After a twenty-year spell away from the genre, Canadian Rae Spoon returns to their formative years with Assigned Country Singer at Birth, their thirteenth album.
Born in Calgary in 1981, the non-binary singer and writer wrote their first song as a twelve-year-old, basing it on the religion they had grown up with but subsequently finding a strong connection with country music. This dissipated as Rae Spoon became compromised and threatened by issues of gender, race and sexuality within that genre, but they tackle these in the first song written for the new record, ‘Country Music Breaks My Heart’: “Well we fit and we fit just fine / And we’re just singing to stay alive / Cause there’s more of us than them / We’re the ones they say just don’t fit in.”