Chris Housman’s musical journey began early, playing fiddle and singing country classics with his family band at a Wild West show geared towards tourists visiting Dodge City, Kansas, “The Cowboy Capital of the World.” He grew up on a cattle farm 40 minutes outside of town, though that environment was never an easy fit for Chris, as he realized he was attracted to those real-life cowboys he grew up with. Now based in Nashville, Chris has since realized a dream that seemed impossible when he was a kid; he has a thriving country music career that fully incorporates his identity as a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. His debut album’s title track, “Blueneck,” earned praise from Rolling Stone, Billboard, Good Morning America, and The Tennessean, and scored him a nomination for GLAAD’s Outstanding Breakthrough Music Artist Award. This summer, Chris makes his Grand Ole Opry debut, further expanding his growing audience of more than 400k followers who recognize themselves in his clever, close-to-the-bone songwriting that captures our modern time in a way few current country artists dare.

Now, on his sophomore album, appropriately titled Dodge City, Chris recounts how he eventually found answers for all the thorny questions he was trying to avoid when he left that cow town. The opening title track captures the desperation of that initial escape. The rest of the album details the life Chris has lived in the years since as he’s learned to walk tall and stand in his truth.

The Slow Harvest uses songwriting as unburdening — a deep, personal catharsis without the psychiatrist. Their debut album, Selections From The Sad Bastard Songbook, is unflinching in its handling of seriously heavy subject matter, but it does so with hinting subtleties, cloaking the meanings under a blanket of singer/songwriter Americana with a moody, half-lit, prairie noir twist that is wonderfully listenable.

Selections From The Sad Bastard Songbook are the stories of life’s fleeting joys and inevitable sorrows. Tales of the all-too-real human condition, simultaneously awe-inspiring and heartbreaking. Songs written for those who know that our daily lives are nothing but theater, with each person playing lead in a self-inflicted fantasy. We see the American Dream exposed as a cycle of indentured servitude. Social norms and universal truths revealed as schemes for control of the masses. The boxes and binaries of the given are pulled apart, deconstructed in search of what it means to exist as a human. These are songs written for those who know we are all prisoners, incarcerated on a rock hurtling headlong into the infinite void. For those who know there is no such thing as winning and no such thing as being right. No beginning and no end. These are songs about the hard-won redemptive power of love, survivor’s guilt, and the crippling fear of being alone. These are the things we are too scared to confront during the daylight hours, but that unfailingly return to haunt us come the long nightfall.