Memorial Day Rewind: Tim McGraw – ‘If You’re Reading This’

Classic Rewind: Merle Haggard & Clint Eastwood – ‘Barroom Buddies’

Happy birthday to Clint Eastwood, who turns 80 today. To commemorate the occasion, today’s Classic Rewind is his only #1 country hit, a 1980 duet with Merle Haggard, from the film Bronco Billy:

EP Review: Chris Young – ‘Voices’

It’s no secret that I have been deeply disappointed for the most part with the direction that mainstream country music has taken in the past few years. There has been little regard for tradition among artists and radio programmers alike, as the genre has moved slowly but steadily away from its roots and closer and closer towards mainstream pop. “Who’s gonna fill their shoes?” asked George Jones, about country music’s legends, back in 1985. At the time and for quite a few years thereafter there seemed to be plenty of able singers waiting in the wings to carry on the tradition, but one by one they disappeared from the limelight and from radio playlists. From the famed Class of ’89, only Alan Jackson maintains a regular presence on country radio.

It’s enough to make a hardcore country fan give up altogether on the mainstream and retreat to the Americana camp or make do with listening to oldies for entertainment. But just when it all seems like a lost cause, there appears a glimmer of hope. Chris Young has been one of the few promising prospects in recent years. He won Nashville Star in 2005, which led to a record deal with RCA. His 2006 debut album, though solid, didn’t garner a lot of attention from radio. His commercial fortunes have improved considerably, though, with his sophomore effort, which has produced two #1 hits so far, including this week’s chart-topper, “The Man I Want To Be.”

Last week Young released a three-track digital EP called Voices, which pays tribute to some of the artists who influenced him. In an era where country stars are more likely to name Bon Jovi and Fleetwood Mac as influences than Haggard and Jones, it’s a breath of fresh air to hear a young up-and-comer name Keith Whitley, John Anderson, and Vern Gosdin as his musical heroes. Voices contains a track from each of these artists’ catalogs: Whitley’s “I’m Over You”, Anderson’s “Swingin’”, and Gosdin’s “Chiseled In Stone”. All are simple, acoustic arrangements that nicely showcase Young’s powerhouse voice. “Swingin’”, in particular, is a pleasant surprise. Never one of my favorite songs, Young’s stripped-down version is good enough to make me reconsider my opinion of the song. Both “I’m Over You” and “Chiseled In Stone” make a strong case that Young is the rightful heir to Whitley and Gosdin. Let’s hope that he is able to continue to come up with strong material and that radio continues to embrace it. Chris Young just may be the man who will lead mainstream country music out of the pop-flavored wilderness.

Grade: A+

Voices is available exclusively through iTunes and is highly recommended.

Classic Rewind: Mary Chapin Carpenter – ‘I Feel Lucky’

Week ending 5/29/10: #1 singles this week in country music history

1950: Birmingham Bounce – Red Foley (Decca)

1960: Please Help Me, I’m Falling — Hank Locklin (RCA)

1970: My Love — Sonny James (Capitol)

1980: Starting Over Again – Dolly Parton (RCA)

1990: Walkin’ Away — Clint Black (RCA)

2000: The Way You Love Me — Faith Hill (Warner Bros.)

2010: The Man I Want To Be — Chris Young (RCA)

Week ending 5/29/10: #1 albums this week in country music history

1965: Buck Owens – I’ve Got a Tiger By the Tail (Capitol)

1970: Charley Pride – Just Plain Charley (RCA)

1975: Freddy Fender – Before The Next Teardrop Falls (Dot)

1980: Kenny Rogers- Gideon (United Artists)

1985: Alabama – 40 Hour Week (RCA)

1990: Clint Black – Killin’ Time (RCA)

1995: John Michael Montgomery – John Michael Montgomery (Warner Brothers)

2000: Dixie Chicks – Fly (Sony)

2005: Dierks Bentley – Modern Day Drifter (Liberty)

2010: Lady Antebellum – Need You Now (Capitol)

Classic Rewind: Charley Pride – ‘If Drinking Don’t Kill Me’

Classic Rewind: Lorrie Morgan – ‘Out Of Your Shoes’

Album Review: Bill Anderson – ‘Songwriter’

Even at the height of his stardom, it was widely acknowledged that “Whispering” Bill Anderson wasn’t much of a singer. But he was, and remains, an excellent country songwriter, who continues to get cuts by some of today’s biggest stars. He has just recorded a dozen of his latest songs on an independently released record, co-produced with multi-instrumentalist Rex Paul Schnelle, who plays electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, banjo, piano, and keyboards and sings backing vocals – basically every instrument but drums, bass and steel.

The songs are all co-writes, and I was struck by the generosity with which Bill puts his own name last in the credits each time. His vocals are no stronger than one might expect, but on most of these songs it doesn’t matter. Half the songs are comedic, and do not demand great singing; in some of the others the limitations of his voice is put to good use.

The stall is set out with the opening track ‘It Ain’t My Job To Tote Your Monkey’, co written with the album’s producer Rex Schnelle and Rivers Rutherford. It’s a very witty riposte to someone who’s never satisfied whether it’s because:

So the government’s crazy and the weather’s all wrong
The radio ain’t playing country songs
Grits won’t cook in the microwave
And you’re mad about the price of gas these days
You can’t get a signal on your mobile phone
Your dog ran off and your wife came home

Also laugh-out-loud funny is the episodic ‘That’s When The Fight Broke Out’ which recounts a hapless husband’s many ill-judged remarks in a series of one-liners. A sense of humor is not necessarily conducive to a happy marriage.

‘Good Time Gettin’ Here’ is a good-natured recital from the kind of guy who wastes most of his time having fun, declaring from high school graduation to his arrival at the gates of heaven:

I’m not sure where I’ve been or where I am or where I’m going
But I sure had a good time gettin’ here

Written with Jamey Johnson and Buddy Cannon, this entertaining song could easily be a hit single for someone like Brad Paisley.

Speaking of Brad, he co-wrote and plays electric guitar on the rather vulgar ‘If You Can’t Make Money’ with Jon Randall also co-writing. The advice for economic hard times is to make love instead of money:
We can’t get a break, can’t get a job
We need to get the opposite of laid off

This is one of the songs where the vocal limitations are a problem, making the song sound sleazy.

Classic Rewind: Bill Anderson – ‘Bright Lights And Country Music’

Album Review: Mary Chapin Carpenter – ‘The Calling’

Mary Chapin Carpenter was almost an accidental country star, coming from the folk singer-songwriter tradition. After she left her major label deal she left the need to appeal to country radio behind, and the wide commercial appeal of her early 90s work shifted to the more intimate approach she had never really abandoned. By the time of 2007′s The Calling all country acoutrements had been removed. This is a straightforward singer-songwriter album with no particular ties to any genre.

Mary Chapin Carpenter is an excellent songwriter with an unusual gift for marrying poetic and occasionally hard-hitting lyrics with beautiful melodies. The songs here all sound good, with attractive tunes, but the lyrics tend to be a little too oblique, each individual line sounding impressive, but the song as a whole less effective when examined closely.

The album opens with one of the best songs, the inspirational title track. This is a slow, low-pitched look at vocation, with a particularly attractive melody and appropriately seductive feel, about the longing for a sense of direction, to be found by God or some other higher purpose:

There are zealots and preachers
And readers of dreams
The righteous yell loudest
And the saved rise to sing
The lonely and lost are just waiting to hear
Any moment their purpose
Will be perfectly clear

And then life would mean more
Than their name on their door
And that far distant shore that’s so near
They’d hear the calling
And stumbling and falling
They’d follow it knowing
There’s nothing to fear
Nothing to fear

I don’t remember a voice
On a dark, lonesome road
When I started this journey so long ago
I was only just trying to outrun the noise
There was never a question of having a choice

Tolstoy famously said that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way“. That may not be strictly speaking accurate, but happiness does seem to be harder to make into compelling art. Mary Chapin gave a voice to single thirty-somethings in the 90s, but her own marriage and changes in her priorities appear to have resulted in new material for her songs, and something of the impetus seems to have been lost, at least for me.

‘We’re All Right’ displays a satisfaction with life here and now, and no interest in either past or future, which does not really engage the listener emotionally, although there is some pretty imagery and a flowing melody. The very pretty-sounding but lyrically repetitive ‘Twilight’ (presumably inspired by life at Carpenter’s Virginia home) has a nice poetic pastoral feel, but it all starts to bleed together into pleasantly forgettable background music, and to be perfectly honest is rather soporific. The mid-tempo ‘It Must Have Happened’ finds her faintly surprised as to how she got where she is “with the ring in my pocket and the moon in my hand”, but it isn’t interesting enough for me to care much.

Classic Rewind: Mary Chapin Carpenter – ‘Passionate Kisses’

Alan Jackson leads benefit for coalminers in West Virginia

Saturday night’s Freight Train Tour stop featuring Alan Jackson with openers Josh Turner and Chris Young wasn’t scheduled as a benefit concert.  But, after the disaster in Montcoal, WV on April 5 took the lives of 25 people, Jackson decided to donate the proceeds from the show to the Montcoal Mining Disaster Fund administrated by the West Virginia Council of Churches.  The Georgia-born singer acknowledged that he didn’t have any personal connection to the lost miners, except for “being just another blue-collar guy”, and paid tribute to them through song and video during the show at Charleston Civic Center.

Show opener Chris Young provided a strong set to a half-empty auditorium, with many of the concert-goers still milling around the lobby or finding their seats.  By the time he sang his closing number, the seats were pretty well filled up and Young lead the crowd in a sing-along of his chart-topping ‘Getting You Home’.  After his set, he made an appearance at the merchandise stand to the squeals of dozens of ladies.  I heard because I was in line for beer just as he emerged.

Josh Turner continued in keeping the ladies satisfied and an all-female mosh pot soon formed around the stage for his set.  Highlights of Turner’s 45 minutes onstage included a cover of George Jones’ ‘One Woman Man’ and his own ‘Got Here as Fast as I Could’.  After getting the crowd further amped up with ‘Firecracker’, he promised to play lots of new music, then launched into ‘All Over Me’, his latest single.  The loudest applause was reserved for Turner’s signature ‘Long Black Train’, which brought the Mountaineer State audience to its feet.

‘Gone Country’ kicked off the set from Alan Jackson.  This was followed by ‘I Don’t Even Know Your Name’, which featured a slap-stick comedy routine starring Martina McBride on the video screens.  It was shot in 1930s style cinema, and I admit, I couldn’t follow the plot, if there was any.  It still made for a neat visual treat to go with the song.  Pausing to reflect the benefit portion of the show, Alan talked briefly about the miners and their families, many of whom were in attendance, then dedicated ‘Livin’ On Love’ to them.  He played his hits, he played a couple lesser known singles, a handful of songs from the new album, and didn’t move around much.  Still, he had the crowd in the palm of his hand the entire time.  As was the case with George Strait, I marveled at Jackson’a ability to captivate a crowd with just his voice and a guitar.  About seventy minutes of traditional country music later, Jackson left the stage with the 12,000+ crowd dazzled.  Later, after pushing about 200 of my dollars into the slot machines at Tri State Racetrack and Gaming Center, I too called it a night.

Classic Rewind: Lynn Anderson – ‘How Can I Unlove You?’

Album Review: Mary Chapin Carpenter – ‘Between Here and Gone’

2004′s Between Here and Gone found Mary Chapin Carpenter attempting to reverse her declining commercial fortunes at radio and retail. A new co-producer, Matt Rollings, was brought on board, and although in many ways this is a very somber and introspective album, a conscious effort was made to make it more radio-friendly than its predecessor. The fiddle and pedal steel are given a much more prominent role on a handful of tracks, as is evident from the first notes of the opening song “What Would You Say To Me?”, which was the first single released from this collection. The trend continues into the second track “Luna’s Gone” before she slips back into singer-songwriter mode with “In My Heaven”, which name checks the late singer-songwriter Eva Cassidy and provides a glimpse of Mary Chapin’s thoughts about the hereafter. This is a track that would have fit comfortably on any of her previous albums,  though the steel guitar would likely have been absent if it had been recorded a few years earlier.

On “Goodnight America”, Carpenter talks about being an outsider in a strange and crowded city. In the first verse, she’s a pedestrian waiting to cross a busy intersection in West L.A. In the second verse, she’s in Houston, before moving on to Atlanta, Charleston, and the Bronx. She’s still looking for a place where she’ll fit in as the song closes:

I’m a stranger here
No one you would know
I’m from somewhere else
Well isn’t everybody though

I don’t know where I’ll be
When the sun comes up
Until then, sweet dreams
Goodnight America

The same theme of loneliness is revisited later in the album with “Grand Central Station”, in which the working-class protagonist takes comfort in the familiar images in New York’s famous railway terminal, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The narrator is part of the cleanup crew at Ground Zero, who is haunted by the voices of the victims.

The album closes on an equally introspective, yet more hopeful note with “Elysium”, which is said to have been inspired by Mary Chapin’s 2002 marriage:

I looked out the window and stared at the fields
Where the blue sky and green were colliding
I looked back at you and I knew we were sealed
By a fate that has ways of providing
Yes sometimes you get there in spite of the route Losing track of your life and what it’s about
The road seems to know when to straighten right out
The closer you come
To Elysium

My two favorite tracks from this album are the two that were released as singles: “What Would You Say To Me?” and “Beautiful Racket”. Neither one charted, despite the fact that they are arguably among the most country-sounding singles of Carpenter’s career. But instead of recapturing Mary Chapin’s lost momentum at radio, Between Here and Gone marks the end of the major label phase of her career, as she and Sony parted ways after the album‘s release.

The replacement of John Jennings with Matt Rollings as Mary Chapin’s co-producer resulted in a subtle yet noticeable sonic change. The album is a bit less cohesive than her earlier efforts, since there were some obvious concessions made on certain tracks in order to woo back country radio support. Overall, however, I enjoyed this album more than any of its predecessors. It didn’t produce any huge radio hits, but it’s the first Mary Chapin Carpenter album that I didn’t get bored listening to three-quarters of the way through.

Grade: B+

Between Here and Gone is available on CD through third-party sellers at Amazon. It is also available for download at Amazon and iTunes.

Classic Rewind: Tennessee Ernie Ford – ‘Sixteen Tons’

Single Review: Josh Turner – ‘All Over Me’

The title of Josh Turner’s latest single suggests that it is a ballad about someone lamenting over an ex-lover who has moved on, but judging a song by its title proves to be a mistake, at least as far as this rollicking, upbeat tune is concerned. In the opening line, we are told that the weather forecast is “for a hot one”, so Turner decides that a day on the water is called for. He instructs his girlfriend to grab her shades, string bikini and Coppertone 45 and join him for a day of boating and an evening by the campfire. Though the destination is a spot down by the river underneath a sycamore tree, the imagery of sunglasses, swimsuits and sunscreen conjures up associations with the beach,. This is entirely appropriate, since this release was clearly timed to be ascending the charts by summertime.

The second single from Turner’s Haywire album was produced by Fred Rogers and written by Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson, and Ben Hayslip. It opens with some honkytonk-style piano and drums, which set it apart from much of the bland fare that will be surrounding it on the radio airwaves. The piano and drums are quickly joined by the electric guitar with some banjo thrown into the mix much later in the song. The intent seems to be to make the record sound contemporary without sacrificing its country identity. In that respect it works, but the guitar riffs are somewhat overbearing. Instead of gradually building up in intensity, which is the usual practice, the listener is hit over the head with them near the beginning of the song.

In the long term, ‘All Over Me’ is unlikely to be remembered as a standout entry in Turner’s catalog, but in the short term, it’s a fun, lighthearted summer song that is enjoyable to listen to, despite the slightly heavy-handed production.

Grade: B

‘All Over Me’ is available for download at iTunes and Amazon.

Classic Rewind: Emmylou Harris – ‘To Daddy’

Week ending 5/22/10: #1 singles this week in country music history

1950: Long Gone Lonesome Blues — Hank Williams (MGM)

1960: Please Help Me, I’m Falling — Hank Locklin (RCA)

1970: My Love — Sonny James (Capitol)

1980: Gone Too Far — Eddie Rabbitt (Elektra)

1990: Walkin’ Away — Clint Black (RCA)

2000: The Way You Love Me — Faith Hill (Warner Bros.)

2010: The Man I Want To Be — Chris Young (RCA)

Week ending 5/22/10: #1 albums this week in country music history

1965: Buck Owens – I’ve Got a Tiger By the Tail (Capitol)

1970: Charley Pride – Just Plain Charley (RCA)

1975: Freddy Fender – Before The Next Teardrop Falls (Dot)

1980: Kenny Rogers- Gideon (United Artists)

1985: Alabama – 40 Hour Week (RCA)

1990: Clint Black – Killin’ Time (RCA)

1995: John Michael Montgomery – John Michael Montgomery (Warner Brothers)

2000: Dixie Chicks – Fly (Sony)

2005: Jo Dee Messina – Delicious Surprise (Curb)

2010: Lady Antebellum – Need You Now (Capitol)