The Freelancer’s Blues, the second full-length LP from Brooklyn’s country crooner Dougie Poole, captures its current moment like nothing else. Poole updates the sto- rytelling backbone of country music for an audience that is young, urban, romantically alienated and financially pre- carious, using the same threads spun by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson before him to write his own anthems for a new generation of country music fans. With his debut album Wideass Highway Dougie Poole es- tablished himself as forerunner in a class of musicians who grew up in a post-genre ecosystem equally as likely to be influenced by Ariel Pink and Animal Collective as Dolly Par- ton and Dwight Yoakam. On The Freelancer’s Blues, Dou- gie graduates from drum machine and synthesizer bedroom country to a full band with honky-tonk harmonies, wailing pedal steel, and carefully constructed arrangements