Thompson Square’s Keifer Thompson: ‘I Think We Will Be Genreless in 10 Years’

Anyone who had been listening to country music over the past few decades can see that the genre has made some big changes sound-wise. No one knows that more than the artists writing, recording and performing the music and some of them have been spending a lot of time thinking about the future of the industry.

Thompson Square's Keifer Thompson, for one, sees country music adding more multi-genre influences and becoming less and less country.

"We've kind of opened the flood gates for an influx of different genres to kind of step into country music, ya know?" Thompson tells TooFab.com. "Is country music country music anymore? It's getting less and less that."

"I think we will be genreless in ten years," he adds. "That is a little sad, because country music has always -- it hasn't been pop music -- it's always been that. So when everyone else was doing their thing, country music always had a smaller stake in the claim, but it was always country music and you always knew it when you heard it. You can't really make that distinction anymore sometimes."

Just because Thompson doesn't think that the popification of country is good for the genre's future, that doesn't mean that he necessarily believes that artists need to make a full return to country's roots either.

"I don't think it needs to go back to George Jones and Johnny Cash, but I do think the songs need to have some more meat on 'em," he says. "And get back to some story songs, that mean somethin' ... What is country music, it's a relative term. The cool thing about what's going on right now is the people are telling us what country music should sound like. I think as an artist, what you have to do is be yourself. I think if people want to buy it, people want it, people love it, then God bless ya ... Whether I like it or not, it doesn't really matter."

Thompson and his wife and musical partner, Shawna Thompson, recently announced that they'll be adding a third member to their family with the birth of their first child, due in January.

"It's kind of consuming our whole existence. I love it. I don't know that we believed we would ever do this, you know?" Keifer says of preparing to become a dad. "We are buying clothes and cribs and getting the house ready, that kind of stuff. It's a pretty exciting time for us."

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