Fancy Hagood has got one of the best voices in country music right now, so it’s a no-brainer for him to release a covers EP. What makes Smothered, Covered, & Fried delightful — in addition to Hagood’s own arena-ready performances — is that he brought along some of the best and brightest in Nashville’s queer country orbit: Brooke Eden, Jaime Wyatt, She Returns From War, The Kentucky Gentlemen, and TJ Osborne.
Hagood kicks the EP off with “Landslide,” a brilliant choice for his intriguing tenor. Hagood brings a sensitive performance to the table here — ten thousand people have covered “Landslide” but only a few remember that this is a song that’s best sung on the immediate aftermath of a heart-shattering breakup.
Hagood, Wyatt, and She Returns From War bring a queer reading to the Pistol Annies’ “Hell on Heels,” while his romantic duet with Osborne on Shaniah’s “From This Moment On” remind us of the radical possibilities of queer country music that is allowed to be that. Our stories deserve to be told with the same mystifying concoction of twang, camp, earnestness, and luxe production as the rest of Nashville.
“Better Man,” performed with the Kentucky Gentlemen, and Eden’s duet on the Eli Young Band’s “Even If It Breaks Your Heart” reinterpret early aughts country music and its penchant for good times and fleeting sorrows. (And, since we’re talking queer people, yearning is a huge aspect of that moment.) For a five-song EP, Hagood proves the case for queer country: we deserve our place in its history, and the rest of the world can slot their stories into our songs as seamlessly as we can in theirs.