“All Your’n”
Tyler Childers
Written by Tyler Childers
2019
As the first single from his Country Squire album, “All Your’n” made it clear that Tyler Childers wasn’t going to be bound by anyone’s expectations. He’d cultivated a sizable following in the wake of fellow Kentuckians Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson with his straight-from-the-holler brand of country, and then he went and busted out an arrangement that sounded like it was pulled from the Stax vaults.
The southern gospel piano licks and the heavy Hammond organ are a far cry from Childers’ earlier records, but he and Simpson, who produced the album, understand that country, at its best, is also a form of soul music. The production immediately pissed off genre purists who were so incensed by the instrumentation– not to put too fine a point on it, but the throwback production sounds like what would’ve charted on the “Race Records” charts– that they missed the single’s deep connection to country conventions.
Childers’ inimitable singing style finds him wailing and hollering about how, “I’ll love you ‘til my lungs give out,” with such gusto that it sounds like he’s actually trying to get his lungs to do just that. And there’s simply no songwriter to emerge in this era who’s better at deploying the idiosyncratic syntax of the “hollers” of Appalachia. He might sing about “fried morels and fine hotels” here, and he might throw in some show-offy internal rhyme (“Goddess in my Days Inn pen / The muse, I ain’t refusin’”), but Childers is never more than a line or two away from code-switching back to the vernacular of his birthright.
Not that “authenticity” matters, but it’s his masterful use of language that proves how Tyler Childers is always true to himself, no matter how far he is outside of Louisa, Kentucky, and no matter if he’s courted an audience that counts the likes of Olivia Rodrigo among his devoted fans. There’s rarely been a more perfect hook in a country love song than his simple, “I’m all your’n, and you’re all mine.”
Additional Listening:
Three more essential singles by Childers
- “A Long Violent History,” which sets an empathetic take on the Black Lives Matter movement to a traditional folk song structure
- “Angel Band,” a purposeful– and misunderstood– tribute to the life and music of “Doctor” Ralph Stanley.
- “In Your Love,” Childers’ second-best love song.
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Grady Smith’s enthusiasm for Childers, and his pure boosterism of what Childers offered, drove me to check him out as much as any other influence.
The scales kept falling from my ears as I began feeling just as excited by these new country music artists the same way I did with the artists of the late ’80’s and ’90’s. That same potential for a seemingly endless and wild discovery of amazing talents, perspectives, and voices was just beyond every new album and single review.
It became overwhelming. The awareness of so much active artistry was simultaneously thrilling and despair inducing. After reading each issue of “No Depression” in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I used to similarly wonder how I could ever really properly listen to all of this wonderful music.
To help me avoid sounding like I am complaining about too much great music , Aaron Tippin is there to remind me that, “That sounds like a real nice problem to have.”
This Childers song is funky, fun, and sweet.