Thoughts on Sam Hunt's "Walmart"

When you’re born and raised on the prairies, you either end up loving or hating contemporary country music. The music is ubiquitous: in retail spaces, at gas pumps, emanating from the car stereos of childhood friends’ parents when you’re in the backseat on field trips, at high-school dances, at weddings and funerals, at football and baseball games, at bars, at the vast majority of concerts and festivals on offer. In my experience, country’s omnipresence either made one a die-hard fan—someone we might say that was fully interpellated by Country Culture and lifestyle branding—or a contrarian hater who reacted against one’s unwilling immersion in the music by disdaining it and its small-minded, parochial worldview and retrograde politics. For this second group of people, basically every time a truly dumbass song like “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” “Accidental Racist,” or—more recently—“Try That in a Small Town” comes around, this serves as confirmation of how ridiculously debased country music has become, how estranged it is from its authentic, more fully rooted past.¹

Until I was around 24, I was firmly in the latter camp. I was raised on folk music and then I became a Dylan acolyte in my teens before I started getting into a wider variety of music online in the 2000s and 2010s via the rich music blogosphere. As a teenager, I silently despaired at my first girlfriend’s music taste, giving her burned copies of Death Cab and Keane CDs as presents to try to subtlety wean her off Nickelback, early Taylor Swift, and Alan Jackson. In my early twenties, contemporary country music was bound up in acute existential crises of purpose and place that I was grappling with at the time. Florida Georgia Line, Lady Antebellum, Blake Shelton, Sugarland, Big & Rich, and Eric Church were the ambient soundtrack—never chosen by me but seamlessly following me from place to place—to my alienation as I reckoned with being underemployed after college graduation and not having divined a reason—any reason—to take me away from Saskatchewan and everything that embarrassed me about it.

If I reflect on it, Sam Hunt’s 2014 LP Montevallo was perhaps the album that single-handedly reconciled me to contemporary country music. I remember being alone at my parents’ house on a weekend when they were gone on a trip. I had moved portable soundsystem speakers into the kitchen and was revelling in a brief window of (what felt like) boundless autonomy before they came back, not having yet found the initiative or self-confidence to move out on my own. Somewhere online I read about Montevallo, and, on a lark, cued it up over the speakers. Immediately, it was as if the record was speaking to me in a vernacular I intuitively understood. At the time, I was a big fan of one Aubrey Drake Graham—in particular, his 2011 opus Take Care—and Hunt, on Montevallo, felt like the Country Drake. The bracing confessionalism, the eye for lyrical detail, the deft switching between talk-rapping and singing: it was as if Take Care had been transposed to the country context seamlessly. I loved it instantly, but I also remember being scandalized by how much I liked it. What did it mean that I could like this music—music that I had defined myself against categorically for so long—and that it could speak to me and my life?

Of course, saying that Montevallo reconciled me to contemporary country music is ironic, given how much cross-pollination there is between the album and what was at the time contemporary hip-hop production. Hip hop was not only part of Hunt’s distinctly millennial vernacular, but it also came through in production elements like pitch-shifted vocals and 808 beats on many of the songs. The country music establishment has had longstanding issues with gatekeeping and often tokenizing performers of colour in the genre—not to mention the abysmal, systemic exclusion of female artists—but, at a sonic level, the genre has been strikingly permissive of “urban” sounds finding their way into songs about how good life is back on the holler. This is just one of the myriad rich and strange contradictions of contemporary country music and its fandom. Another one would be people on the Canadian prairies cosplaying as cowboys and identifying with the holler conceptually in the first place. Though I definitely understand folks—especially those that were inundated with country in their formative years like I was—being repulsed at the genre, I have found a great deal of enjoyment in the music over the past decade. I have come to like it both purely as music, and as a way of checking in on how a certain subcultural constituency in North America sees the world: in other words, the music gives a sense of what some kind of nebulous red state consensus appears to be on gender roles, marriage, labour, the state of the world, etc. Country music signifiers—trucks, beer, horses, rural agrarian life, women in blue jeans, manual labour and its inherent rewards—are also free to be taken up, of course, by anyone making art, and I’ve found that having my own familiarity and fluency with the cultural lexicon of country music heightens my enjoyment of those moments when people “outside” the genre decide to play with those signifiers. (Lana just announced her “country” album, Lasso, out later in 2024, and frankly I cannot wait!)

What Montevallo taught me by being so undeniably appealing was that I could find my own way into country music. Just as in any musical genre, I could explore and identify the performers and movements that spoke to me, and I did. I found someone like Gary Stewart, who I adore for his inimitable, quavering voice. I found Shania Twain and Mutt Lange, perhaps the greatest performer and producer pairing in twentieth century popular music. I found Vince Gill’s powerful and understated musicianship. I found Kacey Musgraves’ razor sharp, writerly observations on class and identity that she often follows with weapons-grade earworm choruses.

Allowing myself to explore country music also showed me, ironically, what had been evident around me my whole life: that country music is, fundamentally, a deeply utilitarian music. Country songs are put to use by their listeners, especially in contexts where indulging in overt emotionality may not be possible or socially acceptable. Admittedly, this point about the utility of song is probably true of every type of music, but in country I would hazard that this is even truer. For example, never have I enjoyed “Fishin’ in the Dark” more than when I’ve heard it in what has to be its ideal social setting: a couple Pils deep on the dance floor at a prairie wedding when, within seconds, the song empties all the party tables and has every couple partner dancing no matter what time of night or morning it is. Conversely, I don’t know if I had truly known what Waylon Jennings’ “Dreaming My Dreams with You” was about until I was abruptly dumped weeks before the winter holidays one year. Only then did the song’s deep pathos reveal itself to me, conveyed via Jennings’ rough, pained voice that continues intoning the chorus—seemingly solely for Waylon himself until the end of time—in the song’s final, fragile, fading moments.

This all leads us to Sam Hunt’s single, “Walmart,” which I only encountered last week, but—had I known about it last year—would have easily been one of my favourite songs of 2023.² In the years since Montevallo, Hunt has pursued a bit of an odd trajectory, revealing himself to be a reluctant country star focused—perhaps to the detriment of his career’s commercial prospects—on song craft and stabilizing a seemingly tumultuous personal life with his pre-fame partner. When he does resurface—as he did on 2017’s inescapable “Body Like a Back Road”—it is often with a smash, but he just as easily disappears. 2020’s great SOUTHSIDE is Hunt’s sole full-length after Montevallo and, since 2021, he seems to have recalibrated his understanding of an album release cycle, instead choosing to release a slow drip of singles across the last several years only as he finishes them. Hunt has dropped seven solo singles from 2021 to 2023, amounting to a lean 22 minutes of music, and many of them are very good.

“Walmart” is the best of these singles, and it is also the hardest to explain in a way that avoids making the song sound trite and gauche to non-country listeners. Down to the title, “Walmart” is deeply, deeply banal by design. The conceit of the song is simple: the speaker sees a former partner’s mother and young daughter from afar in a Walmart aisle, notices the daughter’s resemblance to the partner, and, upon speaking to the mother, is overcome with the realization that “everything happens for a reason / and losing [the partner’s] love ain’t the end of the world.”

Observant Stereogum music critic Tom Breihan, upon the single’s release, rightly noted the centrality of the superstore location to the song’s strange power:

You could be forgiven for seeing that title and thinking the track might be sponcon. It’s not — or I don’t think it is, anyway. In the song’s narrative, Walmart itself is not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just an everyday location where you might have a sudden, heartbreaking epiphany, which is the role that the superstore plays in many of our lives. […] “Walmart” is a ballad, built on piano and strings, about breakup and acceptance. Hunt has been thinking about a relationship that ended a long time ago, and then he runs into his ex’s mother and her daughter in those overlit Walmart aisles, and he comes to understand certain things about his life.

Now, if I were a politically-minded plunderphonic, or—perhaps to cite a more contemporary example—corecore artist, I could easily warp the song, chop and screw it so that it skips and repeats the Walmart chorus part as some kind of winking commentary on soulless late-stage capitalist non-places and the attendant emptiness of modern life. Perhaps I even have this artist living, as the kids say, “rent free” in my head. And he might say that the fact that Walmart—fucking Walmart—is the backdrop to this type of revelation is a symptom of a sick culture. Deep in the heart of red state America—the implicit setting of every country song—we aren’t even dignified with Starbucks as a “third place” setting for this revelatory encounter. Instead, we’re standing in Walmart—in an overlit aisle, as Breihan says—with “a bag of some chips.”

The “Walmart” single cover art, which I have posted above, certainly invites grim readings.³ It feels like a still that should’ve appeared in Nomadland, though, I admit, I saw that movie coming on four years ago, and I can’t remember if Frances McDormand’s character ever overnights in a Walmart parking lot. Parking lots, in addition to Walmarts, are pretty good candidates for non-places.

The power of “Walmart” as a song lies in the fact that it feels, to me, like it can hold all of this, regardless of if it was ever intended to double as some commentary on the emptiness of contemporary North American life, which I’m almost entirely certain it wasn’t. (I just don’t see Sam as that kind of writer.) The song is banal and ambiently grim—grim around the edges, in the places that fall immediately outside its conceit’s localized mise-en-scène—but it is still real. It is about raw emotions, dreams, and regrets, a life-changing moment of revelation and acceptance in a person’s life. Like all good country songs, “Walmart” is a utilitarian song—torn from life—offered up for one to use in one’s life. And who are we kidding ourselves? There’s a high probability that we’ll also run into an ex’s parent(s) and kid(s) at a freaking No Frills, too, and that it will totally existentially annihilate us for a microsecond while we cling to a chest full of Knorr Noodle Cups. Or, if our income is in a different tax bracket, this might take place in an Erewhon, Whole Foods, or at a farmers’ market, and we’ll be clutching different products. I have to say that I might still try my hand at chopping and screwing the track, though, if only for kicks.

1. Overlooking, of course, that that past, too, was likely an invention.

2. As I write this, “Walmart” is coming up on its one year anniversary, but hopefully you can excuse me writing about this song at this point in the calendar year when the current release schedule is such barren terrain.

3. Again, says Breihan, “I wonder if there had to be a lot of corporate negotiations for Hunt to use that title and the blue-handled shopping cart in the cover art.” Lol.