At this stage of his country music career, Oliver Anthony is still reaching his fans by propping his smartphone in a tour-bus window and recording social-media videos.

Seven months ago, of course, he didn't have a career, didn't have a tour bus and didn't have fans. That was before a do-it-yourself solo recording of his populist anthem "Rich Men North of Richmond" hit YouTube and, with 128 million clicks at this point, changed his life.

In a recent video — " To all my Friends and Family" — Anthony apologized for his relative silence for a few months. He said he was swamped in music-business "craziness," finding professionals to handle concert merchandise and lawyers to protect his songs. In January, he retreated to an old church in Savannah, Georgia, to record his first album — using "microphones from the 1940s" and the natural echo in the sanctuary.

"You know, I didn't want to come out on tour to just sing a bunch of songs to people and then go home and make money. It's like, I wanted to touch people. I wanted to get into people's heads and just try to make an impact," said Anthony, a high-school dropout in rural Virginia who held late-shift jobs in several factories in the North Carolina mountains.

"It's such a crazy place that we're living in now. … It feels like the people that we elect to give a voice for us, they're the complete opposite. If anything, they silence us and manipulate us. … It feels like, in a way, maybe, that we've already went off the cliff as a nation."

For many critics, that sounds like red-state political talk, not the words of an everyman who spent years struggling with depression and alcohol.

While Anthony's impact in America has been massive, audiences at recent concerts in Ireland and Australia also belted out "Rich Men North of Richmond" lyrics line for line -- especially the chorus: "It’s a damn shame what the world's gotten to / For people like me and people like you / Wish I could just wake up and it not be true / But it is, oh, it is."