Every couple of months, I get a comment — sometimes in person, sometimes online — that goes something like this: “Why don’t you play more Garth? More Alan Jackson? More Vince Gill?”
And I get it. I really do.
But here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and I figure it’s time to say it out loud.
I’ve Heard This Before
When I started in country radio — I was a teenager, it was 1988, and I thought I had pretty much figured out the world — I was already hearing the same complaint.
Just aimed at a completely different generation of artists.
Back then, it was the fans who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s doing the head-shaking. Waylon’s not on anymore. Willie’s fading out. Where’s George Jones? Where’s Merle Haggard? Where’s Johnny Cash? Where’s Loretta? These were the giants of outlaw country and classic Nashville sound — artists who had defined what country music meant to an entire generation of listeners. And those fans weren’t wrong that those artists had moved aside.
But here’s the thing: they hadn’t been pushed out by accident. They’d been replaced by Hank Williams Jr., Ricky Skaggs, Randy Travis, the Judds, Keith Whitley, Dwight Yoakam, and Highway 101. Artists who were, at the time, new. Fresh. And absolutely great.
Then, right around 1990, even that group started giving way. The Rickys and Randys of the world found themselves sharing the playlist — and eventually surrendering it — to Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Alan Jackson, George Strait, Vince Gill, Travis Tritt, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Brooks & Dunn. Country music, once again, sounded like something new.
It always does.
The Playlist Moves Because Nashville Moves
Here’s the honest reality of how country radio works: Nashville doesn’t stop making music just because we’ve found a batch of songs we love.
The labels keep signing artists. The artists keep recording. The 2000s gave us Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, Brad Paisley, Dierks Bentley, Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, and Keith Urban. Then the 2010s rolled in with Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton, Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, and Thomas Rhett — artists who filled arenas and lived on country radio for a decade straight.
Some of what comes out is good. Some of it is genuinely great. And yeah, some of it is — let’s be diplomatic — a work in progress. It was never any different. But the pipeline never stops, and our job as a radio station is to play the best of what’s out there, the same way WRBI always has.
The bulk of our playlist in 2026 is the good stuff from roughly the last ten to twenty years. That’s not a policy decision against the past. That’s just the math of a format that’s been running continuously while the music kept getting made.
Time Shifts What “Classic” Means
If you’re around my age — I’m 52, so I came up on Garth and Clint and Alan — you might wish we’d play more of that 90s stuff. And the truth is, we do still play it. We pepper in some 80s country too. Those songs earned their place and they’re not going away entirely.
But here’s something worth sitting with: a kid who’s 22 today — who grew up with Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs, and Cody Johnson playing in the background while they were learning to drive — thinks of that as their golden era. Just like I thought mine was.
And right now, there’s a whole generation of listeners falling in love with what’s happening this very minute. Lainey Wilson, who’s won just about every award Nashville hands out lately, is somebody’s Reba. Zach Top — a young guy from a Washington state ranch who sounds like he walked straight out of 1992 — is somebody’s Randy Travis. And honestly, when you hear him, you understand exactly why his fans feel that way. That’s the whole point of what he’s doing, and it’s working beautifully.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after a long time in this format: everyone experiences the golden era of music radio as the moment they first really got into music. Which is almost always somewhere between 14 and 22. That’s when songs attach themselves to your life. To your first truck. Your first heartbreak. Your first summer that felt like it meant something. After that, everything new sounds a little less new.
The Station That Was There Then Would Do the Same Thing Now
You want to know what WRBI sounded like in 1988? It sounded exactly like the hits of 1988. It wasn’t playing Hank Williams Sr. any more than a pop station today plays Elvis — not because Hank wasn’t great, but because radio lives in the present tense, even when it honors the past.
And think about this: in 1988, you were more likely to hear Loretta Lynn or Merle Haggard talked about than actually played in regular rotation. The same way today, you’re more likely to hear a classic Garth cut than you were to hear Webb Pierce on the radio back then. That’s not disrespect. That’s just the distance that time puts between an era and the airwaves.
We honor the past — we genuinely do — but we live in the present tense. Which means when something great comes out in 2025 or 2026, we’re going to play it.
Is the New Stuff Worth It?
That’s always the real question underneath the complaint, isn’t it? It’s not really about airplay. It’s about whether the new music deserves to make room.
I think a lot of it does. Not all of it — it never was all great. But the songs that are going to matter in thirty years — the ones playing in some 52-year-old’s head in 2056, while they wonder why the station doesn’t play more Wallen or Combs — those songs are being written and recorded right now.
There’s a version of Garth Brooks somewhere in Nashville today. You just don’t know his name yet.
So bear with us. We’ll keep playing the classic cuts. We’ll keep sneaking in some Randy Travis and George Strait. But we’re also going to play the new stuff — because in 1988, we played that too.
—Brent Lee is the morning host at WRBI 103.9 FM. His column runs regularly at WRBIradio.com.