Country Songs from the Toaster Vol. I opens with a live recording. Track 1, Shining Star, was captured at a small bar in Nashville, unnamed and unremarkable in the way that the best rooms for music tend to be. The rest of the album was recorded in a studio. But the album begins in the bar, which is exactly where road country belongs.

Tyler Travis and The Strummers bring Kitzmiller's country songwriting to life across eleven tracks that sit in the outlaw country tradition with a lean toward the sounds of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the voices in country music were worn and the songs were about the road and the honesty of having been on it too long. The vocals here are well aged. The songs earn them.

About the AlbumS

Road country does not have clean edges. It lives between the classic outlaw tradition and the bar-circuit storytelling that happens when no one important is watching. These are songs from that position: a man who has seen enough road through enough bars to know what matters and what does not, delivering that knowledge to rooms that may not be paying close enough attention. He sings his heart out regardless. That is the nature of the thing.

Shining Star sets the tone before the studio takes over. What follows is more tracks of country music that does not perform its own credibility. It simply has it.