PAYTON HOWIE

                                                               "Country Before Me" 

                                                               Independent Release

While newer country acts don’t exactly have a foolproof blueprint to follow for a path to success, when they can come out the gate and immediately turn heads, and then continue to forge their path and define their sound while the media pays more and more attention to them, then they are doing something absolutely right!

That’s exactly what Payton Howie has been doing since first bursting onto the scene in 2019 with “Catch Flights,” and she’s earned her most recent, breakthrough success with “Never Go Home,” a rowdy, rocking anthem which not only got her featured on several high-profile playlists, but turned more industry heads toward her and her brand of edgy country.

Howie kicks off 2022 with her newest single “Country Before Me,” revealing yet another layer of her arsenal as she tones things back from what we’ve come to know from her and leans into a softer touched feel to pay homage to those amazing ladies of country music who paved the road.

Wrapped around modern kissed traditional instrumentation, Howie pulls us into the first verse with lyrics that act as a grand overview of those legends, referring to them as dreamers, believers, and tortured souls who never took no for an answer and told the stories of their lives on the radio.

The chorus elevates the idea that she’s set in the verses by focusing on the passion that they poured into their songs, but Howie then masterfully slides over to how those characteristics have affected her today in the here and now, relenting that she can still feel every cry and note they sang while they were standing in the Opry ring.

Whereas many songs like this do the whole namecheck thing, Howie intriguingly opts to instead do her namechecks in a very clever way in that she references song titles in the second verse to pay tribute to the iconic females of the genre rather than just saying their specific names:

“Wore coats of many colors” = Dolly

“Crazy and coal miner’s daughters” = Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn

“We were country when it wasn’t cool” = Barbara Mandrell

“Don’t it make your brown eyes blue” = Crystal Gayle

 “We were just two sparrows in a hurricane” = Tanya Tucker

“Never Go Home” and “Country Before Me” are both scheduled to be part of Payton Howie’s upcoming debut EP this February, Youngblood, and she’s already done everything right to catch attention ahead of it by releasing two songs that are vastly different from one another, but that both still very wisely place the spotlight on her signature vocals which in each case deliver the proper power punch that the lyrics call for.

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)

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