Some days it feels like we’re all just barely getting by. Charlie Worsham knows the feeling all too well and perfectly captures it in his new song “Fist Through This Town.”
It’s Worsham’s first new music since 2017’s criminally overlooked Beginning of Things, and it’s not hard to imagine how that album’s disappointing commercial performance might’ve fueled “Fist Through This Town.”
“Got my hero on the wall/whiskey I can drink/a place to sit and wonder why I don’t get paid a thing,” he sings in the first verse, before giving in to his frustration in the chorus. “I ain’t a killer but I’d let that bastard drown/I wanna put my fist through this town.” Worsham wrote the song, produced by Eric Church’s longtime producer Jay Joyce, with frequent Church songwriters Jeremy Spillman and Travis Meadows. (Worsham also joined those musicians and writers on Church’s new triple album Heart & Soul.)
“Fist Through This Town” arrives with a music video filmed at Nashville bar Twin Kegs II. It casts Worsham as a struggling musician who is transformed into a superstar figure — in an Elvis-style gold lamé jacket — after the song’s cathartic guitar solo. By the end, however, the lights fade and he and his band are right back where they started: in front of a barely paying attention crowd.
“I think we all go through those times when it feels like the world is against us, and that’s especially true for anyone who dares to chase down their dream. ‘Fist Through This Town’ fell onto the page late one solitary night in a little house I used to rent,” Worsham says. “‘Fist’ was the first time I got that honest with myself about my anger. My hope is that this song can be rocket fuel for everyone else out there struggling to will a dream into existence.”
From Rolling Stone US
