It’s Saturday night in Laughlin, Nevada, a resort town about 90 miles south of Las Vegas, and Jason Aldean is about to introduce the song that most everyone has come to hear.
“I told you guys earlier we put out a brand new album last year called Highway Desperado, right?” Aldean says, pausing for a moment to wipe his face with his hand. He’s wearing a perfectly weathered Charlie Daniels Band T-shirt, along with tight-fitting jeans, and his signature straw hat, and speaks with the commanding ease of an everyman superstar.
“What I didn’t tell you was that the first single that came off that album completely made everybody lose their shit,” he continues.
The entire venue erupts into applause, and a sea of phones goes up.
“I don’t know, call me crazy, I just feel like it’s a crazy day in our country when I’m the asshole for calling people out for disrespecting our cops…”
The din from the audience is so loud that it’s difficult to make out every word as various, competing chants spontaneously break out:
USA! USA! USA! LET’S GO BRANDON!
“… fucking up our cities and acting like a bunch of idiots!”
Amid the cheering and whistling, various concertgoers raise their aluminum beer bottles and boot-shaped souvenir glasses in accord with his speech.
“Check it out. It ain’t my job to stand up here and tell you guys who to vote for come November. That is not my place to do that.”
TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!
“I make it very known where I stand, that doesn’t mean you have to stand in the same place I stand, alright? But what I will say is, if you don’t like what’s going on and you don’t get out in November and vote, you’ve got no reason to say anything. Just shut your ass up.”
He applauds his supporters for having “common sense” and thanks them for standing by him through the backlash to the song in question.
That song is, of course, “Try That in a Small Town.”
It’s a version of the speech he’s given at every concert since last year, when the release of the video for “Try That in a Small Town” ignited a media firestorm that itself became the target of large-scale conservative backlash. At other recent concerts, Aldean has dedicated the song to former President Trump — with whom he appeared at the Republican National Convention in July — and draped himself in the American flag.
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LOCATED AT THE SOUTHERN TIP of Nevada, Laughlin (pronounced “Lawf-lin,” per its namesake, the casino mogul Don Laughlin) attracts a fairly diverse crowd, largely from neighboring Arizona and California. Offering a unique mix of gambling and water activities — just across the Colorado River is Bullhead City, Arizona, home to most of the people who work in Laughlin — it’s like a cheaper, emptier Las Vegas. Like Vegas, Laughlin sits in reliably blue Clark County, though next-door Mohave County is one of the reddest in Arizona. Based on the preponderance of “Fuck Biden” beer koozies on display at the otherwise stunning Lake Mohave recreation area, it’s safe to say we’re in Trump territory.
The day is still upsettingly hot as I make my way over from the Tropicana, an imposing casino hotel illuminated at all hours of the night in an alien green, to the outdoor venue where Aldean is set to perform. I’m thankful that I came during an apparent cool front, as temperatures in Laughlin can tick past 100 degrees even well into September. Low 90s is, I am told, blessedly cool for this time of year. Before even making it through security, I’m greeted with an array of creatively militant T-shirts that say things like I’M VOTING FOR THE CONVICTED FELON and THE DEADLIEST VIRUS IN AMERICA IS THE MEDIA in big block letters. This is to be expected; sartorial expression is a key part of the shared MAGA experience.
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What I hadn’t anticipated is seeing so many variations of shirts containing the same message: TRY THAT IN A SMALL TOWN. There are crewneck T-shirts and V-neck T-shirts and tank tops and crop tops and muscle tees in all manner of different colors and materials. There are shirts with the American flag on them and shirts with Aldean’s face on them and shirts with both Aldean’s face and the American flag on them. There are shirts with the song title written in cutesy, swooping fonts and others that have the words wrapped around a menacing skull design.
Attempting to fit in, I purchase a beer and make my way over to the smoking area, a collection of bar-height tables near the bathrooms where people are gathered to casually violate the venue’s no-smoking policy. There I meet Patti, a 66-year-old retiree from Sierra Vista, Arizona, who is wearing a red, white, and blue shirt with TRY THAT IN A SMALL TOWN written on the stomach. Patti doesn’t mince words about the song’s detractors.
“I just thought they were idiots,” she says, appearing vaguely annoyed by my line of questioning. “They’re idiots that obviously did not grow up in a small town.”
Despite admittedly not being the biggest fan of Aldean’s music, she says the song “means a lot” to her and she takes offense at the idea that there is anything racist about it. For Patti, the song seems to function as a sort of an “Empire State of Mind” — Jay-Z’s celebration of New York — for small-town folk, a universal anthem that transcends race, class, or political affiliation.
“In my eyes, there’s no connection between this shirt, that song, and the election,” she says. “And we’d all be a lot better off if the media would keep their damn noses out of stuff.”
It’s a refrain that I hear repeatedly throughout the night, which is confusing, given that the writers of “Try That in a Small Town” have been very clear about the political nature of the song. In a recent episode of the Try That in a Small Town Podcast — more on that in a second — songwriter Kelley Lovelace says the title came to him during a “prayer walk” he undertook after watching footage of people being assaulted on the streets of different cities. He called up his songwriting buddy Neil Thrasher, who eventually connected him with Tully Kennedy and Kurt Allison, both members of Aldean’s band. For Lovelace and the others, writing the song was a cathartic experience and an exciting chance to have their conservative views be heard.
“As a conservative, you get to hear a lot. You don’t get to say a lot. So for us in that moment it was like, we just want to say this,” Lovelace recalled on the podcast. He expresses frustration at the perception that conservative Christians are “narrow-minded” and says the song “gave millions of people a voice who have been kind of beat down or quietened.”
Lovelace and the other writers frame the writing and release of “Try That in a Small Town” as a valiant battle against industry censorship. Even in country music, which has a long history of suppressing liberal viewpoints, Lovelace and the other writers feared that the song might just be too agenda-pushing for the well-oiled Nashville machine. But despite the song’s polarized reception — critics and at least one lawmaker have called it “incendiary,” “heinous,” and “the most contemptible country song of the decade” — the mood on the podcast is celebratory, exultant even. And the writers have every reason to celebrate.
Buoyed by conservative rage and a wave of digital downloads, the song gave Aldean and the songwriters their first Billboard Hot 100 Number One hit and became one of only 28 songs that have topped both the country and the pop charts in Billboard history. Last month, the songwriters won a “10 Songs I Wish I’d Written” award at the Nashville Songwriter Awards — as voted on by their professional songwriter peers — where they were honored along with the likes of Jelly Roll, Chris Stapleton, and Jordan Davis. At the same ceremony, Alan Jackson accepted the organization’s Kris Kristofferson Lifetime Achievement Award.
To date, guests on the Try That in a Small Town Podcast have included anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, anti-DEI crusader Robbie Starbuck, and former national security official and Trump loyalist Kash Patel. Naturally, there’s also Try That in a Small Town Podcast merch, with T-shirts, mugs and trucker hats, as well as an incipient YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok presence. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the writers trying to gain entréee into the lucrative conservative podcast space — as the saying goes, every actor wants to direct and every writer wants to host a successful podcast — but it’s telling that the writers launched a political podcast using the name of the song that the media has supposedly twisted into a partisan provocation.
Surprisingly, given Aldean’s newfound reputation as a firebrand (and frequent Try That in a Small Town Podcast guest), the rest of the Highway Desperado Tour set is relatively non-combative. He announces early in the night that he’s not big on stage talk and mostly delivers on his promise to let the songs speak for themselves. On an earlier leg of the tour, he opened each night with “Tough Crowd” — a pandering ode to the “tough” blue-collar and military types who make up the audience at his shows — but he’s since retired that song in favor of the vaguely risqué radio hit “Burnin’ It Down” from 2014. In fact, apart from “Try That in a Small Town,” there aren’t many overtly political moments in the set. Even his performance of the sneering “Fly Over States” strikes me as semi-ironic given that the Aldeans use a private jet and frequently share vacation photos from luxury destinations in Europe, the Caribbean, Disneyworld, and the like.
One person at the show who doesn’t shy away from talking politics is Larry, a 54-year-old veteran who I find leaning against the railing in front of the bathrooms. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and is one of maybe four Black people I’ve seen all night.
Larry lives in Fort Mohave, Arizona, about 12 miles to our south, and frequently attends country concerts in Laughlin. He voted for Trump in 2020 but says he’s undecided this time around because “they both make valid points.”
Of the controversy around “Try That in a Small Town,” Larry says that Aldean’s intentions were good and critics have misunderstood the song’s meaning. He adds that he wanted to buy his own “Try That” shirt, but they didn’t have his size. His wife, who is white, says that he should tell me about a different shirt of his, which is apparently a big hit around town.
“Oh, yeah,” Larry says, smiling. “It says ALL LIVES MATTER. JESUS DIED FOR ALL OF US.”
Then there’s Cathy, a former correctional officer who’s wearing a shirt that says THIS IS OUR F*ING COUNTRY, which she chirpily tells me is from Brittany Aldean’s clothing line. She spends most of the show waving a small American flag overhead, to the obvious chagrin of those standing behind her. I ask if she does this at every concert, and she says it’s “only for artists that are strictly American and are for America.”
Aside from being extremely friendly, Cathy is also quite fluent in right-wing talking points, drawing parallels between Aldean and murder-defendant-cum-conservative-media-darling Kyle Rittenhouse. For her, “Try That in a Small Town” is yet another case of the media trying to cancel an innocent person.
“The video showed more Caucasian than it did BLM or Hispanics, even though BLM was doing most of the rioting,” she says. “For them to make out that it’s racist is just stupid.”
Besides “Try That in a Small Town” and a couple tepid breakup songs, the only other Highway Desperado track Aldean performs is “Let Your Boys Be Country.” A fairly standard country advice song about instilling rural values in one’s male children, the song inspires a warm if muted response from the predictably hits-oriented audience. For me, the song is an unfortunate reminder of the Aldeans’ ongoing crusade against trans children. On a recent episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, Jason accuses the Left of “trying to make things normal that to me aren’t normal” and bemoans having to explain “the transgender stuff” to his children. For his part, Carlson refers to “transgenderism” as an example of “antisocial, anti-human behavior” that small-town people don’t tolerate. (It’s worth noting here that Carlson was born in San Francisco and grew up in tony La Jolla, California, before attending boarding school on the East Coast.) With this in mind, “Let Your Boys Be Country” and its advice to “Raise ‘em hard (and) raise ‘em tough” leaves a queasy aftertaste.
On the same episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, referring to “Try That in a Small Town,” Aldean tells Carlson that his opposition to certain trans issues is “what kinda lit the fuse for the song too,” a startling admission given that he has elsewhere stated that the song is about “the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief.” In this light, the song becomes a remarkably mutable political object, capable of taking on numerous meanings. Look no further than the Try That in a Small Town Podcast, which has taken up issues including gender-affirming care, transgender athletes, workplace DEI, cancel culture and counterterrorism, all under the “Try That” umbrella.
BACK AT THE TROPICANA after the show, the revelry continues. At Tango’s Lounge, a sports bar with live music and bartop gambling, the bar band breezes through spirited covers of Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam, and Eric Church songs as guests in Aldean gear nod along or take to the dancefloor. It’s here that I meet Karen, who has paired her black “Try That” shirt with a faux-snakeskin ball cap and a wrist splint, presumably from some injury.
Karen lives in Havasu and is in her 50s but says she has grandchildren my age, which simply cannot be true and gives me the immediate sense that she’s a bit loose with the facts. She is, however, the first person willing to articulate what “Try That in a Small Town” is really about.
“Of course it’s a song about shooting people!” she half-yells, clearly having a good time. “I’ll fucking shoot you. My house is riddled with guns.”
Karen’s frankness is refreshing, in a way, after a night marked by equivocation. But it doesn’t stop there. She says she’s “Trump all day long” and I ask what drew her to him.
“Politics, money, all of the above,” she says. “Abortion.”
“So you’re anti-abortion?”
“Fuck no! I’m for abortion,” she says, and I struggle to explain why this is a surprising position given everything she’s told me.
“Totally, just… you know… people say that Trump… with the courts…”
“Free abortion, absolutely,” she continues. “You do what you want with your body and just don’t tell us what to do with ours.”
She turns to face the band and I’m confronted with Brian, also from Havasu, a 56-year-old programmer who tells me a confusing anecdote about misgendering someone at work.
“I think we’re all tired of woke, I think we’re all tired of they/them,” Brian sighs. “If I call you ‘sir,’ it’s just because I’m being polite.”
He laments the high ticket prices and relative brevity of Aldean’s set, but says it was worth it to hear “Try That in a Small Town,” which has “always” been his favorite song. I remind him that the song came out last year and he shrugs, saying that he’s “a fan of all music.”
A curious fact about “Try That in a Small Town” is that the song had already been out for two months and was sitting at Number 26 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart before Aldean released the video and the ensuing controversy rocketed the song to an all-genre chart-topper (a fact that the songwriters relay with obvious glee on their podcast). They see this as evidence that the Left has tried and failed to censor conservative thought, since it was CMT’s fateful decision to pull the music video that was the inciting incident for the song’s explosion in digital sales.
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Seen another way, though, this is simply confirmation that the song’s chart success was not a reflection of any artistic merit but rather an unfortunate case of liberal media being hoist with its own petard. For all its culture-war clout, “Try That in a Small Town” has only been streamed on Spotify a mere 76 million times, respectable for a later-career showing by an aging country star but paltry compared to recent hits from Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, and Shaboozey that have racked up hundreds of millions of streams. Here in Laughlin, which certainly seems electrified by Aldean’s speech, the song itself doesn’t exactly inspire a singalong in the way that genuine earworms like “Dirt Road Anthem” or “Big Green Tractor” do.
As I wander the casino floor at the end of the night, surrounded by women in star-spangled denim and men with images of AR-15s on their shirts, I reflect on a conversation I had before the show with an Aldean fan who preferred not to even give her first name. She looked to be in her fifties and was so visibly disgusted by my being a reporter that it’s unclear why she kept talking to me. In response to the question of why she likes Aldean’s music, as well as the question of why she connects with Trump’s politics, she had the same, simple answer: “Because it’s the truth.”