You hate to go here because of the rats nest of incited and irrational mindsets it stirs up when a subject even veers near a sniff of American politics. But this subject sorely deserves some informed and authoritative context, if it’s not already being delivered delinquently.
Alexis Wilkins happens to be the girlfriend of the current FBI Director Kash Patel. Though the love interest of an American law enforcement functionary would normally not be the domain of public interest—let alone the interest of a country music outlet—Ms. Wilkins is an exception. You cannot and will not see her name mentioned without it being prefaced that she is a “country music singer.”
And it happens to be that the name of Alexis Wilkins is mentioned quite a lot, in part because of the current polarization of the American electorate, and because The New York Times has accused her with Mr. Patel of taking taxpayer funded trips on private jets, including to music gigs, and the FBI using SWAT teams to guard her after she received death threats due to her proximity to Patel.
But we know that the media sometimes loves to label or portray performers as “country” when they’re patently not. They also love to overhype the country music credentials of certain people who perhaps once were popular in country music, but no longer are. John Rich comes to mind, who is much more known as a political commentator than a country performer these days.
Alexis Wilkins is also a political commentator by trade, and presents herself as such on her Instagram page to her 100,000 followers. She’s actively worked in the political sphere for years, and probably more than pursuing country music. So is it even fair to characterize Alexis Wilkins as a country performer? And if so, is she actually any good?
So the first thing that’s worth establishing is yes, Alexis Wilkins has recorded and released country music. The 27-year-old has released eight singles since 2020, and has a 2023 EP to her name. Born in Massachusetts and of Armenian descent, she was raised in part in Arkansas. It appears Alexis activated her penchant for performing country music in earnest while attending Belmont University in Nashville where she graduated with a business degree.
But even though it’s fair to characterize Alexis Wilkins as a country music singer, it’s also fair to contextualize that she’s never released a full-length album, she hasn’t released a single or EP since 2023, has never appeared on any charts, she doesn’t make regular appearances at prominent country music festivals, mainstream or independent.
As someone who works professionally covering country music full-time, I couldn’t recall hearing of Wilkins before the fracas surrounding her relationship with Kash Patel. I had never seen her perform. She’s not actively on a tour, and her tour history appears to be limited. She did go on her own limited-run “Nothing Like a Small Town Tour” at one point in the northeast, and has performed in Las Vegas and other places. She has also made a few high profile appearances singing the National Anthem.
Searching through the Saving Country Music inbox, a publicist did reach out about Wilkins’ debut singles “Holdin’ On,” “615,” and “RSVP” in 2020. That means there was some professional intention behind her career at some point.
But when you consider the regular routines of actual, full-time country music artists, it would probably be more appropriate to characterize Alexis Wilkins as a political commentator who is also a country music hopeful more than an active country music star with a professional career. She was not known as a country artist except in very small circles before the Kash Patel relationship and public attention. That’s not a criticism, just an observation.
It’s also fair to observe that it’s very difficult for women to break into country music, and it often takes them much longer to do so compared to their male counterparts. Alexis Wilkins very well might want to be a full-time country musician, but just can’t pull it off just yet because bigger opportunities have yet to present themselves.
Some of the criticism Wilkins has faced is that each time her name makes it into the headlines, her music gets an unfair boost, with Rolling Stone saying this activity has resulted in a 48% increase in her streams. But looking at her Spotify numbers, for someone whose name is constantly in the press as a “country music artist,” the streams for Ms. Wilkins are curiously low if anything. A 48% increase from virtually nothing is not really an eye-popping stat.
Her biggest songs “Country Back” and “Quite Like Whiskey” and “Love Me” have 308,000, 455,000 and 502,000 streams respectively. Not terrible numbers at all, but these are not the type of sub-million numbers you would expect to see from the top tracks of a nationally-known music personality perpetually in the press, and that Rolling Stone is calling out for capitalizing off of criticism. The rest of her songs are in the tens of thousands of streams. This is no Oliver Anthony situation where she’s going viral.
And none of this is a commentary on the music of Alexis Wilkins itself. So what about the music? Is it actually country? After all, actual country fans are accustomed to pop and hip-hop stars being called country when in truth the music has nothing to do with country.
A couple of the Alexis Wilkins songs definitely have some contemporary pop inflections, such as the machine beat opening on one of her biggest songs, “Country Back.” But overall, the music of Alexis Wilkins is definitely country. In fact, it’s not only solidly country, it’s probably fair to characterize her most recent output in the #510 Traditional Country category of the Country DDS. It’s more country than most “country” music these days.
This is her biggest track:
Listening to the tracks of her 2023 EP Grit, this is steel guitar and fiddle country, with country lyricism and country delivery. Some of her early stuff is significantly more country pop, but still with prominent country instrumentation.
None of this is a commentary on Alexis Wilkins as a person, Kash Patel, American politics, or anything else. This is simply a dry, professional assessment of the characterization of Ms. Wilkins as a country artist. And in this commentator’s opinion, yes, she’s a country singer. But it deserves context that it doesn’t appear that Wilkins is currently participating in what would be considered a full-time country career.
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