Like the famed British Invaders of a generation earlier, songwriter/musician Nick Lowe has mined the various strains of American popular music, purposefully ignoring the lines demarking separate genres. Prevalent among his stylistic influences has been country music.
Lowe Country presents 13 artists – most of them up-and-coming and/or left-of-centre-interpreting songs from Lowe’s 4½ decade career. They range in age from 23 to 48 and reside in such disparate locales as Glasgow, Toronto, Austin, Portland, Raleigh and Nashville. They are the leading lights of a new generation of artists who use classic country music as a springboard for their unique musical explorations. And in doing so, many of them – including Hayes Carll, Caitlin Rose, Amanda Shires, Robert Ellis – have received rave reviews and won appearances on national television and radio.

As a group, they have taken to hear Lowe’s equal opportunity source mining. And in these new, never before released tunes, they vividly display Lowe’s trademarks: catchy melodies; clever word play and wit; a sense of fun and musical adventure; and the appropriate delivery of a lyric, whether it be outlandish or heartbreaking.

The album’s musical world is rich and varied, swooping from the lush vintage sounds of Caitlin Rose and cosmopolitan bluegrass of Chatham Country Line to the haunting sparseness of Amanda Shires and rollicking jamboree of Robert Ellis; from the laconic comedy of Hayes Carll and dulcet, west-coast sounds of the Parson Red Heads to the twisted stomp of Jeff The Brotherhood and beyond.