapleton is a bona-fide superstar and a genuine household name, with a voice so massive and distinctive that he eventually made it to the Super Bowl to make people weep with an all-time great rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Back then, though, Stapleton was a relative unknown who’d cut his teeth writing songs in Nashville and singing backup vocals for bigger stars like Dierks Bentley. When Traveller arrived, it did so with a lot of buzz in Americana songwriting circles – I personally caught wind of him because he shared a producer, Dave Cobb, with Isbell and Sturgill – but without a ton of mainstream fanfare. That was just fine for me, as someone who was still mighty skeptical of mainstream country radio, and who greatly preferred the under-the-radar counterprogramming. Long before a November collab with Justin Timberlake on the CMA Awards turned Stapleton into a viral success story, I’d fallen in love with Traveller and its whiskey-soaked, summer-night-ready slowburns like “Fire Away” and “When the Stars Come Out.” I flagged it early as a perfect accompaniment to the more laid-back life I was looking to live that summer.

The fact that Cobb had been the producer on three of my favorite country records in as many years got me looking at his other recent credits, which led me to the second debut album that triggered my country music deep dive: Southernality, a crunchy, soulful southern rock record from Nashville’s A Thousand Horses. That band’s big debut single was called “Smoke,” and it lifted the guitar riff from Third Eye Blind’s “How’s It Going to Be” for a surprisingly wistful mid-tempo jam about a girl so hard to hold on to that it’s like she evaporates into thin air. I loved that song. It felt like a deeper, smarter, more emotionally vulnerable version of what country radio was churning out at the time, delivering the big hooks of Nashville’s Music Row without the two-brain-cell lyricism of many of the stars of the moment. It was one of several songs from Southernality that immediately landed on my summer playlist.

Googling A Thousand Horses to try to learn more about the band and where they came from, I stumbled upon a then brand-new Rolling Stone vertical called RS Country, which had just started to publish quarterly lists highlighting “10 New Country Artists You Need to Know.” Chris Stapleton and A Thousand Horses had both already been highlighted on the winter 2015 list – alongside future notables like Mickey Guyton and American Aquarium. The then-brand-new spring 2015 list, meanwhile, included a whole bunch of artists I’d end up falling in love with, from John Moreland to Cam to Striking Matches. The artist that really caught my eye from across those two lists, though, was the one Rolling Stone was pitching as the heir apparent to Taylor Swift: Kelsea Ballerini.

“If anyone can fill the void Taylor Swift left in country music, it’s this East Tennessee native, who rivals the ‘Style’ singer with diary-entry lyrics, striking guitar prowess, and a lot of stage swagger,” RS Country wrote. “But after moving to Nashville at age 15 to try to be the next Swift, she learned a lesson that has ended up being the secret to her success: ‘You can’t be who your inspirations are,’ the now 21-year-old relates. So Ballerini found her own voice — both as a singer and songwriter — and became one of the most unique new talents the genre has seen in a long time.”

In particular, Rolling Stone made sure to position Ballerini as a songwriter first, noting that, while she considered a bunch of demos from Nashville songwriting pros when putting together her debut album –that year’s The First Time – she ultimately decided to blaze a different path. “The whole reason I’m an artist is because I’m a songwriter,” Ballerini told the publication. “So I thought it would be more honest of a record if I had my voice and my hand in all of it.” Ballerini ended up with a writing credit on every single song on The First Time, a streak she has never broken on any of her subsequent records. Talk about a Taylor Swift move.

I loved Ballerini’s pop-heavy country songs right away, and I loved how many colors of growing up she captured over the course of The First Time. A classic coming-of-age album, Ballerini’s debut ping-pongs back and forth between extreme confidence and extreme vulnerability, locating a bright, immediately identifiable personality for the artist right at the nexus between those two points. Both sides caught my ear, whether Ballerini was challenging a boy to live up to her standards (lead single “Love Me Like You Mean It,” which went to number 1 on the country chart) or recounting the raw pain of living through her parents’ divorce (the stellar “Secondhand Smoke”).

But my favorite elements of The First Time were the songs that made me wistful for youthful summertime bliss. There was a track called “Underage” that recounted, in heart-racing fashion, all the daring, dumb, dangerous things teenagers do when they’re trying to push the limits of their own independence; it reminded me of my own wild days. There was another, called “Looking at Stars,” that conjured up the romance and possibility of a summer night under a wide-open sky. The one I kept listening to all summer was “Dibs,” an outrageously catchy pop-country confection about a boy and a girl getting stuck in one another’s orbits, and about the girl deciding to shoot her shot and do something about it.

By 2015, I felt like I hadn’t lived a proper summer in three years. Something about apartment living had not been conducive to the anything-can-happen thrill ride that summer had come to represent for me during my high school and college years. Even when I managed to get outside during those apartment years, I felt like I was stranded on a concrete island, far from anything green – let alone from a body of water. And let me tell you: as someone who grew up in a place where Lake Michigan beachfronts were rarely more than 10 minutes away, I did not enjoy being landlocked.

In the summer of 2015, I was still landlocked – Grand Rapids, Michigan is not as close to the lake as you might think – but having my own house made things feel different. I had a yard, for one thing, and a second-floor deck that overlooked a grassy common area in the middle of the neighborhood. In the apartments my wife and I had shared in Naperville and Grand Rapids, it had seemed impossible to make it feel like summer without driving somewhere. But suddenly, getting that classic summertime feel was as easy as stepping onto the back porch at dusk, cracking a beer, and watching the sun go down. That was also the summer I started running again – I’d been a runner in high school, but had mostly let it go during college – and I relished the opportunity to explore my new neighborhood streets on foot, with summer songs blaring through my headphones.

“Dibs” was my favorite of those summer songs, and it came to represent for me a sort of rebirth. I’d spent the previous two years feeling like the summertime utopia I’d fallen in love with at 17 was a thing of the past. 2015 taught me that, while I was a little older now, I was still quite young, with plenty of time to build a new kind of summertime utopia for myself.

That ended up being one of my favorite summers ever, threaded with so many wonderful memories: the aforementioned evenings on the deck or runs around the neighborhood; writing songs in the living room with the sun streaming in through the windows; exploring the world-class Grand Rapids beer scene; playing with my brand-new kitten; binging great TV shows at night; my wife and I celebrating our one-year wedding anniversary. Even mowing the lawn in the evenings suddenly became a huge pleasure, thanks to the summer playlist I cued up for every such occasion. In a lot of ways, it felt like I’d finally cracked the code on what my life should be.

Summers were like that for a while: pure and simple and carefree. My wife and I didn’t have a lot of money, and we never made a lot of friends in Grand Rapids, but we had each other, and that was enough. In my memory, those summers are also just saturated with country songs, and with the embarrassment of riches that I was discovering. Those RS Country spotlights proved to be the gift that kept giving, turning me on to a list of artists that includes (but is not limited to) Maren Morris, Ruston Kelly, Brothers Osborne, Steve Moakler, Lori McKenna, Sarah Jarosz, Mandolin Orange, Natalie Hemby, Tyler Childers, Ingrid Andress, Turnpike Troubadours, Charlie Worsham, Carly Pearce, Parker Millsap, Logan Brill, and Kalie Shorr, not to mention future genre megastars like Luke Combs and Lainey Wilson.

Eventually, though, things changed. Rolling Stone wound down the country vertical, and those regular lists of new artists to watch stopped coming. Music journalism in general crashed off a cliff, and less and less space was afforded to genres like country, let alone under-the-radar artists like the ones I’d mostly gravitated toward. Add in the increasing algorithm-driven nature of Spotify and Twitter (even pre-Musk), and a lot of the little quirks of the genre that drew me in from 2015-2019 seemed to disappear. In 2015, in the space of a few weeks, I stumbled upon country records that sounded like they were influenced by ‘90s radio rock (William Clark Green’s Ringling Road), Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (Ryan Culwell’s Flatlands), and mariachi music (Sam Outlaw’s Angeleno). Maybe those kinds of unexpected swings are still happening and I just don’t know about them. I’ll just say that the discovery channels aren’t what they once were.

The other elephant in the room, regarding country music in this era, is politics. My entrée into the genre happened to dovetail almost exactly with Donald Trump’s 2015 announcement that he would be running for president, and over the course of the next few years, I watched the rise of MAGA politics through the lens of country music discourse. A lot of the country music I was finding myself most drawn to was radical in some way; I liked the genre hybrids that added a little pop to the mix, or rock ‘n’ roll, or R&B, or maybe even some dance or electronic textures. These hybrids were already disliked, on principal, by a lot of the country bloggers of the time, who preferred more traditional-leaning country music. Fair play, I thought at first; we’ve all got aesthetic preferences.

As Trump rose, though, I noticed the increasing venom with which some of these writers – to say nothing of their comment section regulars or social media followers – talked about anyone who they viewed to be “interlopers” in their woods. It wasn’t hard to miss the fact that the majority of the artists drawing their ire were women or people of color, or that the criticism gradually drifted away from the songs and their embrace of poppier sounds toward the way the artists looked, or dressed, or marketed themselves, or behaved. One popular country music blog, for instance, ran this repugnant critique as part of a review of a Maren Morris album:

“Perhaps in pop and hip-hop, people want to see their favorite stars flaunting their money, their body, and their fame. But in country, Maren posting pictures of herself in sports bras on private jets, in sports bras at a big sporting event, in a sports bras at some landmark, or in a bikini on the beach comes across as down-looking, and pandering for acceptance.”

Of course, trad-country fans have always couched their sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia in a belief that anything innovative or forward-thinking in their genre is “not country.” I clocked that sentiment right away as I dove into the genre. The battle lines were clearly drawn between what was genuine, authentic, pure, and “real” and what was commercial, pandering, opportunistic, and “fake.” But those animosities deepened and became viler as Trumpism emboldened the worst in people. Take the outcry at Beyonce performing on the CMA Awards, for instance, or the way Kacey Musgraves got skewered by genre purists for putting a disco-flavored track called “High Horse” on her 2018 masterpiece Golden Hour. Things worsened in the 2020s, when a pair of dog-whistle country songs – Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” – went to number 1 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 thanks exclusively to reactionary right-wing astroturfing.

And let’s not forget the most prominent example of all: Morgan Wallen, a country star whose career was not hurt, but massively helped, when his neighbor caught him on Ring cam saying the N-word. Fast-forward to now and Wallen is arguably the second biggest American music star of the moment. The first, of course, is Taylor Swift, someone who left country music behind because it was too restrictive, too narrow-minded, too unwelcoming to women. That path of exodus has repeated again and again over the past 25 years, starting with The Chicks (formerly of Dixie) and continuing to include many of the top-tier female talents who have passed through the genre since, like Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris, Margo Price, and even Kelsea Ballerini herself.

All of that bullshit pulled me away from country music as the first Trump term wore on and as the COVID-19 pandemic descended. I still love a well-executed country song, but the genre’s baggage has broken the carefree spell I found myself enraptured in during the summer of 2015, when I turned to country songs for a light-as-a-feather summertime soundtrack. It’s hard to find that lightness nowadays – in anything, really, but especially in an increasingly problematic music genre. It’s too bad, because I still remember how it made me feel to explore all those new-to-me artists and albums a decade ago. It was the last time I felt the spark of youthful discovery that had characterized my first steps into music obsession, and sometimes, I wonder if I’ll feel anything quite like that ever again. I hope so.

While my love for country music has curdled in a lot of ways, though, there are some artists from that world who continue to captivate me, and Kelsea Ballerini is absolutely at the top of the list. Every album she’s made has been more interesting than the one before it. Her sophomore LP, 2017’s Unapologetically, told a chronological story from heartbreak to new love, and was a dead ringer for Speak Now-era Taylor Swift. Her third, 2020’s kelsea, was an exploratory grab bag of sounds, from twangy country tunes to all-out pop bangers, and showed a songwriter itching to push beyond the boundaries of her chosen musical community. Her fourth, 2022’s Subject to Change, was similarly kaleidoscopic, both musically and emotionally, but made those pieces fit together snugly, like a 2020s answer to Taylor Swift’s similarly ambitious Red. And on her last two projects, 2023’s Rolling up the Welcome Mat and last year’s Patterns, Ballerini has written about her divorce and its aftermath with a frankness and emotional vulnerability that has brought her a bevy of new fans and made her one of the most relatable stars in either pop or country music. Both are among the best records anyone has made this decade, and if I had to name my top artist of the 2020s so far, it would probably be her.

And yet, if you asked me to name my favorite Kelsea Ballerini song, I think I’d still come back around to “Dibs.” Part of it is the hooks, which are so infectious and so effortless that they always conjure up that summertime feel for me, even in the dead of winter. Part of it is the lyrics, which are cute and witty and evocative of a time in your life when anything seems possible, so long as you’ve got a Friday night free and the right person riding shotgun. But the biggest part is the memories this song evokes, of that perfect carefree summer and how it helped me fall back in love with summertime, with new music, and with life itself. You can take country music away from me, but you can’t ever take that.

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer
• Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World
• Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay
• Track 7: “Walk On” by U2
• Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder
• Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City” by Butch Walker
• Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel
• Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical
• Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows
• Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit
• Track 14: “Crashin’” by Jack’s Mannequin
• Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen
• Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls
• Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers
• Track 18: “Growing Up” by The Maine
• Track 19: “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional
• Track 20: “The Sound of You and Me” by Yellowcard
• Track 21: “Holocene” by Bon Iver
• Track 22: “Handwritten” by The Gaslight Anthem
• Track 23: “Can’t Smile Without You” by Barry Manilow
• Track 24: “The House That Heaven Built” by Japandroids
• Track 25: “Miles Apart” by The Dangerous Summer
• Track 26: “Song for the Road” by David Ford
• Track 27: “Speed Trap Town” by Jason Isbell

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