Lily Rose

One Liner: Odd marriage of country and R&B/rap-ish vocals from a lesbian in Nashville.  Quite a pile of contradictions.

Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, but this is Nashville country
Home: Atlanta/Nashville

Poster Position: 25
Weekend Two Only.  Friday.

Thoughts:   Huh.  Johnny Depp's daughter is Lily-Rose Depp.  I did not know this fact.  Also, this is not Johnny Depp's daughter.  Instead, this is a country artists from Atlanta who hit through TikTok - of course - which gave her hundreds of thousands of new followers in 2020.  She wears a baseball cap in every photo I've seen, and in a curveball to the normal Nashville country type, she is married to a woman.

She started on open mics after spending five years in college, and then in 2017 decided to move to Nashville and seek a full career in country music.  She says that she experienced way more pushback on being gay when in Athens, GA than when she has been in Nashville, which is honestly surprising.

Some of these songs are that terrible juxtaposition of country with R&B that is out there right now, and I hate it.  I'm sure it hits well with some people, but something like "I Don't Smoke" is just a bad mix of drum machines and quasi-rap singing that I know belongs on country radio but also seems to wish it was on contemporary R&B radio.  It doesn't work at all to me.  Semi-country rap, singing about "creeping on your IG," the whole package.

The big track that blew up on TikTok was "Villain," which now has 30.3 million streams.

See?  Sounds like R&B from her voice and the phrasing, but there are also some country feels in there.  Just does both things poorly instead of existing in one of the other.  Feels like it should have been used in NCIS or something to highlight a poignant bust of some high school kid who got mixed up with the wrong crowd.  It doesn't help that she's doing hand motions, as she sings, like she's a rapper feeling himself.

Just one album - 2021's Stronger Than I Am.  The top song is without a doubt the "Villain" one. No other song cracks 4 million streams.  I'll give you her new single to try out for one more track before I move on.  "I'd Be You" has 582k streams.

Got that slide guitar working to bring the country-cred, but then singing openly about taking a lady home to wreck the bed.  I like that flipping of the script.  What does she mean by "Shooting that Jack" in the chorus?  Is that a threat?

Don't care for it.  Hope she does great things.