Country singer Tyler Childers’s Mule Pull ’24 Tour rolled into upstate New York on July 3, sending people playing dress-up as cowboys and cowgirls flocking to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. The tour follows Childers’s sixth album, “Rustin’ in the Rain,” which is a pop-country album that was released in 2023.
Childers, 33, is a long way from his home in Kentucky — where his mother and father put food on the table as a nurse and coal miner, respectively — but he is no stranger to life on the road. He has spent more than a decade traveling the world to sing his music. He is most definitely a singer-songwriter — emphasis on songwriting for his poignant lyrics and storytelling.
I am an unlikely fan: I grew up fostering stubborn, East Coast elitism and listened to New York rap blaring from my friend’s speakers, not bluegrass. But the vulnerability in his lyrical portrayals connected me to him, and helped me shed the unwarranted superiority I held over Southern and Middle America. I found myself relating to the words in his guttural croons with songs like “Peace of Mind” and “Rock Salt and Nails” as he underscores we have a lot more to bring us together than divide us — no matter where we call home in the states.
Childers paints a complex, but vivid picture of his America. His catalog juxtaposes bad backs and dirty hands, with sweet love declarations and Sundays. He does not sacralize the American Dream nor country life – if listeners do that on their own, well, that is their prerogative – but instead tells personal stories of his upbringing: a prodigy tromping around the hills of Kentucky in a town with a population of 2,000, where he wrote his first song at 13 and delivered himself from life spent in a factory.
“If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be working at Toyota or something,” he told Rolling Stone in 2018.
The day of his concert, slices of golden light peaked through trees as we approached the venue is in Saratoga Spa State Park, where huge pine trees hover over tailgates and concert- goers who walk on bridges over flowing water to reach the amphitheater. The natural world and an amphitheater collide to make this special place, where a piece of the forest has been carved out for music. Inside SPAC’s parking lot, people sat dangling cowboy boots over the edge of pickup trucks and held red Solo cups. We entered the venue and headed as close to the center of the stage as possible before the floor of the lawn turned into an uncomfortable metal grate — to our chagrin, the entirety of SPAC’s lawn is not grass — and set our blanket and lawn chairs down.
As the sun sank further in the sky, the crowd buzzed and chattered with excitement, anticipating when Childers would perform. Rude concertgoers weaved their way between groups on the lawn at the last minute, barely saying “ ’scuse me” as they stepped on blankets and tried to finagle themselves as close as possible to the stage. I splayed my body across our blanket to deter them, which kind of worked. As a man in a trucker hat led his pack of friends to step over my head, I looked up. “You’re not even going to say sorry?” I asked. He still stepped over my body like I was a pebble on the beach, now saying, “Sorry! Sorry!” while doing so.
A double-denim-clad Childers arrived on stage around 9 p.m. to the roar of a sold-out SPAC. He opened with the 2021 song “Her and the Banks,” spinning his tales of Appalachian deviance and yearning for more than two hours.
Cloudy exhales of cigarette smoke lit up by stage lights cut through the summer air as people whooped to each song. There is nothing like an outdoor summer concert. The open space and white lights remind one they are alive. I felt hopeful — for what I did not know — with the sun, now retired from its relentless assault, and the July air a pleasant brush.
The crowd was an amalgamation of old and young people: boys with Budweiser cans and Bass Shop Pro hats; beer-bellied, bandana wearing men; girls with red bows in their hair and Free People dresses; women in lawn chairs with tattoos. The audience had an underbelly: a white man and his son both with dreadlocked hair and an excited young man unsuccessfully tried to start an obscene chant about Joe Biden.
Childers hit a stride of hits halfway through the show beginning with “Shake the Frost.” His bushy, orange eyebrows furrowed with the passion of his voice as he delivered unflinching musings on love — its rip-your-heart-out lows and soaring-like-a-wild-bird highs.
Songs he played like “Nose on the Grindstone” and “Whitehouse Road” also feature raw depictions of drug use and alcoholism, describing how vices can thrill but also numb. As a former addict, Childers knows this. Many of his songs are about the price of back-bending labor and poverty in relation to drug abuse: bone-tired exhaustion, desperate measures, and the destruction of one’s body and soul.
“Keep your nose on the grindstone and out of the pills,” Childers crooned to the crowd, which knew every word.
In between singing about misadventures prompted by boredom and trekking honest land, he spoke to the crowd for more than five minutes in his Kentucky twang. This nice personal touch to the show surprised me; I have been to shows where performers barely acknowledge the masses.
Childers shared he had never been to Saratoga Springs before but said, “This is a real cool spot, I would imagine, to see a show.” At one point, he brought out a toy chicken, squeezing it, and opening his mouth wide to wail with it — Childers’s imitation of being an obnoxious person in the crowd, ruining the show for others.
“You don’t wanna be that person,” he advised.
As he sat with his acoustic guitar in his lap, he acknowledged the power live music has to form connections.
“That’s just as much as important as the music that is happening here: the fellowship,” he said. “There’s a good chance to your left, to your right, in front of you, or behind you, there’s at least one person you have absolutely no idea who they are. You might possibly not have anything in common with that person, you guys might be complete polar opposites. But the one thing you do have in common is that you were both interested in what was going to happen today enough to come and gawk at a bunch of hillbillies playing music.”
In the parking lot after the show, I met a group of guys and girls who invited me to hop up into their pickup truck and hang out.
“Want anything? Water? Beer?” they asked me. I took the water, thanked them, and told them I had to get started on the two-hour journey back home. All the way, I thought of the music I heard and one of my first introductions to Childers.
It was a video of him, fresh-faced and fooling around with his buddies. He is 19, not Grammy nominated and probably known as the friend who always carries a guitar. At the start of the video, his friend tells him to “proceed,” and he goes on to belt out “Shake the Frost” — one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard — the kind that makes you hurt in a good way. Then he goes on to change the country music world and upend stereotypes with each guitar strum and song lyric.
Eventually, he makes his way to SPAC, where our worlds collide. Disco lights from the stage make my skin glow, and I float above the concert lawn, but fall deeper and deeper into his spun tales of Americana at a great show put on by the Kentuckian.
–July 22, 2024–
