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" On Wednesday night, the country-music outlet CMT aired the CMT Awards, its annual celebration of Nashville&amp;#039;s most sparkling stars. American Idol-turned-Nashville-superstar Carrie Underwood performed her stormy tale of spousal abuse avenged &amp;quot;Church Bells&amp;quot; while backed by a choir; grizzled rocker Chris Stapleton blazed through &amp;quot;Parachute.&amp;quot;  And then there was Pitbull, who brought REO Speedwagon&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Take It on the Run&amp;quot; into the 21st century with &amp;quot;Messin&amp;#039; Around.&amp;quot; Assisted by British import Leona Lewis and The Voice winner Cassadee Pope, Pit was among a handful of artists who crossed over to the CMT stage from other realms\u2014fiery pop quintet Fifth Harmony added a bit of their saucy &amp;quot;Work From Home&amp;quot; to the upstart Cam&amp;#039;s gently rolling &amp;quot;Mayday,&amp;quot; while funk savant Pharrell Williams guested on the boisterous vocal quartet Little Big Town&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;One Dance.&amp;quot;         Awards shows serving as the stage for unexpected mashups isn&amp;#039;t all that new\u2014the Grammys and MTV&amp;#039;s Video Music Awards have been bringing together unlikely pairings for years, and the CMT Awards&amp;#039; pairings weren&amp;#039;t all out-there. (The Voice judge Blake Shelton teamed up with the Oak Ridge Boys for a pairing of his squickish new track &amp;quot;Doin&amp;#039; It to Country Songs&amp;quot; and their 35-year-old smash &amp;quot;Elvira.&amp;quot;) But these particular hybrids speak to some shifts in country music that have been taking place for a while. Take Little Big Town, whose seventh album, Wanderlust, comes out today. The group had one of country music&amp;#039;s biggest hits in 2015 with &amp;quot;Girl Crush,&amp;quot; a stark ballad that digs down into the ugliest side of relationship envy. Instead of building on that, or on the booze-soaked party atmosphere of their 2014 hit &amp;quot;Day Drinking,&amp;quot; they decided on a whim to work with Williams. Tracks like the bouncing &amp;quot;Work&amp;quot; and the handclap-propelled &amp;quot;One Dance&amp;quot; still have a Nashville feel to them thanks to the group&amp;#039;s Opry-ready harmonies, but they also groove in a way that brings to mind Williams&amp;#039;s other productions, like his 2014 megahit &amp;quot;Happy&amp;quot; and Usher&amp;#039;s pulsing 2012 track &amp;quot;Twisted.&amp;quot;   &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not a country record,&amp;quot; Karen Fairchild told Billboard when the project was announced last month. &amp;quot;And it&amp;#039;s not like anything we&amp;#039;ve ever done. It&amp;#039;s fun to be spontaneous and put it out there to the fans, because we want to, and not to overthink it, but just because it has brought us a lot of joy, and we think it will for them as well. So why not? We&amp;#039;re going with our gut and putting it out there. It&amp;#039;s just music, you know?&amp;quot; Little Big Town&amp;#039;s reaching beyond Nashville for inspiration is just one of the ways that country has evolved in the past year or so. The beer-and-truck-loving subgenre of &amp;quot;bro-country,&amp;quot; which critic Jody Rosen defined as &amp;quot;music by and of the tatted, gym-toned, party-hearty young American white dude&amp;quot; all the way back in 2013, seemed to rule country music for a while. (Blake the long-term results of rock radio abandoning upbeat, melodic rock in favor of post-grunge&amp;#039;s malaise, and country radio at least partially filling the dial&amp;#039;s void of party-centric lyrics and big guitars.) But lately the material coming from even Music City&amp;#039;s biggest artists has shifted.         &amp;quot;The bro-country narrative, if you look at the airplay chart, is still strong, especially since it&amp;#039;s summertime. But it&amp;#039;s a little more nuanced than that,&amp;quot; says Jewly Hight, a critic and reporter who has written for NPR and Slate. Hight notes that country radio, a dominant force across the country, is still fairly conservative as far as getting behind artists; a glance at Mediabase&amp;#039;s country radio airplay chart shows a lot of artists who could potentially sport a &amp;quot;Bro&amp;quot;-emblazoned baseball cap, including the charmer Luke Bryan and the honey-voiced Thomas Rhett. But looks can be deceiving; quite a few of those artists have been wiggling against expectations on their recent albums.  &amp;quot;A lot of the male acts are in their mid-to-late 30s or early 40s,&amp;quot; notes Hight. &amp;quot;Luke Bryan had been doing these Spring Break EPs year after year, and he finally got through the Spring Break EPs and did an album that, for him, was mature. Cole Swindell, had been the epitome of bro country, but his most recent single [&amp;#039;You Should Be Here&amp;#039;], which was very successful, was a ballad about his dad, who died and who wasn&amp;#039;t around to see what&amp;#039;s been going on in his career. I&amp;#039;ve seen a narrative of big male acts making a point to say, &amp;#039;Hey, I&amp;#039;ve got more to offer. I&amp;#039;m doing this, too.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;        This summer&amp;#039;s slate of shows at amphitheaters and stadiums is heavy on the male headliners; the concert-promotion behemoth Live Nation&amp;#039;s 2016 Country Megaticket, where fans can buy tickets to country shows in bulk, only offers tickets to one female headliner, the firecracking Texan Miranda Lambert. But the opening acts break up the bro party a bit; Cam is opening for Nashville lifer Dierks Bentley, who Hight notes &amp;quot;went out of his way to involve the female voice more&amp;quot; on his recent album Black, while the former Idol judge Keith Urban is touring with Maren Morris, whose just-released album Hero is unapologetic in both its attitude and the way it brings reggae and power-pop influences into its mix.   These younger female singers are also bringing country&amp;#039;s bravado quotient down a notch. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a recalibrated tone of voice there,&amp;quot; says Hight. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re not belters\u2014there&amp;#039;s a relaxing of their tone of voice as singers and as songwriters. They&amp;#039;re deliberately casual and nonchalant.&amp;quot; Hight cites pre-pop-crossover Taylor Swift, who had these elements in songs like &amp;quot;Tim McGraw&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;You Belong With Me,&amp;quot; as an earlier example of this approach, and notes that a lot of country songs are now being written the way that their pop counterparts are\u2014namely, tracks growing out of a beat, instead of being written and demoed by a songwriter before being brought to a band. Country&amp;#039;s sound has shifted in tandem with that process, particularly as it&amp;#039;s become more second nature in the studio.  &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;ve gotten good at using beats and really complex production in a naturalistic way, whereas at the beginning of Florida Georgia Line&amp;#039;s career, or on Thomas Rhett&amp;#039;s first album, they used rap beats, and it was pretty obvious,&amp;quot; says writer Nick Murray, who notes that &amp;quot;list poetry&amp;quot; has also taken hold among some country lyricists. &amp;quot;The drums on [Keith Urban&amp;#039;s single] &amp;#039;John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16,&amp;#039; which is the ultimate example of list poetry as songwriting\u2014when I was watching the live show, I couldn&amp;#039;t figure out how they were doing it, but it seemed like there was a live drummer and a loop going on at the same time.&amp;quot;         Even with all these shifts, artists who are operating within country&amp;#039;s old\u2014or, really, old-ish\u2014model are still doing well. Underwood made her connection to the yarn-spinning troubadours of yore extremely explicit by naming her most recent album Storyteller; Brandy Clark, who has written for the likes of Kacey Musgraves and Jennifer Nettles, is still working on Big Girl In A Small Town, which comes out Friday; and Stapleton&amp;#039;s Traveller became a critical and commercial smash for the way it blended arena-rock bravado with crystalline portraiture.  With its expanding fan base and new thinking about how its songs are constructed, country music&amp;#039;s future is as wide open as one of the highways that exists in its mythology. Pitbull appears on the new album by Urban; the brisk &amp;quot;Sun Don&amp;#039;t Let Me Down&amp;quot; places the Miami MC&amp;#039;s boastful raps alongside the Australian megastar&amp;#039;s sweet-as-pie vocals and riffing by disco pioneer Nile Rodgers. With the changes happening in country music lately, it wouldn&amp;#039;t be all that surprising for Mr. Worldwide to take up at least temporary residence in Nashville. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a45678/best-country-music-2016/>