NPR’s Don Gonyea talks with Brennen Leigh about her new album with a classic country sound, “Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin’ Yet.”
DON GONYEA, HOST:
Country music has a long, long list of greats. There’s Hank, and there’s Cash and Carter and Dolly and Loretta. And we could go on and on and on. Now, these days, country radio has strayed from that classic sound, but not so our next guest. In her own words, she ain’t through honky-tonkin’ yet.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “I AIN’T THROUGH HONKY TONKIN’ YET”)
BRENNEN LEIGH: (Singing) But I ain’t through honky-tonkin’ yet.
GONYEA: Brennen Leigh describes her new record as vintage country. And we’re catching up with her out on the road somewhere in the U.K., I understand, promoting it.
Brennen, welcome.
LEIGH: Thank you for having me, Don. And, yeah, I’m talking to you from London.
GONYEA: How do you define that honky-tonk sound? I mean, what are the ingredients? What are the arrangements? What are the instruments?
LEIGH: I don’t think we need to define country music in a narrow way. It’s a huge umbrella. There are a lot of different kinds of country, and I think we have kind of a strange, awkward authenticity obsession in our genre. And we do a lot of quibbling back and forth about what’s real country and what isn’t. You know, is it real country if it doesn’t have a steel guitar? Is it real country if it mentions a cellphone? Do we want it to be a museum relic that’s perfectly preserved and never changes, or do we want it to be relevant to real life?