Chris Jones & The Night Drivers are known for covering a wider range of subjects than the average bluegrass artist, but the quartet have only occasionally ventured into social commentary. Still, as an award-winning humorist — he’s the reigning International Bluegrass Music Association’s Writer of the Year — Jones regularly addresses the foibles of the genre’s community, so it’s not really a surprise that with “What If You’re Wrong,” the group’s new single for Mountain Home, the singer-songwriter-guitarist asks a pointed yet disarmingly framed question.
Served up with characteristic restraint, “What If You’re Wrong” loses no time in diving into its topic.
Following a bluesy, faintly ominous opening figure that establishes the song’s mid-tempo gait, Jones addresses an unseen figure’s prediction that the world is coming to an end on a date certain, setting up the chorus’s titular question:
What if you're wrong, will you admit it?
Or will you dig deeper in it
Even further down in the rabbit hole?
What if you're wrong?
Yet while the subject of conspiracy theories is serious, the lighter side remains apparent throughout, as a second verse offers increasingly far-fetched speculation:
There’s chem trails in the skies, false flags everywhere
The President’s a hologram and no one even cares
“Jon Weisberger and I co-wrote the song as a conversation with a conspiracy theorist,” recalls Jones. “It’s meant to be a light-hearted look at the subject — I’m pretty sure it’s the first bluegrass song to mention chem trails! — but it does ask a serious question: when something earth-shaking is predicted, whether it’s the end of the world, a change of government, or just the results of a major ballgame, what do you do when it doesn’t happen? Do you question your sources or double down? We have so much of this in the era of social media and different realities we live with, it seemed pretty timely, and we had fun with it.”
"What If You're Wrong" is streaming in Dolby Atmos spatial audio on Apple Music, Amazon Music and TIDAL. Listen to it HERE.
