Shooter Jennings, heir apparent to the legit country music crown, is doing his goddamnest to keep the weird in country weird. I'm talking real weird, the opportune word here being weird. Jennings is, of course, the son of country royalty Walon Jennings, and he's done his best to give a one finger salute to the Nashville establishment and make music his own way. And while it might not always be country, it's also rarely anything else you might recognize. He's done things his own way, and he's shredded out some of the best, and the strangest, country tracks you'll ever actually enjoy.
Shooter's has one boot deep in tradition, as you'll hear on the tag line in this track, featuring a very drunk, but also very royal, George Jones, slurring out "He Stopped Loving Her Today." What else you'll hear, way out in the the other realm, is a bit outta space and outta time. Shooter doesn't really do music you'd feel comfortable labeling. This is evident in almost anything you might randomly pick from his Spotify profile. So yeah, hopefully, at this point, you're digging in. But, go deeper into his albums and you'll see how Jenning's "eff you genius" cuts across genres without approval, permission or apology. Jennings makes music his own way, which is a terrible cliche, but I can't think of a better way to describe how the crown prince has found his own feet in the whirlwind and followed up on what his father, the king, laid out out for him to follow. Case in point: he cut an album with Stephen King, 2010's Black Ribbons, which is one of the most interesting, spaced out, deeply current-events-rooted and sonically wild concept albums I've ever heard. Though, the unique factor is true for pretty much anything Shooter Jennings has recorded. If you haven't done it yet, listen up.
I promise you'll love what you hear.
And even though we're not talking about the track, as this is about "Fourth of July", his kicker "Fuck You, I'm Famous", from the same album is a beautiful antidote to our current near-dystopia scatter shatter, end of the world blues...Happy 4th of July, kids...hope those explosions outside are just kids shooting off fireworks..and not the revolution we really need.
