Big wheels keep on turning. Like any self-sustaining music ecosystem, the country music industry continues to churn out hits all year round, and occasionally this column checks in on that world -- particularly when it intersects with the world of top-40 pop, like when Little Big Town recruited Pharrell to produce their new album. But outside of that curious experiment, I haven't paid much attention to country music this year, a fact I realized while perusing my former colleague Caitlin White's list of the best albums of 2016 so far.