The 20 Best Country Radio Hits of 2020
2020 was a pretty good year for country, especially commercially, with Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen and Gabby Barrett all getting songs in the top 10 of the Hot 100. Sam Hunt finally released his first album in almost 6 years and it was kind of underwhelming, but it felt like the industry had already moved on from him being country's next big crossover star and had plenty others ready to go. Here’s the Spotify playlist, and the lists I’ve done so far
for rap and R&B.
#11 Country Airplay, #76 Hot 100
A killer lead single from my favorite country album of the last couple years, where every couplet is perfectly calibrated to tell the story in as few words as possible (my favorite right now is “I ain’t gonna say I never do this/ ‘Cause truth is, lonely makes a heart ruthless”). But that bittersweet melody hints at the emotion that McBryde’s lyric refuses to entirely give up, and that tension makes it a funny, sexy, sad little masterpiece of a country song.
#1 Country Airplay, #50 Hot 100
“Why We Drink” is an almost laughably simple song – every line of the verses AND the chorus is a litany of one-liners like “’Cause our team lost, ‘cause our team won,” concluding with “Yeah, that’s why we drink,” and the melody just climbs a little higher on the chorus. But it’s probably the best silly, catchy, vaguely irresponsible drinking anthem since Toby Keith’s peak, partly because the chorus ends with “’Cause it’s alcohol abuse if you pour it down the sink.”
#24 Country Airplay, #6 Hot 100
It’s funny how stiffly regimented country radio is, making every pre-ordained #1 hit wait months to slowly rise to the top after all the other ones get their turn. This year, Nashville’s slow and steady way of doing things ran up right against how fast things go in the streaming era: Morgan Wallen’s “7 Summers” and Luke Combs’s “Forever After All” became the 2nd and 3rd songs ever by male country artists to debut on the top 10 of the Hot 100. But their labels and the radio establishment had already set on slowly sending other songs by them to #1 first, so those songs will probably finally become serious radio hits sometime next spring. But “7 Summers” in particular really came out of nowhere after Wallen previewed a demo that became popular on TikTok, and I think it’s one of his best songs to date, I’m kind of annoyed that its big moment was blunted by radio’s focus on the decent but lesser “More Than My Hometown.”
#1 Country Airplay, #31 Hot 100
Georgia singer/songwriter Travis Denning has released 10 or 11 songs over the last 3 years and I like all of them, and have been rooting for him since his sleeper debut single “David Ashley Parker From Powder Springs,” so I was happy to see him get his first #1 this year, hope there’s more to come and an album in 2021.
#1 Country Airplay, #26 Hot 100
I really like “Bluebird,” but it’s kind of insane that it was Miranda Lambert’s first radio #1 in 8 years, a stat that really tells you how much the deck is stacked against even the biggest female stars on country radio.
#16 Country Airplay, #25 Hot 100
As much as Tom Petty’s influence looms over modern country music, I appreciate that Chris Stapleton actually got a couple Heartbreakers to play on his latest album, with Benmont Tench supplying the gorgeous organ on Starting Over’s title track.
#48 Country Airplay
Arguably no Canadian country singer has really become a major star since Shania Twain’s heyday, which is kind of crazy considering how Canadians like Drake, Justin Bieber and The Weeknd loom large over other genres. And out of Canada’s fertile country scene, I really wish Lindsay Ell more success in America after her appearance last year on Brantley Gilbert’s #1 “What Happens In A Small Town.” Ell’s fifth album Heart Theory kinda flew under the radar this year, but it’s a great album from a gifted guitarist and perceptive writer, a song cycle about the aftermath of a breakup.
#23 Country Airplay
In what feels like an astronomical coincidence, two of the Canadian country singers who’ve broken through in the last year or two are both women named Tenille who come from prairie provinces and were born in 1994. Tenille Townes, from Alberta, got a lot of buzz for “Somebody’s Daughter,” but I preferred the U.S. radio breakthrough by Tenille Arts from Saskatchewan. “Somebody Like That” kind of feels like a light rewrite of Keith Urban’s “Somebody Like You,” both musically and lyrically, but I love that song, so I’m okay with that.
#1 Country Airplay, #20 Hot 100
Most duets, especially in country, feature one singer on the first verse and the other on the second, or trading lines back and forth in each verse. But Eric Church drops in to “Does To Me” for the bridge and it’s a brilliant decision, letting him add a little hushed intimacy to the emotional bravado of an otherwise typical Luke Combs hit.
#3 Country Airplay, #30 Hot 100
A big gooey emotional song that hits a lot of great little details about family and relationships. I particularly like the live performance where Ingrid Andress plays piano and Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman from Little Big Town sing harmony. Andress got nominated in album categories at the Grammys for an 8-track EP, so she’s this year’s Lil Nas X.
#1 Country Airplay, #3 Hot 100
There’s something kind of eye-rolling and predictable about one of the year’s biggest country hits being a blonde “American Idol” finalist’s transparent attempt to xerox Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats.” But the version featuring Charlie Puth that’s currently all over pop radio has given me a renewed appreciation for the original (the song doesn’t even make sense as a duet!).
#11 Country Airplay, #75 Hot 100
“Songland” is my favorite music competition show on TV right now, and a fair number of good songs have come out of the first two seasons, but it’s been kind of frustrating to see the songs maybe do well on streaming the week after the episode airs and then just disappear. But I always figured that if the show birthed a hit, it would be in country, given that it’s just about the only genre where “American Idol” and “The Voice” can still help you launch a viable career. And sure enough, “Champagne Night” has steadily risen up the country airplay chart over the 8 months since their “Songland” episode aired, although in the middle of that they went through the whole weird controversial name change to Lady A.
#17 Country Airplay
I actually thought the best country song to come out of “Songland” was Florida Georgia Line’s “Second Guessing,” and it was disappointing that they ended up just burying it on an EP and not promoting it as a radio single. But one of the singles they released later in the year wound up being pretty good too. And the most fascinating soap opera in country this year was when Biden supporter Tyler Hubbard unfollowed Trump supporter Brian Kelley on Instagram, but FlaGaLine are still releasing a new album in February, those guys make a lot of money together.
#36 Country Airplay
Shortly after Lady Antebellum became Lady A, the Dixie Chicks also changed their moniker in June, which was a little bittersweet for me since it obscured the Little Feat-inspired origin of their band name. And their gaslight anthem brought the exiled former darlings of country radio their first entry on the airplay chart in 14 years, albeit just barely (incidentally, “Not Ready To Make Nice” also peaked at #36).
#3 Country Airplay, #29 Hot 100
It always seemed inevitable to me that Kane Brown would make a big crossover move to pop radio, and he finally did that this year with the Khalid and Swae Lee collaboration “Be Like That.” But the song he had on country radio at the same time, “Cool Again,” was also pretty good and kind of sounded a little more like a pop song to my ears.
#1 Country Airplay, #16 Hot 100
It’s crazy how long Morgan Wallen’s debut album lingered on country radio, I featured the album’s first single in my 2017 country wrap-up, and here I am putting the album’s 4th and highest charting single in the 2020 rundown. “Chasin’ You” was his second whiskey-themed single in a row, but I much prefer it to “Whiskey Glasses.”
#22 Country Airplay, #92 Hot 100
“Stick That In Your Country Song” is only the 2nd single of Eric Church’s career that he didn’t write or co-write (after 2011’s “Like Jesus Does”), but it’s not hard to understand why he chose Jeffrey Steele and David Naish’s song as the first single from his forthcoming 7th album. Church’s albums always seem to have a lead single that challenges country radio musically and/or lyrically, and winds up outside the top 10 before the more conventional second single goes to #1. And this track lays out Church’s approach as literally as possible, evoking hot button social issues (including a line that makes me cringe about how Baltimore is “where dreams become drugs on guns”) and then daring his contemporaries, “stick that in your country song, take that one to number one.” It stalled at #22, his lowest charting lead single since 2013.
#18 Country Airplay
Accurately sensing that society had progressed beyond the need for Rascal Flatts after Dan + Shay took their career, the band decided to call it a day and announced a (now postponed) final tour and released this as their farewell single. But it all got a little overshadowed by a cover of two Rascal Flatts songs becoming the corniest viral rap hit of 2020.
#32 Country Airplay, #42 Hot 100
Taylor Swift’s exile from country radio for most of the last decade has been largely voluntarily, and even when she stepped away from big bombastic pop anthems this year and released a quieter back-to-basics album, Folklore, it wasn’t really a country record. But she still sent one song to country radio, one of the only songs on the country charts with harmonica on it in recent memory.
#32 Country Airplay
I included Maren Morris’s “The Bones” on my 2019 country list, but it grew into one of the biggest songs of 2020 in any genre, and so I’ll count it as part of the 2020s when I do an end-of-decade list one day. I was surprised that the follow-up single didn’t do better, I really liked it, and it might be the last song on the country charts produced by Michael Busbee, who died of brain cancer in 2019.
1. Luke Bryan – “One Margarita”
2. HARDY f/ Lauren Alaina and Devin Dawson – “One Beer”
3. Lee Brice – “One Of Them Girls”
4. LOCASH – “One Big Country Song”
5. Florida Georgia Line – “I Love My Country”
6. Blake Shelton f/ Gwen Stefani – “Nobody But You”
7. Blake Shelton f/ Gwen Stefani – “Happy Anywhere”
8. Kenny Chesney – “Happy Does”
9. Mackenzie Porter – “These Days”
10. Sam Hunt – “Breaking Up Was Easy In The 90’s”
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on Saturday, December 05, 2020 at 11:24 AM.
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