I’ve been so excited about The Highwomen, which is a supergroup consisting of Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Maren Morris, and Natalie Hemby, ever since they announced it. I’ve been anxiously awaiting actual music from this project for months. Last Friday they announced that they would be dropping their first song today, so I’ve known since then what my New Music Friday post was going to be this week. They’ll be doing their live concert debut this time next week at the Newport Folk Festival, so I’ll be looking forward to that for the next week.

As I have written about here several times before country music has a problem in that it’s decided that no one wants to listen to music by women. Maren Morris is one of the few female artists that has been able to break through the barriers of the country music machine and actually get played on country music radio. Brandi Carlile said she wanted to start this group because she grew up listening to fierce female country artists and it makes her sad that her daughters don’t have that now since women have been all but banished from country music radio. I don’t know if they’ll actually break through to country radio, but I see that CMT will be playing their video all day long so that’s something. The music is very old school country and doesn’t sound like today’s pop country, so I’m not sure that country radio is going to embrace it aside from the fact that it hates women. I however very much like it and can’t wait for the full album. I also love that the video features a bunch of other female country artists old and new. So go have a listen to the Highwomen’s first song “Redesigning Women” and hope that they manage to break through some barriers.