“IN YOUR LOVE”
TYLER CHILDERS MELTS GENRE, ROMANTIC BARRIERS
Tyler Childers, like sometime producer Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price and Jason Isbell, has been the staunch counterpunch to mainstream country. Designed not for terrestrial radio, but the roots that run through Appalachia, bluegrass, and the hard honk of what was pouring out of WSM-AM during the ’50s and ’60s, there’s a purity of intention that leaves today’s country fans scratching their heads.
Like straight moonshine or a dip of fresh cut Skoal, once the bracing from their intensity recedes, the potency of intention and raw emotion captivates. Childers’ stark Appalachian sound may not work in a world of bulked-up Bro-country sonics, programmed next to Jason Aldean or Luke Bryan, but beyond Music Row’s massive business structure, he’s quietly built himself into a major theater headliner, like Isbell, Simpson and Price, as well as Zach Bryan, who’s moving into stadiums.
What makes “In Your Love” so important, though, is it’s the rare roots/Americana-merging song that could work in the larger frame. Opening with a sparkling Elton John-esque piano part that rises and twirls, the ear turns hard to a haunted declaration of “I will— wait—for you.”
The space between those words is fraught, truly the essence of pregnant pause. What is coming? And how will it dust these falling piano notes, tumbling from what feels like an ancient upright tucked into a forgotten house somewhere?
The waiting is—as the song picks up—“’til the sun turns into ashes, and bows down to the moon.”
What feels like standard romantic hyperbole is followed by something more fierce, harder in terms of metaphor and striking in what it suggests. Childers’ voice, a ragged bit of nasal cracked hickory, professes, “It’s a long hard war, ah, but I can grin and bear it / ’Cause I know what the hell I’m fighting for.”
The passion. The ardor. Whatever this love is, he’s burning with the truth of it. It will save him—and destroy him. He doesn’t care the cost, he just wants in completely. The naked performance unabashedly yearns. In a world rushing hard at you, this is something to dig in and defend.
If the chorus acknowledges human limitation, it also embraces the inherent promise of love within us all. The kind of song so devoid of artifice it could serve as one of those wedding songs for the ages, tough enough to let the groom have his brio—“I’m a bad man, looking for takers”—and the bride her moment to shimmer in that consuming moment of utter adoration.
Roughhewn, plain spoken, when the strings swell up as the second verse unfurls, it’s not melodrama but a river that carries the song further. Childers, a dozen years into a career with Grammy nominations and Americana Music Association awards, remains as honest and gut-wrenching as he was on his earliest albums Bottles and Bibles or Purgatory.
Johnson County, Kentucky delivered the world Chris Stapleton, Loretta Lynn, Crystal Gayle. Maybe it’s something in the water, or the air; but probably it’s the abyss of despair that wafts from the coal mines. A decent living for a man who works ’til his back is sore and eventually the charcoal dust turns on them. Then the Black Lung disease steals their lives.
Suddenly, a love song transcends. It’s about loving beyond the temporal, about reaching to a place where even the inevitable, horrible death sentence only makes what is that much sweeter because of the loss that’s coming. Sobering, but real.
And just when it can’t get any more somber, Childers drops a video that raises the stakes from the ravages of the working poor to a reality check of same sex love in a brutal, macho, God-fearing world. To see that tentative connection, the stolen looks from Colton Haynes and James Scully, young men playing miners in the ’50s, and the melting of the defenses they’ve learned to put up is to see redemption and recognition as its most poignant.
That’s the point, isn’t it? Love redeems. No matter who or how.
Enlisting Childers’ friend Silas House, acclaimed author and Kentucky’s poet laureate, to write and consult on the video, the tragic ending eschews the Hollywood crash landing. It’s not about who destroys their love, torments or beats them for being homosexual, but the tenderness they share, the normalcy of lives shared with friends and each other.
All anyone wants is to be loved, seen and accepted as they are. Such a militant act, this basic human value. Watching the scenes roll out, the collapse and dying moments—from Black Lung’s ravages—it doesn’t matter what your sexual definition or taste, your heart punctures.
For country radio, this is a song akin to Patty Loveless’ “How Can I Help You Say Goodbye,” Deana Carter’s “Strawberry Wine,” Alan Jackson’s “I’ll Go On Lovin’ You.” Turning point moments that stain one forever. “In Your Love” stops time, cracks open place and sends you to where love is all—and nothing will undo that ocean of strength in the face of whatever life sends you.
After confessing, “Like a team of mules pulling hell off from its hinges / It’s a love I’ll keep tending, I’ll work for you,” the instruments recede slowly. Then Childers’ profession “I will work for you” turns into an intonation of “I will stand my ground” over and over.
Prophetic, true—somehow a declaration based on love, not rancor or fear. Not since Randy Travis took Best Country Song at the Grammys, and swept the Academy of Country Music and Country Music Association Song of the Year with “Forever and Ever, Amen” has a love song been so committed to whatever might be required. Suddenly, love truly is love, and that’s all that matters—even in a genre tagged as homophobic, marginalized by a few backwards outliers.
Let the loving—and healing—begin.
