The Kentucky songwriter is increasingly probing tough topics in his country songs
Country music is increasingly starting to address difficult subject matter and Elvie Shane is at the forefront of that movement. Today, he drops the new song “Pill,” which dissects the fallout of the opioid crisis. In the video for the song, filmed in New York, the Kentucky songwriter paces through Lower Manhattan, singing into his cell phone and lighting up cigarette after cigarette. He’s playing lost and troubled — and he sells it well.
The video opens with a text to Shane: “Hey man you should reach out to your cousin Jerry and his girl.” The implication is that they’re in a bad way, and we soon put together that his cousin in the throes of an opioid addiction that doesn’t end well. By video’s end, Shane is changing from his baggy jeans and Vans snapback into funereal black pants and a button-down, and lighting yet another smoke. It’s jarring stuff, and further cements Shane as a new voice of the damaged, addicted, and lost in country music.
Shane, whose hard-charging “Forgotten Man” represents the plight of the blue-collar worker in an inequitable America, wrote “Pill” with Lee Starr and Nick Columbia and turned again to his go-to producer, Oscar Charles, who oversaw Shane’s excellent 2021 debut, Backslider.
“’Pill’ is my story, told from the perspective of a note to me from my little brother in my most trying times. It’s an apology to those I love for the turmoil I put them through,” Shane said in a statement. “But for me this goes way beyond just what my family and I have gone through. I want to be a vessel and share other people’s struggles and experiences, even if it helps one person, that means I did my job.”
The video ends with a pair of titles cards: one a sobering statistic that 600,000 people worldwide die every year from drug abuse; another for the overdose prevention helpline Never Use Alone (800-484-3731).
Shane is currently on the road with his Broken Arrows Band and will play the Burl in Lexington, Kentucky, tonight, before heading west in October for a gig at the El Rey Theatre in L.A.