“Love is Worry”
Michael Scott
Written by Michael Scott
Kevin John Coyne: “Some people say that less is more. But I think more is more.” – Dolly Parton
I won’t even pretend that I can be impartial here. I think that my son is an amazing talent and “Love is Worry” is my favorite thing he’s written and recorded so far. But I’ll leave it to Jonathan below to capture why that is, without the added layer of fatherly pride getting in the way of a candid assessment of the record.
But I must share how “Love is Worry” captures everything I love about my son’s approach to creating music, which is perfectly in line with everything that I’m loving about so many contemporary country artists right now that are hovering right outside the mainstream.
Like Parton says above, they realize that more is indeed more. Genre conventions are treated like delicious confections, like country music is a box of goodies to sort through, not steel bars to be constrained by.
So why not have a little Pam Tillis and Kane Brown up in there with some Kate Bush and Frank Ocean? All of these colors that we were told don’t go together can paint a beautiful picture, if the artist is as talented and visionary as Michael Scott.
Jonathan Keefe: It’s just such a natural part of parenthood to take pride in your child’s art that the notion of a macaroni-noodle picture hanging on a refrigerator door is a cliché. The quality of any given child’s artwork is incidental, really, to that sense of parental pride and the impulse to praise and encourage as a way to build a child’s confidence and to deepen that parent-child bond.
So what’s a proud papa to do when his kid comes up with a truly spectacular work? In the case of “Love Is Worry,” the answer is, “Include it in a Singles Review Round-Up.”
In all honesty, I’d already run up the play counts on “Love is Worry” on my 2025 singles playlist before Kevin broached the topic of covering it here. Because it’s a great song. I liked “CU Kid” Michael Scott’s previous track that Kevin had showcased here on the blog, but “Love Is Worry” is one of the best singles of the year to date.
The minimal production positions this as a soulful, bluesy brand of Americana for most of its run-time, with a rapped bridge that in no way sounds out of place. That keeps the focus on the lyrics, which showcase how Scott blends the economy of language from the best of country and folk songwriting (“she sounds like the morning birds / So I let her wake me,” and come on with that simile) with the cadences of blues and hip-hop. The obvious forebearer here, conceptually, is Dolly Parton’s “Love is Like a Butterfly,” with Scott filtering a similar conceit through Gen Z anxieties. “When you don’t know things / Love is losing focus,” is a line from the bridge that impresses for the precision of its emotional intelligence.
Clearly, this isn’t a matter of what so many mainstream country artists try to do, which is to perform a badly-written list of rural lifestyle signifiers over a basic hip-hop beat. Instead, it’s a single that shows the ways that these genres genuinely compliment each other when approached with respect and care by someone with actual talent. A
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