Luke Combs, Jelly Roll, Paramore: This is the Nashville music that made 2023

For years now, The Tennessean has issued an annual list of our favorite albums that were made in Nashville -- or had some connection to Music City.

But 2023, in many ways, was the year of the song.

The past 11 months saw digital innovation and streaming's boom taking fuller grip over industry trends. In the same time, Nashville's world-famous musician and songwriter community created an astonishing amount of material.

The best of this work was defined by writing that reflects cultural relevance and keen perception, along with intelligent crafting, innovative marketing and unparalleled musicianship. But mostly, the year's best music moved listeners and became a part of the soundtrack of their lives.

In alphabetical order, here are 25 Nashville songs released between Jan. 1 and Nov. 1 that tell the story of 2023.

• Oliver Anthony, "Rich Men North of Richmond"

  • Rural Virginian string plucker Anthony rode his caustic, plain-spoken anthem to unprecedented Billboard Hot 100 chart acclaim. Alongside Jason Aldean's "Try That In A Small Town," the song heralded a moment for blunt, human conversations among conservative, Libertarian and rural-based fans of Americana and country about America's present and future. The song also showcased YouTube's persistent success as an algorithm-breaking streaming portal.

• Kelsea Ballerini, "Blindsided"

  • On the bingo card of things country star Kelsea Ballerini expected from 2023, surely not on the list was having thousands of young women chanting "yeah sure, okay" as she "Rolled Up The Welcome Mat (For Good)" on their marriage. However, "having this type of [loud] interplay with my fans has changed the expectations of my career," Ballerini told The Tennessean this year.

• Kane Brown, "Bury Me In Georgia"

  • Lars Thorson plays fiddle in Kane Brown's band. Ilya Toshinskiy and Dann Huff's banjo and electric guitar are Music City staples. "Bury Me in Georgia" showcases those instruments' ability to smoothly swing around and through the trap-style breaks now inherently familiar to country radio stalwart Brown's ten No. 1 hits. Toss in a dash of AC/DC's "Hells Bells," a bit more of Charlie Daniels' "Devil Went Down To Georgia," and mix with Brown's hip-hop-leaning inspirations. The result is a hard-driving hit.

• Zach Bryan featuring Kacey Musgraves, "I Remember Everything"

  • Brand familiarity and strong songwriting propelled this duet across a sizable stereotypical gap between indie folk and mainstream country. Bryan has been a streaming juggernaut since COVID-19's quarantine, and his self titled album featuring several guest features only furthered that trend. Pairing Bryan with an artist whose adjacency and involvement with the Americana, country and pop spaces was perhaps the year's savviest collaboration.

• Shy Carter & Frank Ray, "Jesus At The Taco Truck"

  • Memphis-born Carter and New Mexican Ray's judgment-free song has numerous religious allegories to the New Testament story of Christ. Co-written by Carter, Ray, 2020 BMI Songwriter of the Year Ben Burgess and former Taylor Swift producer Nathan Chapman, it tells the story of pure love and care for others -- namely an undocumented Mexican immigrant taco truck worker. The guitar-led ballad combines empathy, faith and a universal message of goodwill.

• Tyler Childers featuring S.G. Goodman and Erin Rae, "Space and Time"

  • These two Kentuckians play deftly between Americana and classic R&B in Childers' take on Goodman's critically acclaimed 2020 single. Childers' latest album, "Rustin In The Rain," includes the traumatically bittersweet ballad -- an ode, according to its lyrics, to "ones who have loved me, the ones who have tried [and had] their grips on my heart and their grips on my mind." As a live performance, few songs are as arrestingly captivating.

• Brandy Clark, "She Smoked In The House"

  • Brandy Clark has been nominated for nearly 20 Grammys because she is one of the most empathetic and honest songwriters capable of risky, vulnerable art of this or any generation. On this track from her self-titled album, she crafts an earnest, engrossing remembrance of her grandmother. The portrait of a Pepsi-drinking listener of George Jones and Buck Owens, who "put holes in the couch" with "lipstick-colored [cigarette] butts" arrives with pristine clarity.

• Luke Combs, "Fast Car"

  • To The Tennessean, while celebrating his CMA award for Single of the Year for his cover of Tracy Chapman's 1989-released "Fast Car," Combs offered the following: "Shouts out to Tracy for one of the best songs ever. It's just a song that means so much to me as it has to millions and millions of other Americans and people around the world. That song is timeless."

• Jordan Davis, "Tucson Too Late"

  • Award-winning country performer Davis' single could be a doppelganger for Keith Whitley's 1986 breakout hit "Miami, My Amy." "[Keith] pushed boundaries as a composer, performer and songwriter. Meeting the expectation of the same career moments as the artists I grew up idolizing is important. [Accepting] that I could be that level of [creator] and occupy that headspace was cool," stated Davis told The Tennessean about the song.

• Diplo featuring Parker McCollum, "Lonely Long"

  • EDM and pop titan Diplo's three years of forays into Americana, country and Western music have yielded a bumper crop of open-format, genre-defying material. "Swamp Savant" album track "Lonely Long" finds breakout Texas country star McCollum highlighting, as Diplo noted to The Tennessean, that "as country music spreads, cool vocal tones and great songwriting creates a recipe for something which appeals to a type of crossover crowd the genre's never seen before."

• Charles Wesley Godwin, "Miner Imperfections"

  • Charleston, West Virginia native Godwin's ability to sort through immense generational trauma in under four minutes is impressive. His "Family Ties" album track unfurls stories from what he described to The Tennessean as his "strong, silent" Appalachian patriarchs. Their time spent as coal miners, day laborers and pastors "shaped them into hard, tough people," he said. Godwin's intellectual scope and hindsight's vision create a softening narrative.

• HARDY and Morgan Wallen, "Red"

  • HARDY's album "The Mockingbird & The Crow" contains "red," a song that, according to its lyrics, "ain't talking politics," but is rather "talking small town" ... "the sun coming up and going down, a John Deere turning up a hard work check or a bloodhound tracking some white tail buck down." "It's a ton of small-town [stereotypes] that we blended with a nod to politics. Then, in the chorus, we mention that 'we all bleed red.' We did it right. I'm proud of it," HARDY told The Tennessean.

• Walker Hayes, "Good With Me"

  • In 2023, Nashville veteran Hayes' -- known for his hits "AA" and "Fancy Like"-- released "Good With Me," which provides a 2 and 1/2 minute reckoning on 14 of his friends' opinions on ten hotly-discussed topics in America. It's a one-stop-shop for the most positive lowest common denominator showcase of the human spirit. "This song is a lighthearted look at the walls and doors we've erected around each other and how that's harming our social condition," Hayes told The Tennessean.

• Jason Isbell, "King of Oklahoma"

  • "King of Oklahoma" is an epic song about a substance-abusing blue-collar worker whose wife is threatening to leave him and take the kids. "She used to wake me up with coffee every morning / And I'd hear her homemade house shoes slide across the floor / She used to make me feel like the king of Oklahoma / But nothing makes me feel like much of nothing anymore," sings Isbell. The song was nominated for Best Americana Performance at the 2024 Grammy Awards.

• Jelly Roll featuring Lainey Wilson, "Save Me"

  • "A song that's now healed and helped millions of people is being acclaimed on the largest platform," Jelly Roll told The Tennessean about the Grammy-nominated success of his 2020-released power ballad. The song was another of 2023's massive collaborations, this one with 2023's CMA Entertainer of the Year. As president of BMG Nashville, Jon Loba signed Wilson as an artist and distributes Jelly Roll's music. "[Jelly Roll] has learned how to trust his singling voice as much as his rapping one," Loba said in a Tennessean feature.

• Gabe Lee, "Merigold"

  • Nashville native Gabe Lee's most significant power as a singer-songwriter is as a sensitive empath who excels at repairing the ties that bind in a nation torn asunder. His album track "Merigold" tells the story of a cancer-stricken wife whom Lee knew. It spins a comforting, connective song from a harrowing tale. The song transcends rural-urban division, allowing for shared pain and healing.

• Ashley McBryde, "Light On In The Kitchen"

  • Arkansas native McBryde has deeply entrenched unflinching, blue-collar honesty as her trademark brand in country music. Of the numerous homespun wisdoms in "Light On In The Kitchen," the refrain including "honey, trust yourself / You better love yourself" rings loudest. "Honest songs played by real musicians with real instruments is causing really honest emotions -- sometimes fear, eventually always love -- to come out of people," McBryde told The Tennessean.

• Megan Moroney, "I'm Not Pretty"

  • The "Tennessee Orange" vocalist's current calling card hinges upon just how emo and sad women want to be about the fresh wounds of heartbreak. "My songs are based on memorable, strong personal experiences like my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend convincing herself that she's prettier than I am -- after lurking on my Instagram feed at 2 a.m. in the morning and accidentally liking, then unliking, an old spring break picture of me from 2016 in Panama Beach City, Florida," she told The Tennessean.

• Maren Morris, "The Tree"

  • Aggrieved by some political and social leanings of country music's mainstream, pop star Maren Morris turned to an unlikely inspiration -- Hank Williams' 75-year-old country classic "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It" -- for her self-described "very righteously angry and liberating" "The Bridge" EP track. She described her current relationship to country as a "draining, transactional" one that "isn't nourishing in any healthy way. [I'm ready to] plant new seeds where it's safer to grow."

• Paramore, "This Is Why"

  • As a band defined by "no brand or outside projections," Middle Tennessee-borne Paramore returned to pop-rock superstardom after a half-decade hiatus in 2023. In their previously quoted February 2023 Tennessean feature, a song featuring the lyrics “If you have an opinion, maybe you should shove it / Or maybe you could scream it / Might be best to keep it to yourself," was highlighted by lead singer Hayley Williams as the best of what the band had previously learned and who they currently are.

• Brittney Spencer, "Bigger Than the Song"

  • 2023 saw singer-songwriter Spencer deliver a few glimpses of her soon-arriving album "My Stupid Life." "Bigger Than The Song" feels like a 2000s-era pop throwback delivered with country's songwriting fundamentals present, front and center. A refrain like "makes you wanna be fancy like Reba, a queen like Aretha, in love like Johnny and June" -- plus name-checking Janet Jackson, Alanis Morrissette and Dolly Parton -- feels refreshingly autobiographical.

• Alana Springsteen featuring Chris Stapleton, "Ghost in My Guitar"

  • Alana Springsteen's under 25 years old and already a decade-long Nashville veteran. Thus, after peeling back her emotional layers for the heartbreak anthem "ghost in my guitar" and hearing Chris Stapleton's distinctive guitar notes while standing offstage during a Mexican festival gig, she knew he'd be an ideal instrumental collaborator for the song. One pie-in-the-sky ask later, and what she described to The Tennessean as "an unimaginably great song with a personality that redefines my career," emerged.

• Morgan Wallen featuring Eric Church, "Man Made a Bar"

  • A song pairing pop's most infamous star, Wallen, alongside his longtime inspiration Eric Church, tells a heartwarming outlaw story of a man being counseled through his problems by a local bartender, who has also been the owner-operator of his establishment since his first divorce in 1985. When the words "I, too, have been in your boots, my friend" are sung, the heavy guitar feedback under Wallen's vocals offers every sense of tying the song to both late 1970s country and late 2000s rock.

• Charlie Worsham featuring Luke Combs, "How I Learned To Pray"

  • Combs once posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that veteran artist Worsham's 2013 track "How I Learned To Pray" deserved "so much more credit and attention." On Worsham's 2023-released collaborative EP, "Compadres," what he described to The Tennessean as an "unapologetically country" ballad finally finds them in the studio together. "The longest way around is the shortest way home," says Worsham, quoting author C.S. Lewis.

• Bailey Zimmerman, "Religiously"

  • "One day you're in love with someone, and the next day, you or your partner is scrolling on social media and you've been replaced," Bailey Zimmerman told The Tennessean about what motivates him to sing about love like he's a politician campaigning for hearts worldwide. "And now I'm in this cold bright light / And this don't even feel like life / 'Cause I don't have the only woman who believed in me / Religiously" is delivered, to wit, with unparalleled passion.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville music: Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Kacey Musgraves write 2023