After the semi-success that was her self-titled debut, Julie returned to the fans in 2006 with Men & Mascara. This time around she hired Byron Gallimore; the man responsible for producing Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, both of whom have turned out to be two of the biggest hit makers in the genre. Any sane person would think that this would be the recipe for success; a stellar vocalist who also has a stunning exterior, great songs, and a contemporary production. Alas, no. Neither of the singles released off the album (The title track, and a cover of Saving Jane’s “Girl Next Door”) charted, and so this album faded quietly into obscurity, which is truly sad, because this is one of the best albums I’ve heard. Ever.
In the opening track “Paint And Pillows”, Julie assumes the role of a woman whose man just cheated on her. She uses their home and furniture as a metaphor for their relationship:
It’s gonna take more than paint and pillows
New curtains on these windows
To cover up all the trash that you drug in
There ain’t a rug big enough to sweep it under
And just in case you wonder
I’d rather strike a match and watch it go up in smoke
It’s gonna take more than paint and pillows
He can’t fix what he broke with just a few band-aids, and if he doesn’t make a better effort, she’s ending the relationship. This would’ve made a killer single, because not only does it showcase Julie’s voice brilliantly; it also has a contemporary sounding production. It would’ve slipped right in between Before He Cheats and Should’ve Said No; the only thing separating it from them being: the fact that it’s actually good. Damn good, to be more precise. Read the rest of this entry »
Sugarland seems to be easing into their role as country’s new “it duo”, slowly but surely edging out Brooks & Dunn and Montgomery Gentry via both album sales and radio success (Don’t believe me? Check out Country Universe’s Album Sales Update). They make random videos for non-singles (“Love”), don’t release any video for their latest chart-topper (“It Happens”) and they perform whatever song they want to on every awards show (“What I’d Give”). It’s like they don’t even have to promote their singles anymore, they just do whatever they want and are successful. Unlike fellow singers Kenny Chesney and Carrie Underwood, they really have the material that I feel deserves this success.
Now we know their upcoming single, “Joey” will be a success hot on the heels of three #1 hits, but is it any good? Well it’s a little bit of a mixed bag. The premise of the song is a good idea, of all the questions one asks when a loved one dies, wondering what could have happened differently:
What if I said yes?
What if I’d gone out that night?
What if you turned left, and everything would’ve turned out alright?
What if I spoke up?
What if I took the keys?
What if I had tried a little harder, instead of always trying to please?
The lyrics get a little repetitive but they get across the point, all the “what if”s that follow a tragedy. It’s an interesting concept and a cool way of not spelling out what happened. From what I can gather, Joey is the boyfriend of the narrator, and he dies in a car accident, possibly from being drunk and driving, but it’s not clear. One problem appears: it’s too vague. The writing of the song doesn’t tell us major details of what happened, we just get the grief of the narrator! We get little pieces of the story, but not all of it. Luckily this single should get a music video to illustrate more, but that really shouldn’t be necessary.
Unfortunately this song is a little repetitive with a chorus that gets the message across, but a little too simplistically. At the end of the song where it breaks down into “Joey/I’m sooooooo sooooorry…” over and over again, which is a little too much repetition for me. Luckily, the verses are meant to be the showcase of the song, not the chorus so it’s not a huge problem, but it’s still there.
Sonically, I love this song. Jennifer sings wonderfully with a less pronounced accent, and the pain of her performance really shines through. Unlike “Already Gone”, this song has a lot of harmony from Kristian, and it really works. The production is just right, with a great melody accentuated by the plucking guitar and medium drums in the background- just a great sounding song all together.
This song is different enough from Sugarland’s past 3 singles in theme and mood to really show off the sadder side of Love On The Inside, now they just need to release “Very Last Country Song” next… (If you haven’t heard “Very Last Country Song” yet, hear it now, here) Whatever they do, they can’t go wrong with their next single unless they choose “What I’d Give”- but this song is still great.
Grade: B+
Written by: Bill Anderson, Kristian Bush and Jennifer Nettles
Lately I’ve been ordering more albums off of Amazon.com, mostly older albums with songs I like. Today, I realized that I’ve bought almost all of Trisha Yearwood’s studio albums, all of them except Trisha Yearwood, Everybody Knows and Where Your Road Leads. Then I decided I should just order those three and complete my Trisha collection! I also decided to order one of Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits collections, to get all of Dolly’s hits on one CD.
Unfortunately, I’m $8.06 short of reaching super saver shipping (I try to be cheap sometimes…), so that’s where you come in! I need recommendations, and I think you guys will come up with some great stuff.
Sound good? This might seem lazy, but I know I’ll get some great ideas of what I should get. Also in the comments, I’ll respond to tell you if I have the albums or not. I’d prefer a country album, but any and all recommendations are welcome!
One of my favorite things about country’s most successful group ever was their genuine appreciation for the South. ‘Dixieland Delight’, ‘Song of the South’, ‘Born Country’, and ‘Hometown Honeymoon’ are just a few of their anthems to the glory of the southern lifestyle. So by the mid 1980s, the members of Alabama were southern rock and country music superstars, and no place more than the southern states.
These songs were fun and a nice break from some of the power ballads on the radio at the time. Back in the days when a ‘country’ song was one of these gems by Alabama or something delightful from Tracy Byrd and people weren’t sick and tired of hearing about how backwoods and redneck every singer is. I miss those days. Now that every other song on the radio has this theme, it’s gotten pretty boring.
But a few good ones still remain – particularly those by Alabama. My recommendation this week is Alabama’s ‘Hometown Honeymoon’, a tale of two young lovers getting married and all the family heirlooms and treasures they acquire. It’s an endearing little tune and even a list song in the loosest sense of the term, but it’s a damn good one.
What other ‘I’m country’ songs do you think got the message across without pandering? What are your favorites?
Reba McEntire’s first album for the Valory label will be released August 18. The album, Keep On Loving You, features her current single. ‘Strange’, which is currently climbing the charts. Here’s your first look at the music video:
After the Urban Cowboy boom had fizzled out and just before the New Traditionalist movement took Nashville by storm, sales of country music were down considerably and still falling fast. As a result, record labels were unsure how to market new artists – much like today. So, in 1984, it was no big deal that an artist’s debut album would contain only 6 tracks – especially if that artist was signed to RCA Records. The Judds first record was a 6-song mini LP and so was Keith Whitley’s debut for the label. I’m not sure whether the label just didn’t have the faith in the artists to invest in a full-length album or if they were looking for a quick return before bankrolling a major project, or if it was a combination of the two.
At any rate, Keith Whitley’s RCA recording career began with 1984′s A Hard Act To Follow, a 6-song set introducing Keith Whitley to the record-buying public at large. Producer Norro Wilson and Keith deliver these 6 tracks with varying degrees of quality. Album opener and also the lead single, ‘Turn Me To Love’ is a slick-sounding come-hither number that finds Keith in good voice, but this production just doesn’t fit the voice. The lyrics are a bit bland and unoriginal too.
A honky tonk piano introduces us to ‘Living Like There’s Tomorrow’ and the fiddles and steel on this track match the vocal much better than the previous track. Still, the background singers are a bit loud in the chorus. The label’s second attempt at a radio hit was the title track. ’A Hard Act To Follow’ finds Keith longing for the woman he once had and musing that she is a ‘hard act to follow, her leaving brought the whole house down‘.
‘If A Broken Heart Could Kill’ is my favorite track on the set. It’s a barroom waltz in stone-country fashion. Why the label didn’t release this to radio, I’ll never know. But I suspect Keith Whitley would have shot to stardom a lot faster had this one gotten a chance on the airwaves. It’s very reminiscent of George Jones at his best. As a singer, Keith has more sides than just the tender balladeer and on Bob McDill’s ‘If You Think I’m Crazy Now (You Should Have Seen Me When I Was A Kid)’, he uses his Kentucky drawl to great effect delivering the clever lyric.
The set closes with ‘Don’t Our Love Look Natural’, a song about dying love that takes the unusual analogy of a funeral. Harlan Howard and Don Cook wrote this number, which borders on melancholy and novelty – so much that I’m not sure which way it’s supposed to go. Keith’s performance is tinged with sadness, so I’ll take it as a sad song.
Neither of the singles from A Hard Act To Follow made it to the top 40 and the album itself failed to chart. Nowadays that would spell the end of a major label career, but luckily for us things didn’t work that way in 1984 and the label released a full album the next year. And while it didn’t meet any commercial success, this set is still a worthy addition to your Keith Whitley collection, but I’d pick up his later albums first if I were you – this one’s more for the die-hard fans than just the casual listener.
Grade: B-
This album is out of print, but copies of the CD re-release are available on Amazon.
The sky was gray and threatening before Heidi Newfield took the B105 stage at Cincinnati’s annual Taste of Cincinnati festival last night. And after several downpours earlier in the evening during opener Justin Moore’s set, the crowd was wet, but still excited and plenty rowdy when Newfield hit the stage just after 9 pm.
The blonde vixen ran through her repertoire, which consists mostly of songs from her debut album, with the ease of a diamond cutter on a deadline, letting her fun-loving personality shine through the clouds in the sky during ‘Cry Cry (Til The Sun Shines)’ and ‘Can’t Let Go’ – a number she infused with a whole lot of harmonica.
The only song in the set the crowd seemed to know was the hit ‘Johnny and June’ and they were singing along like it was their own. Newfield rocked out on numbers like ‘Knocked Up’ and her current single, the autobiographical ‘What Am I Waiting For’, but showed her tender side on ‘Wreck You’, another solid track from the debut album.
There’s not much harmonica – if any – that I can remember on her debut album, but Heidi seemed to want to play the fire out of the instrument last night, even on her closing number. I was a bit puzzled by her closing song, as she went with Trick Pony’s debut single ‘Pour Me’ – a definite crowd-pleaser. For an artist trying to forge ahead on her own, I didn’t expect her to draw from the band’s songbook for her show, but this one seemed to work. Newfield was in great voice, and kept the already dampened and tired crowd engaged and entertained during her 50 minute set.
In 1995 BNA (successor to RCA) released one more album of Keith Whitley’s previously unreleased material, this time solely drawn from his songwriter demos for Tree. This album really showcases Keith the singer-songwriter, something he never had the chance to show during his lifetime, as he wrote or co-wrote every track. The songs are all pretty good, although they do not all quite match up to the very best of the songs he recorded by other writers.
Re-production duties are handled by Steve Lindsey and Benny Quinn, and lean a little more heavily to strings and orchestration on some tracks than is entirely desirable, but the vocals reveal Keith at his best. Even though these recordings were never originally intended for public consumption, they were designed to show off the songs to other artists looking for material, and no doubt Keith felt a strong connection to them, which comes out strongly in the end result.
The most frequent co-writer on these tracks is Don Cook, best known these days as producer of Brooks & Dunn, but also a very competent songwriter in his own right. He and Keith wrote half the tracks included on Wherever You Are Tonight, including the excellent title track, which was released as a single to promote the album. It is a melancholy tale of a night-radio DJ in love with one of his callers: “She brought love to this lonely place/Even though I never even saw her face”. We don’t know why she stopped calling in, but the protagonist moves from third person narrative to address her directly in the chorus:
“I still dream about her and me
And imagine how good it could be
This song goes out to you
Wherever you are tonight.”
Despite the radio theme, lovely tune, and beautiful vocal, the song regrettably failed to attract any attention at country radio, and the label never again released a Keith Whitley single.
In addition to being an exceptional vocalist, Keith Whitley was also a very accomplished songwriter. He didn’t record very many of his own songs, but a handful of them went on to become hits for other people. Here’s a sample of some of the songs he wrote or co-wrote:
Yesterday, I was watching a new TV show called Glee that premiered on Fox this week. During the show, the cast sang the hit “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey- a great song. While I had heard this song before, something about hearing it then got me, inspired me. The song doesn’t even really apply to me, but the chorus just grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I bet it’s because I’ve finished high school, I’m moving on to chase my own dreams so I won’t stop believing! It really inspired me- a great feeling to have.
Country music has many songs like that, songs that inspire and uplift, even though most of the current ones are pretty bland and lame. Others are exceptional, like Jo Dee Messina’s “Bring On The Rain”, by far one of my favorite Jo Dee Messina songs. This past week I got Dolly Parton’s latest album, Backwoods Barbie, which has the great inspiring track “Better Get To Livin’ “. Just like “Don’t Stop Believing”, “Better Get To Livin’ ” just makes me want to go and be the best person I can be.
Lee Ann Womack has plenty of these songs, like the smash hit “I Hope You Dance”, but I prefer her quieter inspirational numbers. On her album There’s More Where That Came From, the final track is “Stubborn (Psalm 151)” (Listen to it here). This song is just an absolute masterpiece, examining faith and how hard it can be to find it:
There’s a molecule of faith in this room
And even though it’s much too small to see,
If I have the courage to believe
I’ll find the one who left it here for me
This is probably the biggest song that really inspires me- it’s just so real and not overblown faith, and it has that quiet resolve to do better, a true inspirational song.
One of the problems with making a tribute album is how far the participants are prepared to bring something of themselves to the interpretation, and how far they are so concerned to pay their respects the artist being honored, that the end result is little more than very tasteful, high-class karaoke.
The tribute album produced by BNA, the successor to Keith Whitley’s record label RCA, in 1994, five years after his death, does sometimes fall into that trap, but it makes one or two decisions which mark it out, too. The highly respected Randy Scruggs took on production duties, with Lorrie Morgan as executive producer. Another of those involved was songwriter Byron Hill, who says on his website that the project was the one he enjoyed working on most in his period as A&R director for BNA (1993-1994).
Some of the hottest artists of the mid 90s were recruited for the project, and most of them give respectful versions of some of Keith’s best-known songs, which speak well of their admiration of Keith, but fall a little flat when compared to the originals. Alan Jackson takes on ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes’; Tracy Lawrence tries ‘I’m Over You’; Joe Diffie sings ‘I’m No Stranger To the Rain’; and Mark Chesnutt tackles ‘I Never Go Around Mirrors’. They are all fine singers in their own right, and their versions of Keith’s hits are pleasant enough to listen to, but the overriding adjective which comes to mind while listening is ‘nice’. They lack something of the passion Keith brought to them, and perhaps this is because they were thinking of the act of tribute they were paying rather than the song itself. I suspect that if any one of these gentlemen had independently decided to record the song on one of his own albums, it would have had a different approach and more life. I think what is missing is inspiration.
Diamond Rio are a little more successful bringing something new to their track, ‘Ten Feet Away’, one of the better songs on LA To Miami. This is partly because the natural advantage of being a harmony-based band automatically brings a new feel to a song popularised by a solo singer, and partly because the new version has better production. Also very pleasing and not overawed by the task is the duet by Keith’s old friend Ricky Skaggs with Marty Raybon, lead singer of Shenandoah, on ‘All I Ever Loved Was You’, the least familiar of all the covers. This traditional-sounding bluegrass waltz was written by Ricky’s mother Dorothy Skaggs, and originally recorded by Keith and Ricky as precociously talented teenagers on their 1971 set Second Generation Bluegrass.
I don’t have a theme for my recommendation this week. But I do want to point you to a great song on Randy Travis’ latest album, Around The Bend. The song is ‘You Didn’t Have A Good Time’. It’s a stark look at the morning-after a hard night’s drinking. Randy Travis is the owner of the one of most distinctive voices of our time and he uses it here to play narrator to the drunken soul: ‘When you woke up this morning/I guess you just assumed /That you got something out of /The empty bottles in this room’, before concluding that ‘somebody had to tell you, you didn’t have a good time’.
Sooner or later, the subject of cross-dressing as a lifestyle was bound to make it into a country song. I thought it would be another 20 years before we heard a mainstream country music single about a transsexual. And I didn’t expect it to come from the squeaky clean Phil Vassar when it did arrive. It’s the lead single from Phil’s upcoming fifth studio album, and the song impacts radio this week, having already debuted at #52.
Bobby is an all-American boy: linebacker on the football team and he can bench-press 335 pounds. Then one weekend, down at the local bar, he walks in wearing a pink party dress and sporting golden curls. The story continues as Bobby goes back to his day job on Monday – driving a tow truck. He’s been known to knock a few teeth out, so if you see a big burly wrecker driver in a sundress, don’t ask him for a beauty tip. (I think I saw this guy on that new Operation Repo show, but he was calling himself Sonya.)
All the while, Vassar takes this from a novelty tune and turns it up just a notch. ’You better watch how much you drink/He might look better than you think/If it’s a big bald girl with the platinum curls/Hey then don’t be surprised/That’s just Bobby with an I’. And a new man, er, woman is born. Eventually – probably to avoid trips to the dentist – everybody just seems to accept Bobbi.
The controvery is masked behind genuine humor in this toe-tapper. And I think it may take repeated listens to fully understand all the action that’s happening here, so I smell a first-rate music video to accompany it. Until then, enjoy what I consider one of the best radio singles so far this year from one of country music’s most engaging songwriters.
RCA had a lot of unreleased Keith Whitley recordings in the vaults, and in 1991 the label got his last producer, Garth Fundis, to work on a number of these, leading to the release of Kentucky Bluebird. The album is a bit of a hodgepodge, comprising a mixture of these re-produced tracks, snippets from radio interviews of primarily historical interest, and a few tracks from Keith’s earlier RCA albums. A total of 15 tracks are listed, but only eight were new songs. The material is not of such a consistently high material as his two masterworks, Don’t Close Your Eyes or I Wonder Do You Think Of Me, but Garth Fundis did a pretty good job making it sound like a reasonably cohesive project.
Five tracks were taken from the sessions for the jettisoned album Keith recorded with Blake Mevis as a follow-up to LA To Miami, with new backings recorded under Fundis’ oversight. The label obviously regarded these as the most commercial tracks, and two were picked as singles to promote the album. The more successful of these was ‘Brotherly Love’, a duet with Earl Thomas Conley, which reached #2 on Billboard. Conley was rather a curious choice of duet partner, as although he had been a massive star in the 80s, he was at the tail-end of his hitmaking career, he was quite a bit older than Keith, and his soulful style had little in common with Keith’s traditional country and bluegrass influences. However, their voices blend together surprisingly well on a touching if slightly sentimental tale of brotherhood.
Keith’s last ever hit single (making #15) was the pleasantly inoffensive but rather forgettable pop-country ballad ‘Somebody’s Doin’ Me Right’, written by Fred Knobloch, Paul Overstreet and Dan Tyler. It feels rather like an out-take from LA To Miami, as does the undistinguished stuttering rocker ‘Going Home’, which was written by Troy Seals and actor John Schneider (who had himself been pursuing a career in country music with some success in the 80s). You can see why Keith was not altogether happy with the album they were planned for.
The best of the Mevis-originating tracks is the rather lovely ‘That’s Where I Want To Take Our Love’, written by Dean Dillon (who later recorded it himself) and the legendary Hank Cochran. Keith gives a beautifully tender interpretation of this reflective dream of settling down and making a home in the country: “They’ll know just what country means ‘fore they go off to town”, he sings of his imagined future children.
RCA had never given Keith much opportunity to record his own songs, but he did write songs, and three tracks here are based on demos he recorded for his publishing company, Tree, although only two of them are songs he co-wrote himself. ‘Backbone Job’ was written by Keith with Kix Brooks, and has a jaunty tune belying a serious lyric about searching for honest manual work in a hi-tech world.
After the semi-success that was her self-titled debut, Julie returned to the fans in 2006 with Men & Mascara. This time around she hired Byron Gallimore; the man responsible for producing Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, both of whom have turned out to be two of the biggest hit makers in the genre. Any sane person would think that this would be the recipe for success; a stellar vocalist who also has a stunning exterior, great songs, and a contemporary production. Alas, no. Neither of the singles released off the album (The title track, and a cover of Saving Jane’s “Girl Next Door”) charted, and so this album faded quietly into obscurity, which is truly sad, because this is one of the best albums I’ve heard. Ever.
1949: 
Sugarland seems to be easing into their role as country’s new “it duo”, slowly but surely edging out Brooks & Dunn and Montgomery Gentry via both album sales and radio success (Don’t believe me? Check out Country Universe’s 
Lately I’ve been ordering more albums off of Amazon.com, mostly older albums with songs I like. Today, I realized that I’ve bought almost all of Trisha Yearwood’s studio albums, all of them except Trisha Yearwood, Everybody Knows and Where Your Road Leads. Then I decided I should just order those three and complete my Trisha collection! I also decided to order one of Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits collections, to get all of Dolly’s hits on one CD.
One of my favorite things about country’s most successful group ever was their genuine appreciation for the South. ‘Dixieland Delight’, ‘Song of the South’, ‘Born Country’, and ‘Hometown Honeymoon’ are just a few of their anthems to the glory of the southern lifestyle. So by the mid 1980s, the members of Alabama were southern rock and country music superstars, and no place more than the southern states.
After the Urban Cowboy boom had fizzled out and just before the New Traditionalist movement took Nashville by storm, sales of country music were down considerably and still falling fast. As a result, record labels were unsure how to market new artists – much like today. So, in 1984, it was no big deal that an artist’s debut album would contain only 6 tracks – especially if that artist was signed to RCA Records. The Judds first record was a 6-song mini LP and so was Keith Whitley’s debut for the label. I’m not sure whether the label just didn’t have the faith in the artists to invest in a full-length album or if they were looking for a quick return before bankrolling a major project, or if it was a combination of the two.
In 1995 BNA (successor to RCA) released one more album of Keith Whitley’s previously unreleased material, this time solely drawn from his songwriter demos for Tree. This album really showcases Keith the singer-songwriter, something he never had the chance to show during his lifetime, as he wrote or co-wrote every track. The songs are all pretty good, although they do not all quite match up to the very best of the songs he recorded by other writers.
Yesterday, I was watching a new TV show called Glee that premiered on Fox this week. During the show, the cast sang the hit “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey- a great song. While I had heard this song before, something about hearing it then got me, inspired me. The song doesn’t even really apply to me, but the chorus just grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I bet it’s because I’ve finished high school, I’m moving on to chase my own dreams so I won’t stop believing! It really inspired me- a great feeling to have.
One of the problems with making a tribute album is how far the participants are prepared to bring something of themselves to the interpretation, and how far they are so concerned to pay their respects the artist being honored, that the end result is little more than very tasteful, high-class karaoke.
Sooner or later, the subject of cross-dressing as a lifestyle was bound to make it into a country song. I thought it would be another 20 years before we heard a mainstream country music single about a transsexual. And I didn’t expect it to come from the squeaky clean Phil Vassar when it did arrive. It’s the lead single from Phil’s upcoming fifth studio album, and the song impacts radio this week, having already debuted at #52.
RCA had a lot of unreleased Keith Whitley recordings in the vaults, and in 1991 the label got his last producer, Garth Fundis, to work on a number of these, leading to the release of Kentucky Bluebird. The album is a bit of a hodgepodge, comprising a mixture of these re-produced tracks, snippets from radio interviews of primarily historical interest, and a few tracks from Keith’s earlier RCA albums. A total of 15 tracks are listed, but only eight were new songs. The material is not of such a consistently high material as his two masterworks, Don’t Close Your Eyes or I Wonder Do You Think Of Me, but Garth Fundis did a pretty good job making it sound like a reasonably cohesive project.
