Inside Lancaster Rayne’s Modern Bakersfield Vision
Punk Head: “Little Country Boy” feels intentionally larger than your earlier releases. At what point did you realize you wanted to make something that could fill a stadium instead of a dancehall?
Lancaster Rayne: I grew up in Texas and just recently moved to ABQ so, Little Country Boy is an ode to that childhood and, because of that, I knew Little Country Boy would be a “bigger” more anthemic track. But, it became what it needed to be. That broad, nostalgic reminiscence had to have some power behind it. There are big feelings there and they needed to be couched within a big atmosphere. I think it’s all about connecting with the listener in a way that they feel what you’re feeling. Music has that magical potential to inspire raw emotion with or without words. With Little Country Boy, the words tell you what the story’s about and then the grandness of the music and its arrangement communicate that bittersweet aura in which everything sits.
Punk Head: You describe this track as a “tactical departure.” Was that evolution exciting for you creatively, or slightly terrifying?
Lancaster Rayne: Definitely exciting! The Modern Bakersfield sound’s beauty is in its simplicity, I think. There’s a rawness and edge with the guitar-driven arrangements that give it that singular emotive charm. With Little Country Boy, I knew there would need to be a much broader sonic landscape to work in and couldn’t wait to dig in.
Little Country Boy is the third track in a staggered-release strategy from a pretty deep catalog of songs in the pipeline. Right now, the industry is flooded with hyper-polished, digitized tracks that all sound like they came from the same software template. I’m carving out my own lane by focusing purely on storytelling that means something to me and 100% human-performed instrumentation. Little Country Boy could certainly be looked at as a departure at this point, but six months from now, it won’t.
Punk Head: The phrase “Modern Bakersfield” almost sounds like a mission statement. What does that mean to you beyond just sonic aesthetics?
Lancaster Rayne: I’ve always been a big Dwight Yoakam and Buddy Holly fan. I admit, I’ve just recently started to appreciate Buck Owens. For most of my life, I thought of Owens as that guy from Hee-Haw. But, as I started taking a hard look at the music I loved as it pertained to my songwriting aesthetic, I realized Buck was fundamental in that guitar-driven, heavier back-beat sound that Buddy Holly helped pioneer and I was now trying to reimagine. And, it was not lost on me that the “Bakersfield Sound” was not just some arbitrary label—it was a place in California, not a place in Tennessee.
Sometimes, creative work really benefits from a change in scenery. Foreign films look and feel different because they are, well, foreign. A movie coming out of the Hollywood system will be different than one coming out of, say, Brazil. The worldview is completely distinct and the artist translates this difference through his craft in ways that are sometimes unexpected and almost always welcomed. But, I think there’s room for many voices and many visions. People like variety and different flavors of everything.
In some ways, I think Modern Bakersfield does stand as mission statement that has as a lot to do in my mind as a poke in the eye of the AI trend in music (and elsewhere for that matter). But, it’s also about independence and following your instincts. It’s about dismissing the conventions of country music that are currently dominating the market and trusting your gut and believing, even though your music may not sound like everyone else’s, it can still be good, it can find an audience and it can still be unmistakably country.
Punk Head: A lot of artists talk about authenticity, but you’re specifically emphasizing fully human-performed music. Why was it important to make that part of the public conversation?
Lancaster Rayne: I know that people like AI songs. Just look at the streaming numbers and that’s obvious. I also know that polls show that a lot of people don’t care if it’s AI as long as the songs are good. BUT…those AI-generated songs were learned from real people making real music. If it weren’t for human-made tunes there would be no AI music.
There’s a reason why AI country vocals seem to always sound like the biggest names in the industry. They can produce a derivative product that people like with AI but they can’t create new source material for AI to learn from. You know, music definitely has a math element to it and computers are a lot better at math than I am. So, I agree with a guy like Shooter Jennings who purposefully keeps little mistakes in the mix. I try to produce a good track but sometimes we flub up. And, if the flub’s not too glaring I leave it in just to ensure there’s some artifact of humanity in the song.
I believe it’s important to keep pushing real, home-grown music out there. I think it will always find an audience of people who want to connect with something real and seek it out. At the end of the day, if the AI stuff keeps dominating streaming then the AI will end up copying itself which means it will become a self-consuming loop of a copy of a copy of a copy… Whenever photography emerged, people feared that art would lose all value given that people could now buy a picture of a great painting and the original would become meaningless. Clearly, that didn’t end up happening. As far as I know, a Renoir is still sought after and pretty danged expensive.
Punk Head: You’re making ambitious country music from Albuquerque instead of Nashville. Does distance help you stay sharper creatively?
Lancaster Rayne: I think all music, country music certainly, represents many distinct voices and experiences. To think that music creation could be confined to just one place, produced by the same handful of people over and over again is doing the art a disservice. Nashville does what they do and people love it all over the world. But, storytellers come from everywhere, otherwise the stories might start getting kinda boring. I’m just one voice, telling my stories, sharing emotion and creating a musical backdrop for them that I dig. And, it’s great to know that people out there connect with it. I don’t know if being in ABQ keeps me sharper but it definitely keeps me thinking outside the box, if you’ll pardon the tired cliche, and the landscapes are always inspiring.
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