Tyler Childers is back with news of a new album, Rustin’ In The Rain, set for release on September 8th. Along with the album announcement, the venerable Kentucky singer-songwriter shared the lead single, “In Your Love”, accompanied by a grippingly bold music video.
The video for “In Your Love” depicts an Appalachian LGBT love story between two miners. In the face of discrimination, the protagonists escape from toiling under the mining company and go to work for themselves and for each other. Even after standing up to bigotry, they still experience pain and loss—but a love persists that transcends all boundaries that seek to divide humanity.
Musically, Childers is back to writing good old-fashioned love songs, with “In Your Love” comparable to his gold standard “Lady May”. Cascading vocal melodies loft atop simple piano and mandolin, as Childers croons, “We were never made to run forever / We were just made to go long enough / To find what we were chasing after / I believe I found it here in your love.”
Tyler Childers –”In Your Love” [Official Video]
It’s worth noting that this beautifully progressive and undeniably moving music video comes weeks after Jason Alden‘s “Try That In A Small Town”. The dichotomy between one story highlighting marginalized voices and another that was edited due to undertones of racial violence highlights the divide in country music today.
Childers discussed “In Your Love”, the music video, Rustin’ In The Rain, and much more in a wide-ranging NPR interview published Thursday morning. Chatting alongside the video’s writer, Tyler’s friend and Kentucky poet laureate Silas House, Childers touched on how country music has led astray.
“Merle Haggard grew up dirt poor, working his tail off,” Childers said. “And you can grow up like that, and work your way out of it and understand the weight of where you’re at now. And you’re never going to forget how hungry people are. I think a lot of times now, if you look at the songwriters in country, where do they live? Nashville is an extremely necessary town; everybody’s got to meet somewhere, and this is a heck of a meeting place. But there’s this hard disconnect. The writers didn’t necessarily grow up in a rural setting, but the nostalgia for that way of life resonates with them in some way. So they’re working within these stereotypes of this nostalgia that they might not even have any reference point to understand.
“My mom loved me to death, and my dad worked his tail off. I didn’t want for nothing,” he continued. “But it came at a price. Time away from family — they worked very hard to take care of us. They instilled in me to work and understand the weight of that. I grew up in that community. And then I lived in that community.”
Related: Tyler Childers Announces New Year’s Eve Run In Kentucky
Rustin’ In The Rain comes in the wake of a pair of overtly themed albums from Childers. In 2020’s Long Violent History, he used traditional bluegrass music to make a statement on racial inequality, while on last year’s Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven? Tyler revisited his love of gospel music as a way of addressing religious intolerance. Asked whether Rustin’ In The Rain carried similarly heavy subject matter, Childers said that the new album was inspired by the love songs of Elvis Presley and by mules.
“It [also] has all these allusions to horse-drawn equipment and pieces of harnessing,” Childer said. “I was spending a lot of COVID time working these two mules. My grandpa grew up as a tenant farmer in Lawrence County, and always kept a horse up until he passed. And his favorite brother Lucian, lived down the road and he worked mules up until the ’90s. And so it was a part of my history. And then the world shut down. I was like, no better time than now. And that was a lot of fun, so that was kind of where my head was at. The album has a lot of love songs, but if there’s a thread, it’s the mules.”
Though Childers is historically a reluctant interview subject, he was rather candid in the NPR feature. The interview culminates with a very straightforward question about whether or not Childers fears alienating the large demographic of “good old boys” in his audience with his progressive ideology.
I don’t know. The first time that I’ve ever really put myself out there was Long Violent History. I was digging out my foxhole and really hunkered down and scared to death. And I was pleasantly surprised with how well that was received. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t get any awful messages sent to me, some things that were just pure ugly. I got cussed out one time when I went to get some shotgun shells. Getting a tongue lashing in a gun store is pretty unnerving. I had to process things like that. But the record did have a lot of positive impact.
I did get a lot of messages where people were like, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to have this really tough conversation with a family member that I really care a lot about. For all the ugliness that it’s going to bring out that just can’t be helped, this video is going to make real conversations possible. This is a story of two people sharing their love and living a life together and experiencing loss. That’s pretty powerful. Once you take away the flash card phrases and like the knee jerk reactions, how does that make you feel? How are you going to feel when you get to those points in your life? And what are you going to need when you’re going through loss? Are you going to need people to be hateful with you, when your partner in this world dies and you’re alone?
When I was younger, sometimes I didn’t think that the way some people were telling me things were was necessarily how they were. Then somebody I looked up to helped steer me in a way that made it clear that things could be different. Maybe this video will do that for some people.
Tyler Childers’ Rustin’ In The Rain is available here for pre-order.
The post Tyler Childers Boldly Announces New Album ‘Rustin’ In The Rain’ With Powerful “In Your Love” Video [Watch] appeared first on L4LM.
