I want to be a real country singer: Revisiting Joshua Hedley’s ‘Mr. Jukebox’

I hadn’t left the neighborhood, but I could smell the ash of a Canadian forest when I started thinking about the sequence of songs on Joshua Hedley’s 2018 album Mr. Jukebox.

This line of thinking grew from the kernel of juxtaposition between the album’s second and third tracks and occupied my brain for at least half a mile or so of a five-mile run. If I didn’t own a physical copy of Mr. Jukebox, I probably would have let the whole idea go, but I’m rather cursed with holding on and looking back.

I can’t honestly say what started this flurry of half-baked criticism either — I can’t even say Mr. Jukebox is my favorite Hedley album to be honest. The synapses started firing, and I was in the thick of it. Maybe I was stuck on my mother-in-law’s notion that I somehow don’t like country music. I don’t know what sparked that idea in her head either, but I do like country music — I’m just picky about what country music I like.

Before getting to that Venn Diagram that is the crux between songs two and three on the album, I probably need to say something about song number one. I think doing so gets to the intentionality with which Hedley undoes the classic tropes and cliches of his genre even as he masquerades and waltzes through all the genre’s tender sweet spots.