The 20 Best Country Radio Hits of 2023
2023 was a historic year for country music, with four songs reaching #1 on the Hot 100 and, for the first time, the top three songs on the chart were all country. It was kind of bittersweet, though -- I didn't like most of those big historic hits, and neither did a lot of people who do or don't usually listen to country. I would've hoped that a year like this came with a song with big crossover people that people of all walks of life love like "Before He Cheats" or something. Still, I thought it was a pretty strong year for mainstream country beyond those songs. Here's the lists I posted last week for rap, pop, R&B, and rock/alternative, and the Spotify playlist for the country list:
1. Lainey Wilson - "Heart Like A Truck"
#2 Country Airplay, #29 Hot 100
Two of the dominant themes of country hits in 2023 were Lainey Wilson and the word "truck," to the point that I made a Venn diagram illustrating the point. In February, Wilson had two different songs in the country airplay top 10 at once, and October she again had two different songs in the top 10. And in November, Wilson became CMA's first female Entertainer of the Year since Taylor Swift way back in 2011, all well deserved. I rolled my eyes when I inevitably heard "Heart Like A Truck" in a commercial for Dodge Ram trucks, but it didn't make me like the song any less.
2. Jordan Davis - "What My World Spins Around"
#1 Country Airplay, #40 Hot 100
The Eagles drafted a defensive tackle named Jordan Davis in 2022, so I kept seeing Jordan Davis's name trending on social media this year but it was always NFL Jordan Davis. The country Jordan Davis had a great year, though, he's been making hits since 2017 but it felt like he really arrived as a marquee star with "What My World Spins Around" and "Next Thing You Know."
3. Kelsea Ballerini - "If You Go Down (I'm Goin' Down Too)"
#17 Country Airplay
Kelsea Ballerini surprise released an EP about her divorce from Morgan Evans, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, in February, and it felt like she promoted it more heavily than any of her full-length albums to date. But I'm glad she didn't completely abandon her 2022 album Subject To Change, giving the second single "If You Go Down (I'm Goin' Down Too)" one of 2023's best music videos, and a CMT Awards performance full of performers from "RuPaul's Drag Race" in protest of Tennessee's ridiculous anti-drag legislation.
4. Chris Stapleton - "White Horse"
#9 Country Airplay, #12 Hot 100
Chris Stapleton doesn't sing until 47 seconds into "White Horse," and I love how that slow burning intro builds and builds up to that moment. Not many of Chris Stapleton's contemporaries would even try that in this "don't bore us, get to the chorus" era, although of course the last time I heard "White Horse" on the radio, the DJ talked all over the intro anyway.
5. Ashley McBryde - "Light On In The Kitchen"
#22 Country Airplay
My favorite Ashley McBryde songs are a little acidic, funny, tinged with dysfunction or sex or working class hard luck stories. But when she writes something sweet and heartwarming, it's still full of wry details and humanity because she's just a really fucking good songwriter, one of the best we have today.
6. Jelly Roll - "Need A Favor"
#1 Country Airplay, #13 Hot 100
Jelly Roll is, even more than Machine Gun Kelly or Post Malone, a perfect case study in just how quickly a white rapper can cross over once he starts singing. He plugged away for over a decade as a rapper, finding regional success alongside Three 6 Mafia's token white protege Lil Wyte. But when Jelly Roll started crooning and playing guitar, he got a major label deal, and in the course of three singles rapidly became famous: "Dead Man Walking" was his rock radio breakthrough, "Son of a Sinner" topped the country charts, and then "Need A Favor" crossed over to pop while still getting played on rock and country radio. For all I know, Jelly Roll could be on the dance charts next year, but I get the sense that country is where he's gonna continue to thrive for the foreseeable future.
7. Chris Janson - "All I Need Is You"
#11 Country Airplay
Chris Janson never quite got saddled with the 'bro country' tag,' but most of his previous hits were jocular trifles like "Buy Me A Boat" and "Fix A Drink." By contrast, "All I Need Is You" is a sweetly straightforward and sentimental love song with a rich string arrangement, but instead of dragging it out as a ballad, it's a refreshingly brisk uptempo song that gets in and out in 2 minutes and 42 seconds.
8. Luke Combs - "Going, Going, Gone"
#1 Country Airplay, #23 Hot 100
"Going, Going, Gone" was the song Luke Combs played for his first Grammys performance, and it returned him to #1 on country radio after his previous single broke his historic streak of #1s. It was also the first time Combs played guitar on one of his own studio tracks, and he spoke openly about how the song was his attempt to write something with a memorable guitar lick like his favorite song, Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car." A few months later, Combs released a cover of "Fast Car" that became a massive crossover hit that exposed Combs to a ton of new listeners, but I still prefer "Going, Going, Gone" as an expression of "Fast Car"'s influence on him.
9. Jackson Dean - "Fearless (The Echo)"
#21 Country Airplay
Usually, when an album track is re-recorded for release as a single, there's an obvious commercial motivation, like a big-name guest or a more radio-friendly arrangement. This year's "Fearless (The Echo)" didn't sound too dramatically different from the original on Jackson Dean's 2022 debut album Greenbroke, so I was curious and asked about when I got to interview Dean for The Baltimore Banner over the summer. It turns out he had just grown a lot as a vocalist after a couple years of touring and performing the song live and thought he could sing it better, and once I went back and compared, he's right, the new recording is a pretty impressive step up vocally.
10. Brothers Osborne - "Nobody's Nobody"
#22 Country Airplay
Like Jackson Dean, Brothers Osborne hail from Maryland, and like Jackson Dean, I got to interview John Osborne for The Baltimore Banner this year. And while I was skeptical of the band making an album without Jay Joyce (my perennial favorite who produced three songs on this list and about that many every other year), I love what they ended up doing with Mike Elizondo, who co-produced Dr. Dre hits like "In Da Club" before he moved to Nashville.
11. Morgan Wallen - "One Thing At A Time"
#8 Country Airplay, #10 Hot 100
This year Morgan Wallen continued to have historic, boundary-smashing popularity on par with Garth Brooks in some senses, and other senses exceeding Brooks's success with "Last Night," the biggest country song in Hot 100 history. It all baffles me a little bit, as someone who thinks Wallen is just a solid middle-of-the-pack country singer. One of the things that frustrates me is that my favorite single from each Wallen album has been the one that wasn't a huge radio hit ("The Way I Talk," "Seven Summer," and now "One Thing At A Time").
12. Chase Rice - "Bad Day To Be A Cold Beer"
#52 Country Airplay
I Hate Cowboys & All Dogs Go To Hell is my favorite country album of 2023, a really moving and smart, funny record from a C-list hitmaker I never expected it from, and it's disappointing that even the light-hearted drinking song didn't do great on the radio.
13. Zach Bryan f/ Kacey Musgraves - "I Remember Everything"
#27 Country Airplay, #1 Hot 100
I have no ill will against talented guys like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell (the latter follows me on Twitter!), but sometimes it gets a little boring to me how there are these alt-country critical favorites standing just beyond the country mainstream that people use as a stick to beat the Nashville stuff that's often just as good. So it's been exciting to see someone like Zach Bryan kind of blow past the checkpoints of an Isbell-like career and top the Hot 100 and do numbers that country radio can't ignore. And it was fun to see him reach that level with Kacey Musgraves, who I always thought deserved a little more radio play for her post-"Merry Go 'Round" singles. The other three country songs that went #1 this year are in the "worst" list, but I like "I Remember Everything."
14. Lainey Wilson - "Watermelon Moonshine"
#1 Country Airplay, #21 Hot 100
A lot of female country stars over the last ten years briefly seemed like they had a chance at bucking the trends and becoming a steady hitmaker, only to fade away after a couple big hits. So I've been very cautiously optimistic about Lainey Wilson's success, and I think the moment when it really felt like she's probably here to stay came just recently, when she won CMA's Entertainer of the Year (the first woman since Taylor Swift in 2011) and notched her second solo #1 (with no other women getting solo #1s in the last two years).
15. Megan Moroney - "Tennessee Orange"
#4 Country Airplay, #30 Hot 100
Megan Moroney's probably the most promising new female country star since Lainey Wilson's breakthrough, I love the way her debut single is a happy song but kind of has this wistful melody where you're not sure if it's going to be a sad song when it starts.
16. Old Dominion - "Memory Lane"
#4 Country Airplay, #27 Hot 100
Old Dominion is good for an amiable single every couple years, and this is one of their best, I love the guitar solo (which I want to assume is played by Old Dominion guitarist Brad Tursi, who wrote Teddy Robb's excellent single "Question The Universe" this year).
17. Carly Pearce f/ Chris Stapleton - "We Don't Fight Anymore"
#22 Country Airplay, #94 Hot 100
Carly Pearce's 29: Written In Stone is one of my favorite country albums of the decade so far, so I'm pretty excited to hear her next album. The first single has kicked around the airplay chart for almost 6 months, and I thought that its chances at being a hit might be diminished once Stapleton released a new solo single, but I was happy to see that "We Don't Fight Anymore" reached a new peak just this week.
18. Sam Hunt - "Outskirts"
#36 Country Airplay
A few years ago, it seemed like Sam Hunt or maybe Kane Brown was the country star most likely to reach the huge crossover success currently enjoyed by Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs. Brown is still making some pretty big records, but Hunt has kind of fallen off the map -- he's only released two albums in ten years, and his last two singles were his first to miss the Hot 100 entirely. That's a shame because he's really finally started to grow on me, I like "Outskirts" a lot.
19. Parker McCollum - "Handle On You"
#2 Country Airplay, #30 Hot 100
I wasn't big on McCollum's breakthrough single "Pretty Little Heart," but all three of the singles he's had out since then have been great, this one hooked me right from the first line ("I went and bought the biggest bottle they got 'cause you're gone").
20. Justin Moore f/ Priscilla Block - "You, Me & Whiskey"
#3 Country Airplay, #37 Hot 100
It wouldn't feel right doing one of these lists without my perennial favorite vocalist Justin Moore, although I'm disappointed that Big Machine seems to be downsizing his albums, his last couple records were 8 songs and well under 30 minutes.
The 10 Worst Country Radio Hits of 2023:
1. Jason Aldean - "Try That In A Small Town"
2. Oliver Anthony Music - "Rich Men North Of Richmond"
3. Morgan Wallen - "Last Night"
4. Shane Profitt - "How It Oughta Be"
5. Parmalee - "Girl In Mine"
6. Russell Dickerson - "God Gave Me A Girl"
7. Dylan Scott - "Can't Have Mine"
8. Kane Brown - "Bury Me In Georgia"
9. Bailey Zimmerman - "Religiously"
10. Joe Nichols - "Good Day For Living"
Previously: The 20 Best Country Radio Hits of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
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on Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 8:59 AM.
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