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Colbie Caillat Brings Western Back To Country
The entrance of Colbie Caillat and her quartet Gone West into country music brings a breath of fresh air to the scene. The band’s reliance on acoustic, vocal harmonies, and its use of the steel guitar revive a folksy style to a genre that has suffered a decade of abysmal “bro-country.”
Gone West includes Caillat and her fiance Justin Kawika Young, with married couple Jason Reeves and Nelly Joy.
Reeves has long worked with Caillat as a songwriter, and the couples toured together to promote Caillat’s last album The Malibu Seasons (2016).
The band’s title comes from the fact that all four members come from west of Nashville and head west whenever they leave the Music City.
Their autobiographic single of the same title is simple, yet deep.
Young and Caillat relate reasons to visit their significant other’s home state and then reminisce of returning with something more valuable — their partner.
Reeves and Joy follow in the second verse — Reeves, who “chased the light to Amarillo where the wild horses run,” and Joy, who went “back to Mama’s homeland, playing in the field of dreams,” referencing the 1989 classic based in Iowa.
