Midland’s Jess Carson Touts His Country Roots
Arizona, Oregon and California aren’t the states most people associate with “country,” but one member of Midland says that’s a mistake.
The country music newcomers are native to those states, though they now call Texas home. “If we could be magically transported to where I grew up, it’s as country as any place in Texas,” the group’s Jess Carson says through the group’s record label of his Oregon roots. “And there are elements of it that are much more Southern than Texas. Rural Oregon is very, very poor and it can be a very scary place to get lost in and to drive around in.”
But the scary and not-so-scary parts have one very big thing in common. “Country music is the genre that envelops everything,” Jess continues. “That’s what people listen to; it’s pickup trucks. So Texas has a large reach in its culture of ‘westerness,’ but it’s interesting that people in rural Oregon speak with what you would consider a southern accent. And I guess the culture came from here [and] maybe it spread to there. I don’t know, but that’s what I grew up around.”
Midland’s debut album is set for release September 22nd. “We’re working really hard at cultivating an album full of songs that mean something to us but also fit together,” the group’s Cameron Duddy recently told Billboard. “Picking songs that fit together nice and tell our story and represent the place that we’re at right now in music has been the agenda for putting this thing together, and we’re very excited to share it with people. We’re proud of it.” Read more here.
Teddy McDonald is a fun-lovin’ country music fan man living in Nashville, Tennessee.
