Ken Tucker

Stewart liked to play music, but the smaller the crowd, he thought, the better he'd be able to connect to an audience.

As the years went by, his ambivalence toward celebrity became a dark resentment.

He shunned interviews, lost record contracts.

Lots of drugs were consumed to numb it all.

Stewart died by suicide at age 59.

Here's Bob Dylan's favorite Gary Stewart song.

A half century in the making, I Am From the Honky Tonks is a lot more than the biography of a cult artist.

It's a vast, tumultuous portrait of 20th century southern working class life.

I think a history-minded artist like Casey Musgraves would really like this book.

I hope she and you read it.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the new Megan Maroney country album and mentioned that also surging in popularity is her colleague, Ella Langley.

Well, now Langley's album called Dandelion is out, and it's more varied and ambitious than I'd anticipated.

It's common for someone early in her career to work variations on the songs that have made her successful.

And Choose in Texas, the song that began this review, is more than successful.

It is, in fact, the longest-running number one ever by a woman country artist on Billboard's Hot 100.

But Dandelion demonstrates Langley's range in making pop ballads, bluegrass rave-ups, and more.

My favorite song on the album may be Last Call for Us, a honky-tonk song that uses closing time at the honky-tonk as a metaphor for a romance that's about to end.

The singer Robin is in the middle of hers, and she's chosen to build an album around that idea.

She calls the collection Sexistential, and its songs are about hard-won middle-age wisdom and a weary impatience with partners less engaged or sincere than she.

Performers ranging from Taylor Swift to Charlie XCX have expressed their admiration for Robin's way with vocals that twist around a pulsing rhythm and songwriting that injects emotional complexity into disco repetition.