Ian Noe (Born May 9th, 1990) is a Country Music artist from Kentucky, USA. He released his debut album Between The Country in 2019, and an EP, Off This Mountaintop not long after.
His music tends to be on the darker end of modern country and deals with the issues of 21st Century rural America.
Tropes Associated with Ian Noe and his songs:
- Addled Addict: More than one in Meth Head.
- Album Closure: The title track of Between The Country ends the album with a story of various drug dealers being killed, with the implication being that this might make things better.
- Road May Flood / It's A Heartache give a rather bleak ending to River Fools and Mountain Saints, compared to most of the rest of the album.
- The Alcoholic: The subject of Irene (Raving Bomb), allegedly based on a cousin of his.
- Slightly more sympathetically, from River Fools and Mountain Saints, there's "just a river fool on good old mountain wine / shooting at the moon and squalling like a mountain lion"
- Cover Version: Has done a version of Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA, with very toned down instrumentation, which makes the actual meaning of the song more obvious.
- Also an interesting variant as the final track of River Fools and Mountain Saints, where the original song Road May Flood segues, seamlessly, into a cover of the first verse of It's a Heartache by Bonnie Tyler.
- Darker and Edgier: Certainly compared to a lot of Country Music.
- On an intra-album level, Ballad of a Retired Man compared to the rest of River Fools and Mountain Saints.
- Disposable Sex Worker: The subject of Dead On The River (Rolling Down)
- Drugs Are Bad: Slightly more subtle and / or realistic than most, actually, but Meth Head and Between The Country don't exactly paint either addicts or dealers in a good light.
- Homage: Dead On The River (Rolling Down) is, according to some stage banter, "Based on true events. Well, the first season of True Detective".
- It Gets Better: The subjects of If Today Doesn't Do Me In seem to believe that it will, anyway.
- Odd Friendship: Seems to get on quite well with Jason Momoa, perhaps slightly surprisingly.
- Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Death: "With the wheels on the highway / in the cold autumn rain / out came the pistols / and a book full of names..." from the title track of Between The Country.
- Precision F-Strike: "He's the low heathen kind / with a shit mangled mind / the desparate fucking Meth Head".
- Pre-Climax Climax: In Barbara's Song, which deals with a train crashing off a bridge, "There were lovers in the aisle / knotted up in a pile / goin' hard despite our deepest fear"
