Pillbox Patti

One Liner: Drum machines and well-told stories from the swamps of north Florida

Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, but I'd call this country pop

Home: Nashville (originally from Starke, FL)

Poster Position: small Type 
Sunday.

Thoughts:  Not what I was expecting at all.  This is a songwriter, Nicollete Hayford, who has worked with a lot of people to write pop country gold.  She's even the daughter of songwriters.  But she then took some bits and pieces of her small-town Florida upbringing and turned them into this wild persona named Pillbox Patti.  I get some Lana Del Rey flavor in here, over the top of a lot of beat machines.  Just one album, and it's totally random.  One song will be a heart-felt piano ballad ("25 MPH Town"), then a country tune sounding like Margo Price singing about doing drugs in a small town, and the next is an 808-fueled trap track about partying ("Young and Stupid").  Here is a quote from an article about her: "Directly inspired by her array of influences, she recorded the "Florida" EP with the aid of an instrument key to not country music but hip-hop's birth: an E-mu SP 1200 drum machine and a sampler she procured from Kid Rock."  So, there you have it.  Another Kid Rock acolyte.

Songs she wrote are not familiar to me - Little Big Town’s ‘God Fearing Gypsies’, Koe Wetzel’s ‘Cabo,’ Kylie Morgan’s ‘Gucci,’ or Ashley McBryde’s ‘One Night Standards’, ‘A Little Dive Bar In Dahlonega’ and a bunch of other songs off Girl Going Nowhere and Never Will.  Her top streamers are Ashley McBride songs from some thing called Ashley McBride presents Lindeville, which feature McBride and a handful of other women on each track.

Just one album, 2022's Florida.  The surefire hit is the small-town anthem that tracks part of the Florida state song (and makes me think of "Dixie" as well).  "Suwannee," with 359k streams, is clever with that combination.

"coochi cutters!"  "Camel Cash speakers!"  Those are some awesome references to the white trash bits and pieces.  Also, "Yankees took the beach, left us with the swamp," that is a great line.  The Suwannee river runs from southern Georgia through Florida (although flows is a funny term for some of those Florida swamp rivers, it is more that it turns into the Okefenokee Swamp and that slowly pulses towards the Gulf of Mexico.  Solid tune.  I bet it is a real deal anthem for the people who came from that area.  

One article that I am reading is very assured about the ways that this is groundbreaking, but I'm less sure.  They say it is country "for sure," but some sort of "apocalyptic country pop."  Not so sure about that.  It definitely sounds different than anything else that is trying to "be" country, but a lot of it just sounds more like songwriter pop.  Nothing "country" there.

Some of these songs are very low streamers - three of them don't even have 5k streams, such as the crappy "Hookin Up."  But the other big streamer is "Young and Stupid," with 256k.

There is that Lana Del Rey sound I was talking about.  This almost feels like a Weird Al thing - like she's doing such a heavy parody thing that it feels like it's just a joke.  But then it seems like this is really the thing she was aiming for, an outsized persona with ridiculous lyrics.  I don't like that song nearly as much as some of the others on here.

I'll probably pass on this one.  Not terrible, but I also would rather hear a real band playing music than a vocalist singing over a drum machine.