Charlie Kaplan - Country Life in America (2023) Hi-Res

I wrote "Country Life in America"'s nine songs in the years after graduating college. It’s in some ways a lost album, made up of the songs I wrote then, and the ones in the same vein that came after. It’s also a tribute to that time and place, and to the people I shared it with.

I remember the long hours I spent waiting for my life to start. I was restless and impatient. To overcome the stultifying quietude of those days, I peered into the guitar to imagine the types of rooms I’d rather be in: Loud, packed, heaving, sweating singalongs to well-loved songs, friends nearby, lost in the moment. This was the setlist for my theater of the mind.

Finishing and recording these songs now, I have the privileged vantage point of identifying with that young man’s struggles and being the voice he might have wanted in his head. I can take in his triumphs too; finding love, finding out how to sing about it, finding out that’s what it’s all about.