There is a kind of country record that only gets made by someone who has spent twenty years playing other people's rooms. Mya Byrne's Rhinestone Tomboy, released on April 28, 2023, is one. It was the first full-length on Kill Rock Stars Nashville, the roots imprint the punk label opened with a Byrne single, and it carried the weight of a debut without being one. Byrne had been releasing records since a 2004 EP, fronted the New York bar band The Ramblers through the late 2000s, and made two solo albums, Lucky in 2012 and As I Am in 2015, before a label of that size took notice.
What changed was partly the company she kept. Aaron Lee Tasjan produced the album at Make Sound Good in Nashville with Gregory Lattimer engineering, and his instinct for letting a song swagger suits Byrne. She sings with a low, smoky ease that can sit inside a slow waltz and then, on Come On, snap into something closer to a fist raised at the ceiling. Twelve songs, all written by Byrne, two with co-writers: Sweetheart of Mine with Karen Dahlstrom and the closing That's What Lucky Means with Linda McRae, cut separately in San Francisco as if to keep one foot on the West Coast.
The record is dedicated to Patrick Haggerty, who founded Lavender Country in 1973 and made what the Country Music Hall of Fame recognises as the first openly gay country album, and Byrne's connection there is not honorary. She played bass in the revived Lavender Country, and before that in The Homobiles, the San Francisco queercore band led by Lynn Breedlove of Tribe 8. Byrne came out publicly as a trans woman in 2014 and has written about trans lives since, including for Country Queer, but Rhinestone Tomboy is not a record about being explained. Songs of fear and refusal sit next to plain love songs, and the plainness is the argument: a trans woman is allowed to write a ballad about wanting to be called darling and leave it at that.
The fury is real, though. A month before the album, Byrne and her friend Paisley Fields released Burn This Statehouse Down, written the day Tennessee passed its anti-trans laws, with Tasjan on lead guitar and Kym Register and Swan Real on vocals.
Since then she has gone back to Oakland and to collaborators from her punk years. Two 2025 singles show the range: Transsexual Blues, written and produced by Swan Real about being a trans woman in professional music, and Keep Me Warm, produced by Sandy Stone. Neither has the Nashville gloss, and neither needs it. Rhinestone Tomboy proved Byrne could carry a big, bright country record. Everything since suggests she took what she needed from it and kept walking.
