When Lainey Wilson won the Grammy for Best Country Album in 2024 and spoke onstage about growing up in a farming community of 200 people, Brian Dunne was at home in his apartment in Brooklyn watching. And while the New York singer-songwriter is far from a country artist, he was inspired by Wilson to embrace his own roots.
“She was talking about where she had come from and how she had gotten there… and I was thinking about how all of us in New York try to shed their identity. It’s almost like you want to be born anew when you step off the bus,” Dunne says on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast. “I was thinking maybe I should take a page out of that book and make a New York roots record.”
Dunne did exactly that, crafting the songs that would become his latest album, Clams Casino, named one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Albums of 2025. It’s a portrait of a working-class artist’s existence where, as we wrote in our review of the album, “joys are hard-won and fleeting, self-doubt rears its head hourly, and the struggle to constantly achieve, or perform achievement on social media, looms like a Scooby-Doo villain’s shadow.”
Over the LP’s 10 tracks, Dunne, who is also a member of the band Fantastic Cat, dismisses any idealized image of a chic New York existence.
“Everybody has this image of themselves walking down Bowery with their collar up, but maybe I should make a record that sounds like New Jersey Transit,” he says. “That’s where I come from.”
Watch the full episode below, where we also break down the best albums and songs of 2025, trends we’ve recognized this year, and what we hope to see in 2026.
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Lainey Wilson, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Kings of Leon, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Breland, Marcus King, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, and Brian Dunne.
