Josh Ross’s Juno nominations could be a sign that Canadian country music is gearing up to once-again dominate the awards. This year, multiple country acts have made inroads in many of the categories — highlighting the growing popularity of country music in Canada, and the genre’s resurgence in pop culture in general.
Ross’s five nods put him neck-and-neck with Tate McRae, the pop singer who has often competed with the likes of The Weeknd for most nominations at the awards. For her main competition to be a country star, it says something about the genre’s return to more mainstream popularity.
“You’re looking back in the day at Shania Twain,” said music and entertainment reporter Rudy Blair, pointing to the early 2000s as the last time a country singer led nominations at the Junos. “So that tells you just how [long] this has been coming — not just with what’s going on with the Juno Awards, but also what’s been going on across Canada.”
Ross is far from the only country musician among this year’s Juno nominees. In the audience-voted fan-choice, he has three country music compatriots (Jade Eagleson, Dean Brody and the country-inspired Les Cowboys Fringants), while Shawn Mendes’ nomination there is largely based on the strength of his country-esque single, Why Why Why.
WATCH | CBC’s Commotion on Shawn Mendes’ country-inspired album:
Meanwhile, Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter catapulted three musicians to the Canadian awards this year. Both Jack Rochon and Shawn Everett are nominated for Jack Richardson Producer of the Year for their work on the album, while Alberta’s Lowell is up for the inaugural songwriter of the year, non-performer award for the Beyoncé tracks Bodyguard and Texas Hold ‘Em.
Paired with a litany of other country and country-inspired musicians — from newcomers like Owen Riegling to relative veterans like MacKenzie Porter and Brett Kissel — it mirrors a rise in the music industry at large.
Spotify reported a 20 per cent global increase in country music’s monthly streams in its 2024 Wrapped report. Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy) was the longest-running number one song of the year — tying Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’s smash country hit Old Town Road for the longest run ever.
Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s I Had Some Help recently became the second country song in a row — after 2023’s Last Night — to top Billboard’s “songs of the summer” chart. Noah Khan’s country-pop hit Stick Season was the biggest song of 2024 in the U.K. — where country has shot up 67 per cent. And Teddy Swim’s genre-bending country/soul/R&B track Lose Control became Billboard’s year-end top hit as 2024 came to a close.
The timing for that success has proven a boon for country artists north of the border.
“Canadian country artists have always been this bubble that is going to explode, and it’s been that way for years,” Blair said. “Maybe some people are finally taking some notice.”
There’s also evidence that people are taking the same kind of notice about country music south of the border. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter was largely credited with both riding and significantly enlarging a wave of renewed interest in the genre.
By highlighting Black people’s historical contribution, Beyoncé and artists like Reyna Roberts, Allison Russell, Kane Brown and Rissi Palmer have participated in what some have called a renaissance for Black country artists.
Melding genres, eroding stereotypes
Paired with their melding of genres — bringing hip-hop and pop elements into country and vice versa — other artists like Shaboozey, Lil Nas X and Blanco Brown have been able to produce giant, audience-crossing hits.
Everett says that tendency to borrow elements from various other schools of music has contributed to country’s mainstream allure, eroding the stereotype of arena rock country obsessed with traditionalism and the past.
“The best country music always managed to tell a story about what it felt like to live in our current day and age,” he said. “The best versions of it [now] manage to use that storytelling technique, and — in a modern way — be able to twist the words so that it feels like 2025.”
He pointed to modern country musicians like Sturgill Simpson who have borrowed pop sensibilities in their lyrics — like his track Turtles All the Way Down, which the singer has confirmed is about psychedelic drug use.
Others don’t even need confirmation to unearth their meanings: “I used to wake and bake / Roll out of bed, hit the gravity bong that I made and start the day,” sings artist Kacey Musgraves in her 2024 title track Deeper Well.
“For a while, it got me by / Everything I did seemed better when I was high.”
Though they’re lyrics that sound straight out of a pop album, Musgrave’s song is definitely country — though, she like many names mentioned in this piece, has had her country bonafides questioned over a pointed effort to modernize and meld her music with pop.
Along with his work on Maggie Rogers’ country-lilting Don’t Forget Me, Musgrave’s Deeper Well also helped earn Everett his second Juno nomination of the year for engineering. And along with irreverent, aggressively contemporary tracks like Trey Lewis’s Dicked Down in Dallas and Dixon Dallas’ X-rated Good Lookin’ burning up the charts, country musicians have been intentionally breaking country’s staid stereotypes to achieve viral fame.
If you grew up in Canada with friends outside of the country, there’s an uncanny experience you’ve likely lived through: that of mentioning a famous song or musician, only to realize no one knows what you’re talking about.
“That’s not necessarily something that was ever happening in country music before,” Everett said. “Which makes it feel like a really modern take on the genre.”
“You’re hearing less and less songs about, like, drinking in trucks,” confirmed fellow nominee MacKenzie Porter. “That’s a little bit out now, where I feel like the stories are just real-life stories or things that everybody can relate to.”
Changing politics of country music
That’s not to say country has wholly left its conservative sensibilities behind. In 2023, Jason Aldean’s chart topper Try That in a Small Town set a record — with Aldean at no. 1, it was the first time the top three tracks in Billboard’s Hot 100 were all country songs. But the song also became what the New York Times called a “culture war battleground” over its implied opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
And ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, country singer Carrie Underwood sparked controversy for agreeing to sing at the event — partially because Underwood and her music had become publicly tied to LGBTQ+ rights issues. In the end, the ceremony was replete with country stars — featuring Jason Aldean, Billy Ray Cyrus, Gavin DeGraw, Kid Rock, the Rascall Flatts and others.
Many of those country artists either voiced support for, or played at events promoting Trump’s electoral run — a clear difference between pop and hip-hop artists, Billboard noted at the time, who tended to voice support for candidate Kamala Harris. In fact, Trump’s association with the genre was strong enough for writers at the Rolling Stone and USA Today to theorize their respective comebacks were tied together.
To be fair, other country stars — including Garth Brooks and Tim McGraw — played at Biden’s inauguration. And in a 2024 article, Rolling Stone noted that the Democratic National Convention had included several country stars in its ceremony, after having zero such musicians in 2016.
The Democratic party’s exclusion, wrote journalist Marissa R. Moss, spoke to the assumption that country had become an alienating sub-genre meant only for one political group — a tacit, widespread belief based on decades of both outdated music and an outdated understanding of it.
Their embrace of it in 2024, she said, seemed to be an admission that the genre had burst back into the mainstream.
“It’s hard not to feel like this is a new understanding from the DNC,” wrote Moss. “That liberals aren’t just listening to streaming pop hits and that Southern folks, Appalachian residents, and small-town people in general who listen to country and roots music often believe in things like basic human rights, too.”
Whatever the reason for country’s seeming resurgent popularity among all demographics, Everett says, the desire is undeniable, and only growing. He says he currently has 40 country songs to mix in the next month and a half. Not only is that an extraordinary number of country songs, it’s an extraordinary number of songs total: he’s never mixed that many songs in that span of time, total.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I barely ever worked on any country music in my life, but then suddenly now I’m just inundated with country music.”
