Highway

Country radio in the US has a split personality: the polished Nashville machine on one side, and everything else on the other. Highway leans toward everything else. Think Tyler Childers mumbling through a coal-town ballad, Sturgill Simpson's psychedelic detours, Jason Isbell writing better sentences than most novelists. Old stuff earns its place too. Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard still turn up, which matters, because a country station that forgets its own history is just pop with a fiddle on top. There's grit here. Fiddle, pedal steel, a Telecaster that actually twangs. Some blocks drift towa…