do country roads always take you home? do they always cut back toward a better before? do they always pass through nostalgia? is their movement always one of return? for some, maybe.

but for some, home fits poorly. like a too-big suit inherited from a grandfather, slumping and gripping in all the wrong places; tightening around the joints and snagging on loose nails, chafing at the skin.

for these people, country roads might not be a means of return, but a chance—rare, troubled, shimmering—to wander toward something else; toward a somewhere or a some how whose edges are more accommodating, more homely, even if far afield.

CHAPS makes country music for these people: for the kinds who hear in the sloping whine of a pedal steel the siren call of a better elsewhere; for the one-way-ticket-on-a-westbound-train types for whom country isn’t a pile of bricks and a family name, but a dream of flight; for the stone butches and the rodeo queens and the rhinestone cowboys and all the gender outlaws who never quite found home on the range.

CHAPS follows country roads not because they point home, but because belonging, for folks like us, is always another country.