Childers is in Nashville for various promotional tasks, like recording a bunch of one-liners for digital services and radio (“and you’re listening tooooo Tyler Childers!” he demonstrates, sliding his voice down a couple registers). He’s opted not to make the traditional country-musician move to Nashville, preferring to keep permanent residence at the Kentucky cabin where he, his young son, and his wife, the singer-songwriter Senora May, live quietly, connected to their roots. It’s a necessary grounding, because since releasing Purgatory in 2017, Childers’s career has exploded: He’s played arenas (and some stadiums), been nominated for Grammy Awards, and become one of the most revered, and influential, country artists working today. His music is a soundtrack and a lifeline for a generation of Appalachian, Southern, and rural people who finally feel seen through his words, and offers a new way for them to be seen and understood by everyone else.
But he is a wanderer, and Snipe Hunter is a wanderer’s album, a culmination of every kind of searching, playing, huntin’, and exploring that Childers has done to get to where he is now. A masterpiece that bucks genre convention and serves as a guidebook for life, full of advice and on-the-road diaries about how to survive in the wild (literally and metaphorically) and honor tradition while challenging it too. Whether he’s dreaming of India, wandering “forever and a day” to Australia, or just around his own backyard in Appalachia, he’s traveling—“Gump-stumbling” through the world, as he calls it, looking for companionship, spirituality, guidance, and passing on what he’s learned along the way.
In Childers’s eyes, this is a team sport: his trusty road band, the Food Stamps, is along for the hunt, with Rubin, additional production from Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn, and mixing by Shawn Everett (Kacey Musgraves, Alabama Shakes) out on the field too.
“It’s observations from a traveling hillbilly,” Childers says. “Huntin’ our sounds and trying new things to find it, and hunting our path. It asks, in so many different ways, what are you looking for?”
That’s something Childers has sought to answer many times over the course of his 34 years, and he’s looked everywhere, including far beyond the Baptist Church that was his raising. Back when he was a teen, after becoming enamored with the work of Jack Kerouac, Childers hopped aboard a motorcycle with his uncle for a trip to Lowell, Massachusetts, where Kerouac was born and a tribute to his life, faith, and work now sits. By then Kerouac had already become a “rock star” to Childers, and when he came upon a part of the memorial that heralds the writer’s blended spiritual practice of Buddhism and Catholicism, his world burst apart.
“I knew that Kerouac had grown up Catholic and gotten into Buddhism, but I didn’t really think about both of those things [together], of creating his own personal path,” Childers says. He’d discovered On the Road at Borders one day, and knew he needed the book when he saw a promise of “sex, drugs, and jazz” on the back cover. Kerouac’s been such an important presence in his life that his current 27-date tour is called On the Road, with the promotional art mirroring one of the book’s famous cover illustrations. “Kerouac was my first real permission slip to be a spiritual wanderer and say it’s okay to do that, and that it doesn’t automatically mean you are on your way to the wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
