Favorite album

What’s your all-time favorite album?

There are certain voices that carry the weight of a whole people, and Tyler Childers’ Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? is one of them. It is not just an album—it is an invocation, a reimagining of old faith through Appalachian soil and song. Though I’ve long stepped away from the rigid orthodoxy of my upbringing, I cannot deny that the cadences of revival hymns and the fire of fundamentalist preaching still echo in me. Childers catches that tension—between belief and doubt, tradition and transformation—and he sings it with the raw conviction of someone who has seen both heaven and hell in the same Kentucky holler.

For me, the power lies not in the creed but in the memory of belief. When I hear those horns and gospel choirs rising in the “Jubilee” version, or the stripped-down ache of the “Hallelujah” set, I feel the same pull I did as a boy in West Virginia, when faith meant both belonging and burden. I may not stand where I once stood, but the memory of that faith, the communal fire of voices lifted together, still excites my spirit. In Childers’ work, I hear my own contradictions: reverence without dogma, longing without certainty, the fierce hope that music itself might be prayer enough.

That’s why this album stays with me—it bridges my past and my present. It reminds me that Appalachian music, whether sung in chapels or taverns, has always been about survival, about crying out against despair and naming joy where it can be found. Childers doesn’t ask if we believe; he asks if we feel. And I do. Every time.