Country music has always been grounded in the lived experience, but in the 2000s the genre paid especially close attention to the little moments in our days: not just the joys of drinking and falling in love but also pleasures as simple as heating a bowl of rice in the microwave. This natural development was a way to take stock of American life in the turbulent time after 9/11 and during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Some responded with hard-rocking patriotism, while others took out the fiddles and tried a different approach.