Tyler Childers plays country's redefined blues, rhythms at Nashville's Opry, Eastside Bowl

"Rustin' In The Rain," Kentucky native Tyler Childers' fifth mainstream album, arrived to close the first full week of September.

The award-winning country artist performed at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry and a Spotify-sponsored "Fans First" exclusive event at Eastside Bowl to honor the occasion.

The best way to chronicle what has emerged from the performer in the time he's spent honing his craft since he and Sturgill Simpson unleashed "Purgatory" on the world in 2017 is as thus:

For five years, Childers and his art achieved acclaim by tickling our collective musical fancies with a metaphorical collection of rare feathers.

In his sixth year of widespread popularity, he bundled those feathers in a burlap sack and metaphorically walloped the world into musical delirium.

To call Childers' new sounds Americana, bluegrass, or folk is wrong — but what, then, to do about the millions of people who are about to ascribe billions of misnomers to his musical catalog?

Maybe they're less hipster music aficionados and more adoring devotees enamored of the man and his work.

Childers' latest album "Rustin In The Rain" — via Margo Price and Erin Rae-featured Christian gospel ballad (literally about the birth of Christ) “Luke 2:8-10” — makes any standing ovation he receives in this album's release cycle hit differently.

Thus, it's fair to say that, between the two Nashville venues, 5,000 "adoring devotees" worshipped Childers' latest offering, which they perceived was dredged from the depths of Kentucky's Big Sandy River.

'In Your Love' and 'Space and Time'

Spend an hour similar to those that The Tennessean did over the past week with the album's soulful pair of closing tracks, "In Your Love" and S.G. Goodman-written ballad "Space and Time."

Whatever genre, the sound that arrives is the organic rhythms and blues that allowed country music's birth, once again redefined.

At the Opry on Tuesday evening, Goodman appeared with Childers to sing "Space and Time."

The song exists in the metaphysical space between Sade's 2000-released folk-reggae ballad "By Your Side" and everyone's pandemic-era playlists of 90s country ballads.

Closed-eyed swaying of the tear-jerked variety consumes any listener enraptured by the song's traumatic bittersweetness.

When the star-made singer ] performs, Childers' wounded bird of a vocal appears. It doesn't soar; it seeps into the listener.

And then there's "In Your Love," the world's current "it" song with "that" video.

Yes, in sociopolitically polarized times, Childers' video for the song featuring a queer love story of Appalachian miners in the 1950s, written by the state's poet laureate, Silas House, is a firebrand issue. However, he's also the artist who released the 2020 album "Long Violent History," inspired by his angst over Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker — and fellow Kentuckian — who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville. Plus, 2022 saw him release "Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?" a triple-album of gospel music.

Before describing his art as anything else, in a recent New York Times feature, he referred to his recent releases as compelled work that "[gives] someone a glimpse into that light helps put water on this fire before it boils over into white-hot rage."

Disassociate "In Your Love" from its video. When doing so, the idea emerges that for as much as Childers is a study of the grit required to approach music as manual labor, he's also someone now able to love himself and his life (now complete with wife and child) crafted from doing manual work for a rate higher than minimum wage.

That's important.

On his 2019 album "Country Squire," Childers crafts a heart-wrenching narrative of being an artist whose life has grown from a childhood of laying "face down in the gum on the floor" on his school bus ("Bus Route") to playing lonely one-night-stand gigs (“Everlovin’ Hand”) and attempting to eke out a trailer-living existence for himself and his wife ("Country Squire").

Sure, let the video for "In Your Love" finally pique your curiosity on what Childers has been doing for the past half-decade. However, let the man keep cooking with every listen of his latest hit that follows.

It's a modern soul track (ambient synthesizers and overwrought, palpable emotions both present) wrapped in a super-tight country band and veteran lead singer capably working with a powerful composition.

Childers is a man who endured life to — before discovering fame and wealth — find love.

"It's a long, hard war / Oh, but I can grin and bear it / 'Cause I know what the hell I'm fighting for / And I will wait for you," he sings.

It's not just haunting because Childers aggressively captivates audiences — like the one at Eastside Bowl — with teeth-clenched glowers between lyrics of performances.

Instead, the level of vulnerable honesty the lyric achieves offers a terrifying glimpse into his life, or even wilder, your own.

Country's redefined future

There are other moments that, when best heard live, flesh out the country authenticity that drives home the album existing as the best release yet showcasing how the genre's music — and not its fashions or aesthetics — can best guide popular music's future.

From covering the Kristofferson-written ballad "Help Me Make It Through the Night" to writing an emo lamentation-as-modern waltz about someone not responding to "Phone Calls and Emails," plus getting bluegrass favorites the Travelin' McCourys to deliver Zydeco-meets-bluegrass goodness on "Percheron Mules," the genre's all here.

By January 2024, thousands more people will hear Tyler Childers' album at Bridgestone Arena.

The potential of a raucous sing-a-long with men either crying in their seats with their wives and children — or as they did at the Opry, proposing marriage to each other — will occur.

The entire time that's happening? Expect to see Childers, onstage lip bit, eyes in front of a brain deep into the throes of another night at work.

The song he'll be singing identifies the selfless method by which he'll achieve his career's next great heights.

"I am yours to use / And I sure wish you would use me / Do not let my heart just fall apart / Rustin' in the rain."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tyler Childers plays country's redefined blues, rhythms at Nashville's Opry, Eastside Bowl