The higher Muscadine Bloodline soars, the more grounded Charlie Muncaster gets.
“One of the biggest compliments that drives me,” Muncaster tells Rolling Stone, “is when someone says, ‘I can’t believe how normal you guys are.’ There’s something about this that fuels me, because you really can be who you are, and not have to change to get people to listen to your music.”
Muncaster and Gary Stanton, the duo from Mobile, Alabama, who lead Muscadine Bloodline, have spent most of the past two years eschewing major-label interest while growing the sort of large-scale fanbase that those labels clamor over. They’ve had a platinum single in “Porch Swing Angel” and another viral hit in “Me on You.” They’ve been a preferred arena opener for Turnpike Troubadours. And, they’ve shared a steady stream of new music with their fans.
The Coastal Plain dropped Friday and marks Muscadine’s fourth studio album and second in 18 months after 2023’s Teenage Dixie. With the band’s longtime producer Ryan Youmans (Jelly Roll’s Self Medicated) at the helm, the duo saw the 14-track album as a challenge to elevate their music and songwriting, doubling down on their independence in the process.
“If there was a phrase for this record, it would be ‘proving ground,’” Stanton says.
It’s less that the two have chips on their shoulders, and more that independence is a feather in their cap. They insisted on making this record with the touring version of Muscadine Bloodline — Justin Rowton (bass), Weston Stewart (guitar) and Zoltan Tobak (drummer) — rather than a studio outfit. And they were the primary songwriters.
“To kind of tip a hat to Charlie and I, being that we’re an independent band and not in cahoots with a lot of people, I think a lot of people who will write about us in the industry try to play up, say, a song we wrote with Brent Cobb,” Stanton says. “They’ll say the standout of the record is this song, and it’s because Brent’s the writer. So, as songwriters, he and I were just like, we want to write the bulk of this record.”
Stanton and Muncaster had similar upbringings. Both were raised in Southern Alabama, and both were heavily influenced in church and by gospel choirs. A pair of stubborn Southern musicians who both love songwriting, and hunting and fishing, resulted. They respected each other even before they joined forces and created Muscadine in early 2016.
During college, Muncaster invited Stanton to his place in Auburn, Alabama, for a weekend of writing songs. They wrote a few, including “Ginny,” which made their 2017 self-titled debut album. But, more importantly, Muncaster had a show that weekend and invited Stanton to sit in.
“I just thought, we’ll split the money and let’s drink and have a good time, but it turned out there was an immediate chemistry that we had,” Muncaster says. “Just singing cover songs, but we felt this strange thing happen where we knew all the songs the other knew, and we were trading off singing lead and harmony. There were people in the crowd saying, ‘Y’all are killer! What’s your band name?’ Well, we didn’t have one! We were just buddies. Maybe we should do something about that.”
Muscadine first turned heads playing in college towns across Alabama and Mississippi in the wake of their 2017 self-titled debut album. They forged a devoted fanbase, but in the process maybe gave fans the wrong impression of who the band would become. When Stanton and Muncaster were in college, they made music that appealed to college crowds. Stylistically, The Coastal Plain will take them further than ever from those roots. This is not a college-anthem record. This is one of the strongest country albums of 2024, heavy on introspection and songwriting depth. The duo know it will not appeal to some of their most hardcore supporters.
“Every now and then, you’ll see a comment or something that says, ‘Man, I miss the old Muscadine,’ and that’s cool,” Muncaster says, “because every artist that I’ve grown up loving and respecting has turned a page, and then another page, and another page. I’m ok with some fans falling off over there, if we can gain over here, because this is the truest form of what we’re doing now.”
The current single is “Tickets to Turnpike,” a lyrical and musical homage to the Turnpike Troubadours, another independent group — and one that has frequently showcased Muscadine as an opening act in arenas and amphitheaters over the past two years.
“Going on the road with Turnpike, after growing up being inspired by those cats and their records, we just wanted to have an ode to those guys,” Muncaster says. “It’s a love song. It’s asking a girl to go on a date that just happens to be at a Turnpike show. It’s not really a song about how much we love Turnpike, but it’s in the style of a Turnpike song. It’s like ‘The Bird Hunters.’ The act of that song is two guys bird hunting, but the song isn’t about that. It’s a heartbreak song. This song is a double-entendre ode to them, in that way.”
They also invited Turnpike’s Kyle Nix to lay down the fiddle on the song. “We could have just gotten anybody in town to do it, but it wouldn’t have been Kyle playing,” Muncaster says.
The songwriting challenge they presented themselves on “Tickets to Turnpike” — pushing their comfort levels and emphasizing both storytelling and lyrical wordsmithing — is a hallmark of The Coastal Plain. The album’s first single, “10-90,” was crafted around this turn of a phrase: “When you only got 10, I’ll be that 90 that’s left.”
The album’s final track, the stripped-down “Good in This World,” was the result of the duo challenging themselves to write in the style of one of the all-time greats.
“It’s very John Prine influenced, down to the gut-string guitar,” Muncaster says. “We’ve never done a song like that. It felt cool to end a record with a song that just has that on there, with Charlie singing. It’s a light song, about the simple, mundane things that can happen to a guy when he’s sitting at a service station getting gas, and what he can bring home.”
The desire to be an all-around band should not be taken as Muscadine running from the work that got them here. They don’t shy away from the stomping let’s-get-it-on energy of “Me on You” at their electric live shows. The song will feature prominently in just about every concert of this fall’s Coastal Plain Tour, which kicks off Sept. 7 in Minneapolis. It’s more that the group has aligned with the new wave of country artists who place lyrics, emotion, and vulnerability at the forefront of their music. Stanton feels this is Muscadine’s future.
“Honestly, Teenage Dixie felt like our first record,” he says. “It was like our intro to the world. We’d been a band for eight years, but that felt like, ‘We’re starting now.’ This record is a more mature version, sonically and contextually, and it’s kind of throwing in an ode to our upbringings in church and choir. There’s a lot more gospel and bluegrass influence to this one.”
The other side of Muscadine’s story also involves their Alabama roots. They are steadfast in a determination to lift up other artists from the state.
One of those artists is Taylor Hunnicutt, whose influences stretch beyond country and Americana and into blues and soul. Hunnicutt, from Demopolis, Alabama, is enjoying a rise of her own, due in no small part to a platform provided by Muscadine. She hasn’t just opened for Muscadine, she has tapped Muncaster and Stanton to work with her to produce a forthcoming album.
“They were the first people who gave us an opportunity, when we were way, way smaller than everybody else who was opening for them,” Hunnicutt says. “They reached out because they are independent, and they are Alabama. They respected that we were just trying to really do it, and get out in the world with our music, and spread that. I love them like brothers, and that’s why doing this record with them is going to be so important for me.”
As the glass ceiling for independent artists has mostly shattered, Muscadine has an opportunity to carry the torch for Southern Alabama’s music scene for years or decades to come, but they know that getting to that point requires challenging themselves indefinitely. It’s why, despite being more in-demand than ever, they invested their creativity and time into The Coastal Plain. They’ll come back in another couple of years and try to top this album, too. But for now, the duo is elated with the one they’re releasing.
“This record is, 100 percent, the best work that we’ve ever done,” Muncaster says. “It’s the most confident I’ve ever felt. I can’t pick a song on it that I don’t like. If you made me take one off tomorrow, I couldn’t do it.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.