Tyler Childers - Purgatory

The album that changed everything. Released on August 4, 2017 through Childers' own Hickman Holler Records and distributed by Thirty Tigers, Purgatory is the record that introduced the world to one of the most gifted and distinctive voices in American roots music, a Lawrence County, Kentucky songwriter of rare depth and intelligence who had been playing and writing for years before the right record and the right producer brought his talent fully into focus.

That producer was Sturgill Simpson, a fellow Kentuckian who recognized something extraordinary in Childers and brought him to The Butcher Shoppe in Nashville alongside recording engineer David Ferguson and a cast of elite session players including fiddler Stuart Duncan. Together they built a sound rooted deep in Appalachian tradition, moving freely between honky-tonk, bluegrass, country, and folk, while never losing the raw, autobiographical grit that makes Childers unlike any other artist working in the genre.

The ten songs on Purgatory chronicle a man navigating the push and pull between a reckless past and a more settled, reflective adulthood, between the pull of youthful wildness and the stabilizing force of love and introspection. "Whitehouse Road" draws from real roads and real experiences in eastern Kentucky with the unflinching specificity of a writer who lived every word. The tender "Lady May," written for his partner Senora May, is one of the most quietly devastating love songs in recent country music. "Feathered Indians" became a cultural touchstone, eventually achieving double platinum certification. The bluegrass-infused title track meditates on limbo and redemption with a philosophical depth that announced Childers as something far more than a conventional country songwriter.

The album went on to achieve platinum certification from the RIAA, the first independently released country album in over 18 years to do so without significant radio airplay. Rolling Stone included it in their list of the 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century. It remains one of the essential American records of its decade, and the beginning of one of the most important careers in contemporary roots music.