Country music loves songs about things. Not complicated things — just the things. Sure, we have our fair share of love songs and all the complexities that come with them.

But we love things and more than any other kind of thing, we like to sing about our things. Songs about jeans, boots, beer and other kinds of cowboy shit — man, we love those songs, especially when we can call them ours and explain thier simplicity. Yet, the one thing we love siging about the most is a honky tonky.

I’d suggest that the term “honky tonk” would not have survied without the Hank William’s song. While the thing is simple, the idea and politics behind a honky tonk are not. Exploring all that could take me down a very serious rabbit hole, and that’s a thing I don’t want to do.

The beauty of these thing songs is the simplicity. They are part of your life, and they exist, so we sing about them. We honor them. We understand them. We preserve them through art.

This week, Austin-based Kathryn Legendre and CRYS, who currently calls New York City home, add to the long history of great honky tonk songs — and both use these simple things to explore the complexities of life.

The song is built upon the idea that the best home cooking (another simple thing) comes from the heart, Legendre uses several great devisces to deliver a perfect little country banger about the honky tonk. With the smart use of pronouns and subjects, she explains that your honky tonk, served up fresh and hot, is the place, the music, the people, and the idea. With soft, yet undeniably inuendo, this song hides very little. It’s about one of our great simple things — the honky tonk and all that complicates it.

“(I Might Not Be) Cut Out for Honky Tonkin’” by CRYS, digs deeper into those details — and exposes the darker sides of one of our favorate things. You can draw a straight line from Kitty Wells to this song. CRYS finds it’s actually a lot of work to live such a simple life, especially for a woman. Maybe, it’s a song about gate-keeping, bad men and coded language about who can be a honky tonker. But then again, it might just be a simple song about simple things.

Sweeney’s voice perfectly pairs with this upbeat, twinkly piano “gettin’ over it” banger, which fits nicely into her canon of love and love lost songs. “I’m stuck between I do/ And I’ll never do that again” is some clever, classic country writing from Sweeny, Buddy Owens and Galen Griffin.

I’m a sucker for a harmonica and for a band that few people know. And with Casual Drifter, I get both. Strong harp work, clean guitar licks and smart allocation of steel, “Goin’ For Broke” scratches my country music itches. I like this song a great deal and want to hear more like it.

For this week’s beautiful new grass entry, I offer “High Plains Wyoming.” Poetic and soft, this song deals with the harsh life of those who live in the region. This could easily find its way into a soundtrack, and should. Means released this song on her self-titled album, which is also lovely, but this song stands out among the rest of the album, which features guests like Molly Tuttle, Kyle Tuttle and Timmons. Overall, this is an incredibly well-crafted, grassy Western effort.

This one hit me this week. I’ve been a reluctant fan of Cody Jinks because of his popularity, and that is dumb.