Tyler Childers - Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven

One of the most audacious and genuinely moving albums in recent country music history. Released on September 30, 2022 via Hickman Holler Records, Tyler Childers' fifth studio album is a gospel-rooted concept record of remarkable ambition, presenting eight songs across three full discs, each offering a completely different sonic perspective on the same material. The structure is a nod to the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and what that means for a man who grew up Baptist in Eastern Kentucky and has spent years filtering through faith, doubt, and sobriety to find his own truth.

The first disc, Hallelujah, presents the songs in their most elemental form, recorded live in the studio with Childers and The Food Stamps playing together in a room with no embellishment. Raw, honest, and deeply rooted in Appalachian tradition. The second disc, Jubilee, expands the same songs into full arrangements featuring strings, horns, dulcimer, and a touch of sitar, lush and cinematic and rich with the sounds of a community gathered together. The third disc, Joyful Noise, co-produced by Charlie Brown Superstar, pushes the material into entirely new sonic territory through remixes and experimental textures that reframe the songs once more and reveal new dimensions entirely.

The songs themselves are extraordinary. The title track, written as early as 2017, finds Childers pleading with the heavens to let him hunt alongside the streets of gold after he is gone, as pure and plainspoken a vision of faith as any in American music. "Way of the Triune God" is a testament to sobriety's power. "Angel Band" is a meditation on psychedelic experience and the universality of heaven, welcoming all regardless of race, creed, or religion. "Purgatory," a reimagining of the title track from his 2017 debut, is given extraordinary new life. Three traditional hymns, including the Hank Williams classic "Old Country Church," anchor the collection in the church music of Childers' upbringing.

As Childers himself has said of the album's message: "It doesn't matter race, creed, religion and all of that. The most important part is to protect your heart, cultivate that, and make that something useful for the world." Spread across three LPs and including a booklet, this is one of the great American albums of its decade.