Are We Country?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
— William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

For as long as Champagne Sunday has been in existence, we’ve been told by some people that we have a bit of a Country sound to us. For as many years, we’ve refused to be called “Country” mostly because we don’t really like Country music. Well, let me rephrase: When people say that they are Country music fans, we tend to not like the music that they’re into, and when we hear Country music stations on the radio we quickly change the channel as though we’re afraid of catching a disease from them.

We have just always had an extreme distaste for the lame-ass Country stars singing cliches that other people wrote, drenching their vocals with twang and auto-tune, with a backing band of so-good-they’re-robotic musicians, playing with canned emotions that only serve to appease their demographic. Granted, this same kind of crap can be found in EVERY genre of music, but it seems to be rampant in Country. I dare say, it’s nearly the requisite standard for an artist of that genre. And even then, there are absolute gems to be found there that we cannot deny.

All that being said, a lot of the music we write (and even a lot that we listen to) really DOES seem to have undertones (even OVERtones) that can be best described as “Country”. We’ve come to a point where we’re tired of fighting it. We’ve been plagued our entire career by a lack of good marketing. People need to put us in a box that the masses can understand. It’s like putting Wheaties in a Wheaties box. You buy the box because you know what’s inside. If the box misrepresents its contents (for example, you get home and the Wheaties box has Lucky Charms inside), people turn away from it. We’ve never been able to put an accurate label to our music, and we believe that has really held us back.

But, hell, if changing the genre on our ReverbNation page from “Rock/Adult Alternative/Indie” to “Country” finally brings us the success that we’ve been killing ourselves for, then so be it.  We are, after all, a beer-loving married couple, living in an RV with a dog, playing acoustic music that people often describe as “Country-ish”. Regardless of how little we care to be lumped in with it all, it may just be time to bite the bullet and say “Fuck it. Yee-haw.”

Honestly, you, our loyal fans and friends are better suited to answer this than we are. What do you think?