ROCKABILLY ELEGY:

His real contribution has more to do with his region than it does with his genre. He's written a set of great songs, sorrowful tracks that bring to life the malaise of the 21st-century Rust Belt in a way that's far more personal than political.

The opioid epidemic haunts McKinley's music, and he speaks from firsthand experience. A stand-alone single he released earlier this year, called "Ghost of My Best Friend," is about a friend's overdose, and 2020 also brought the overdose of his mother. The best song on Die Midwestern is called "Bag of Pills"; the lyrics involve both dealing and using drugs:

You want it, I can feel it

Got a bag of pills I've been dealin'

So I can take you drinkin'

Don't tell me about a love thing

We'll get high and talk until mornin'

Then you can catch me sleepin'.

It's also one of the least country tracks here. In its instrumentation and overall vibe, it almost reminds me of the Smashing Pumpkins' "Disarm."

And if the album is anchored in Ohio's troubles, it's also saturated with thoughts of leaving. In the record's opening lines, our protagonist and his girlfriend "hit the road" -- a happy scene that carries the baggage of past troubles, as the chorus notes that "for the first time in a long time, we were all right." There's an old joke that when you play a country song backward, you get your wife back, your dog back, your pickup truck back, and so on, and this would appear to turn that convention on its head: Things are looking up! But eventually the bridge comes around, and it turns out that fleeing was just a dream. When he wakes up, the guy's girlfriend is on the phone and wants him to get his stuff out of her house.

The title track, which comes immediately after, is even more direct about leaving Ohio in particular:

I've been thinking that I should go

'Cause if I don't leave now

Then I'm never gonna leave Ohio, Lord

And that's a chance that I just can't take

Now that I'm getting older

"The Midwest is full of drugs that end up controlling people," McKinley told The Fader about the song. "It's about my love/hate relationship with Ohio. I love it because it's everything that I am but I hate it because I've seen it take my loved ones' lives, I've seen it make hopeful people hopeless. Temptations run all along the Ohio River, but it's so hard to watch the Ohio fade in the rearview mirror."

Similarly, he remarked to Forbes that "there are a lot of people I know here who have talent, who could do something if they just went somewhere else."

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