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Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” was so ubiquitous for so long that you might’ve been happy to imagine you’d heard the last of it. But a cover version has just been released that’s pretty much guaranteed to make you pleased
that road has turned out to be a roundabout. Steve Martin and Alison Brown have turned it into a vintage-sounding bluegrass tune and recorded it with an all-star cast of singers and players from that genre, including two of the great living bluegrass vocalists, Del McCoury and Dan Tyminski. Chances are you won’t mind the song becoming an earworm again, now that it’s a multiple-banjo earworm, combining a high, lonesome sound from deep in the holler with (surprise) some of Martin’s contemporary comic flourishes.
On the eve of the song’s Thursday release, Variety talked via Zoom with Martin, who was taking a break from looping, and Brown, who was taking a break from banjo camp. Before recording this one-off, the duo was last heard from with last year’s collaborative album, “Safe, Sensible and Sane,” which included guests such as Jackson Browne. With “Old Town Road,” they really went all-in on an all-star roots ensemble, recruiting not just McCoury and Tyminski but Ronnie McCoury (Del’s son) on mandolin and harmonies, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Garry West (Brown’s husband) on bass.
At the end of last year, Variety had a song the two of you did with Jackson Browne, “Dear Time,” on our list of 2025’s best songs last year. And now this is a very different kind of all-star track than “Dear Time,” to be sure. You came up with the “Old Town Road” arrangement, is that right, Alison?
Brown: I arranged it and co-produced it along with Garry West, who’s co-founder of Compass Records. But Steve deserves the credit for hearing the bluegrass potential in the song. I think that, if not everybody on the planet, most people know Lil Nas X’s version of “Old Town Road,” and the version with Billy Ray Cyrus, of course, too. But the idea of how could you bring it into the bluegrass space, that was a lot of the fun of the challenge. And obviously, that “can’t nobody tell me nothing” line, you had to have Del McCoury sing that.
Del McCoury was born to sing “Old Town Road” — everyone will agree.
Martin: We were excited just imagining Del singing it. And I think for non-bluegrass people, it’s gonna be like, “What the hell is that?” I mean, it’s such a sound that we know in our bluegrass world, and not so much out of bluegrass world, you know?
Brown: That’s true. That high, lonesome, male tenor voice is just such a cornerstone sound of bluegrass. But I think it’s one of the things that’s an acquired taste if you’re just being introduced to the genre. But no, he kills that. It was a great excuse to do a song with Del. Ronnie, too, and of course, he sounds so much like his dad, but he brings his own thing to it. So having double McCourys was such a gift. And Dan just crushes it, too, man.
Martin: My introduction to Del was when I was traveling around playing with the Steep Canyon Rangers, and we did Del Fest, maybe. We were doing one of our songs on stage, and Del was gonna join us, so he was, like, two inches from my ear, singing harmony, and I thought, “Oh, I get it. I see…”
“Old Town Road” is obviously one of the biggest recorded hits of all time, but also probably counts as a guilty pleasure for a lot of people who are in country music — or bluegrass — who go, “I’m not supposed to like this song, but it actually does sound kinda country. Whoever wrote or created it, there’s something in there that kind of feels weirdly authentic,” even though there is also the question, “Oh, is it country cosplay,” or what is it?
Martin: It’s hard to define exactly what their version of the song is. I kinda researched it; I even drew a little map. Because Lil Nas was living in Atlanta, and he was online… Evidently, this is the way things are done: There’s sites where you can buy a track, or a rhythm, and he paid $30 for the beat, I guess. So it went from Holland to Atlanta, and then it ended up in Nashville. Anyway, the artist, Lil Nas, was very generous to us because he allowed us to dabble with the lyrics and sort of rewrite them for bluegrass world…
Brown: But to your point about it sounding kind of country, even though Lil Nas obviously didn’t really come from a country space, or as an artist, one doesn’t think of him that way… To me, it’s the tonality of the melody with the flat seven. And the notes and the scale of the melody, they’re very Appalachian. They’re very much like a song that we did a version of called “Cluck Old Hen” on “Safe, Sensible, and Sane.” That tonality of that modal scale is a very Appalachian kind of sound, so it’s really natural for the banjo to riff off the vibe and the scale of the melody.
Martin: And also what I always thought was gonna be exciting, and it worked out that way, is that when you hear the first 16 bars — that Alison wrote, by the way, very beautifully and very mysteriously — you don’t know what the song is. You can’t even conceive. And then when “Old Town Road” comes in, it’s this weird surprise that it actually works. By the way, this song has a great tempo, and I think we pretty much stuck to that tempo.
So you were looking to sort of set the song up in a more sort of serious or almost misleading way…
Martin: Right. With a very bluegrass opening, or very Appalachian opening, as Alison says, with the modal sound. And Alison wrote this beautiful melody that took me literally a month to learn. Because if you listen to it, it sounds normal, but if you listen again, there’s a lot of strange pushes and pulls and slides and strange things. And I kind of insisted, “Just keep playing that. Don’t riff on that. Just keep playing that,” because that takes a while to get into your head. And when it gets in, you can’t get it out.
Brown: It’s got a little back step here and there, as one might say in this genre. But yeah, Steve was like, “Let’s keep it a secret for the listener.” Like, they should, when they put this on, think it’s some Appalachian tune that they just aren’t familiar with, and keep keep the secret of the song as long as possible.
Then you managed, after all the vocal fun, to have a banjo climax toward the end.
Martin: Yeah. Oh my God. Alison, it wasn’t double time, it was quadruple time, right?
Brown: It was only double time. That was enough.
Martin: Yeah. My God. I thought it really lifted the song, as it builds to this big climax. And then, I’m not sure if that going to the major at the end there is in the song or if it’s you guys.
Brown: It’s not in the original version; the original version just stays on the same chords. But putting that bold four chord in there, where it just goes to this four major chord, it just says bluegrass. And then Steve’s idea of changing the lyric right there to say “Bluegrass Road” instead of “Old Town Road” was great, too. It gives you this moment of the shining star of bluegrass music (McCoury) stepping forward.
Steve, what was your thought in “bluegrassing” the lyrics for that extra verse?
Martin: You know, I took it from the original song. It’s about a guy who is sort of… macho is the wrong word, but starstruck. So I sort of wrote the line about, “I wanna be a rock star, I wanna be a rock star,” because I think that idea is in the original lyrics. And then actually it was Garry, Alison’s husband, who suggested Buc-ee’s [the South-based mega-convenience store chain], which I didn’t know anything about. And then my favorite line is, he pulls into the parking lot and “not one car is an import.”
Brown: And I also love: “Line short, food court, can I get some pulled pork?” We spent a lot of time in the studio, working on this, cleaning up the track, wondering: will the rest of the country know what pulled pork is? But you’re kind of our test. Do you know what pulled pork is?
Oh yes. I visit barbecue places…
Martin: I had certainly heard of it.
Brown: OK. That’s comforting.
I was thinking, traditionally minded roots-music people who hear this might think, oh, with all these great players and singers in here, they’re kind of redeeming this song that we didn’t care about. But then, when you’ve got a line referring to Sasquatch in there, you haven’t treated it overly seriously.
Martin: You gotta have a little humor in it or… And it’s the kind of lyric I can get away with singing. I always say, I sing like William Shatner.
Brown: No, you do not!
It’s not, like, a recitation…
Martin: Well, I’ve gotten better at singing, because I’ve done all these shows with Marty Short, and we end up doing these duets. They’re comedy duets, but eventually, after years, you learn to let it go and not be afraid and sing out, and I started to get a little vibrato. I could always talk a song, but now I’m starting to be able to sing it a little bit better.
Brown: Steve never gives his singing enough credit. I mean, I think you sound great.
Martin: Well, I got this great review in Bluegrass Today. It said, “Steve Martin’s singing is surprisingly adequate.”
That’s close to saying “the next Del McCoury” or “the next Dan Tyminski.”
Right …
And Lil Nas has approved…
Brown: Yes. He’s seen the lyrics, and was very wide open. I think that kind of collaboration spirit is so much a part of rap. I was really glad he embraced it.
Martin: We kind of learned that that is the spirit of rap, where you can adapt and twist and turn and contribute.
Brown: To quote Garry, “He is super down with it.”
Martin: Good! So am I.
The duo of Martin and Brown will next be heard contributing to a Stanley Brothers tribute album Brown’s label, Compass Records, is issuing Oct. 16, titled “Where the Soul Never Dies: Celebrating 80 Years of the Stanley Brothers.” Their track, which also features Ed Helms, is an updated version of “How Far to Little Rock,” which Brown describes as a “kinda cornpone routine that the Stanley Brothers would do,” now “with some really excellent twists,” a la Martin’s added lyrics for “Old Town Road.” The tribute album also features a contribution Brown solicited from the late Dolly Parton as well as appearances by Billy Strings, Rhiannon Giddens, Willie Nelson, Sierra Ferrell and many others.
