Raised is out March 18.
Photo: Dawit N.M. for New York Magazine
When Hailey Whitters thinks of Shueyville, the small Iowa town south of Cedar Rapids that raised her, she thinks of her Aunt Cindy and Uncle Phil’s farm. The country singer-songwriter didn’t grow up around animals the way others in the Whitters family did, but depending on the year, Cindy would have cows, pigs, chickens, goats, turkeys, or even ducks. “She was homesteading before homesteading was cool,” Whitters jokes, pulling onto the farm’s gravel driveway in a pickup truck borrowed from her mother. In the wood-furnished kitchen of the farmhouse, fragranced by strawberry rolls rising on the counter, Cindy tells us stories about butchering…
