S.G. Goodman

During the last half-decade, S.G. Goodman has emerged as one of her generation’s sharpest Southern songwriters, linking a storyteller’s vivid specificity to a trusted friend’s emotional acuity to a classic songsmith’s compulsive hooks. And it’s not just that Goodman is from the South—namely, Hickman, Kentucky, a small bottomlands town on a big bend of the Mississippi River. It’s that she embraces her home’s vernacular and wisdom, its tragedy and humor. She makes powerful symbols of spoonbread flooded with Karo syrup and birds she might see flitting in her backyard, gripping characters of the people with whom she has shared the aisles of the dollar store and religious icons she invites on her long ride to heaven.

But Goodman is not some nostalgic throwback or regional relic. “We’re not living in that old-time feeling,” she howled on her 2020 debut, delivering a mantra so apt she actually turned it into a bumper sticker. Indeed, her songs represent a respect for the best of the Old South and a devotion to the promise of a New South, too, where equity and inclusion can coexist with country grace and pace. Planting by the Signs, her third album, is a brilliant exposition of these ideas, whether she’s literally fighting for justice for a snapping turtle in the road or dreaming of ways to excoriate privilege. Even if it’s just her and a guitar drifting in echo or a band that rides the divide between restraint and ragged glory, Goodman’s songs are gently psychedelic Southern rock—that is, a familiar old sound, recasting what it once had to say.