Lady Redneck “After the Rain, You’ll Find the Son” (SINGLE)

Traditional country has always had a slightly Christian bend to it, and we’re reminded as much right out of the gate with the straightforward new single by Lady Redneck, “After the Rain, You’ll Find the Son.” Although you could easily make the case that this is a Christian track more than it’s a country single, I don’t know that the deeper cosmetics of the composition would be so quick to agree with such a statement.

There’s a raw pastoral quality to the harmonies in this song that make us feel like we’re drinking in the warmth of a lovely southern afternoon whilst embracing a slick groove that was made to get our hearts synchronized with the rhythm of the music, and these are not attributes that come standard in CCM at all. In contemporary country, pushing the limits with an instrumental setup is the status quo, but Lady Redneck is going a step further here and engraining her harmonies with a presence of texture that emulates the feel of a live performance. She isn’t letting the insularity trend get in her way of making a classic strain of country spiked with some modern experimentation and definitively Christian lyrics, and she’s scoring major rewards for the effort here.

This is a very old school country song structure, but it doesn’t leave us feeling like we’re listening to a cover or an artist who doesn’t know how to join ranks with a modern movement. Honestly, I think that Lady Redneck is dividing her aesthetical loyalties between a postmodern style of country composing and a more straightforward Christian poetic angle, which ironically goes together quite well in a slower piece like “After the Rain, You’ll Find the Son.”

The mix is putting her vocal at the helm of the track regardless of how much potency her backing band is offering up in between the verses, and I think that the multilayered concept to the rhythm section is as natural as any of the singing parts are. This is a song that would probably sound very similar to its studio version in a live setting, which is most certainly not true of ninety percent of the country music you’re going to hear out of the mainstream pop pulse in 2022 and beyond.

There are a lot of singer/songwriters that are looking to embolden optimism in these dark times we’re living in, but I haven’t heard many that have the voice nor the passion that Lady Redneck has for her lyrics in a song like “After the Rain, You’ll Find the Son,” which is one of several interesting compositions I’ve heard from her so far. She’s going to have a tough time with the competitive edge in her scene, but provided she doesn’t veer into secular plasticity as some of her less than erudite peers tend to when running out of artistic steam early on, she’s going to find herself an audience that is all her own a lot sooner than much of her rivals will.

Mark Druery