For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved country music. I’ll admit that I wandered into the genre in the 1990s, like most, a fairweather fan of hugely popular acts, and didn’t know anything about its past. It wasn’t long before country music, with its charm, simplicity, and oh-so-relatable themes had won me over completely. I’ve since spent a great amount of my time listening to and learning the makings of and history of country music. Likewise, I’ve began to love every cliche’ image commonly found in the country song, and I’ve made it a point to familiarize myself, at least to some degree, with everything from the neon signs of the smoke-filled barrooms to the wide open fields and even the prison cells.
Luckily, I’ve had no experience with prison cells (except what I see on Lockdown), and though I have enjoyed the view, I’ve not spent any great amount of time in corn fields either. No, my time under the country music atmosphere has mostly been spent at any number of watering holes on the east side of the Mississippi River. I can honestly say I know just how great it feels to plant your tired ass on a bar stool and order up a remedy for your broken heart. As any of my friends will tell you, the first thing I like to do upon arrival in a new city is to go visit their various restaurants and pubs. And then, after some sight-seeing or event-going, I’m usually the first one ready to sample the liquor at a different establish the next night. I enjoy people, I enjoy socializing, and without sounding too god-awful pretentious, the modern-day bar scene is really the last bastion of the kind of face-to-face networking and general person to person contact that has all but vanished from society. How much of your contact with other people is limited to your time behind a screen, be it computer or cell phone?
For that reason alone, the occasion of listening to a great song with a room full of friends and strangers is a satisfying feeling. At least it is to me. But I’ve also found that atmosphere affects your listening experience, sometimes to the point that it can color your like or dislike for certain sounds and lyric combinations. Some songs just sounds better in different places. This is why I always stay put in those clubs that have elected to provide one of those dandy TouchTunes jukeboxes, instead of the now-standard karaoke deejay. Lately I’ve noticed there’s usually only a handful of us brave enough to risk alienating themselves to the entire room by taking the long walk over to that screen and choosing a handful of songs. I could categorize us, but I won’t. Depending on where we’ve stumbled into, I’m still likely to find another protege of Alan Jackson’s instructions to not rock the jukebox.
The American Legion’s Post 471 in Portsmouth, OH has an excellent club right downstairs from their meeting house. Now, most weekends, you’ll find the locals belting out the hits themselves, but if you go in on a weekday, you’re likely to find a nice little lady playing country sounds on that digital jukebox. And you’re just as likely to see me standing in line, dollar bills in hand, behind her waiting my turn to fill the room with my own favorite country songs, and even a few that aren’t so country. But they fit my mood at the time, so they work just as well as my country standards. On my most recent outing, I decided to jot down the songs I was playing on the old jukebox and wondered if everybody has pet songs to play on the jukebox, or just to a room full of people in general. I know I like to show off what I consider my own good taste in music, and I’ll bet you do too. Here’s what I played this week:
The postman delivered a past-due bill notice
And the alarm clock rang two hours late.
The garbage man left all the trash on the sidewalk,
And the hinges fell off of the gate.
And this morning at breakfast, I spilled all the coffee,
And I opened the door on my knee
But the last thing I needed, the first thing this morning
Was to have you walk out on me.
We’ve all had days like the one Willie sang about, days where nothing seems to go right. I’ve just experienced an entire week of one bad thing happening after another that has left me feeling a little more self-indulgent than usual. Some of the events were somewhat inconsequential but were bothersome because they happened in close to succession to other annoyances. All of them paled in comparison to the loss of a beloved family member who left us in the early hours of Saturday, July 3, 2010.
Ronan didn’t live with me; he lived with my parents, but he was best friends with my two dogs and was a frequent visitor to our home. His sudden departure was a devastating blow, one with which we are still struggling to come to terms. He hadn’t been himself lately, but none of us realized how seriously ill he was. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been listening to different songs lately. We’ve all got our evergreen favorites that we always come back to. These are not them. They’re also not new releases or recent discoveries. These are just 8 songs that have been giving me a lot of satisfaction lately. So I wanted to share them.
Mark Chesnutt – ‘Thank God For Believers’ … This is one of my favorites from our June Spotlight Artist. Years into a rocky relationship, this guy is still making mistakes, but he’s sure grateful for his good-hearted woman who just ‘wipes her tears away and puts the coffee on’.
Wynonna – ‘Sometimes I Feel Like Elvis’ … Pressures build up and even the best of us feel a little overwhelmed sometimes. This ‘song about having everything and nothing at all’ features a pair of smart, revealing verses that give way to a soaring chorus.
Reba McEntire – ‘Never Had a Reason To’ … The closing track on Reba’s acclaimed What If It’s You album finds the narrator chasing her own dreams, having never been tied down to any one person, place, or thing – until now, that is. The bass-line intro, which frames much of the song, recalls classic country songs like George Jones’ ‘Her Name Is…’
Dixie Chicks -’If I Fall You’re Going Down With Me’ … Natalie Maines rips into this track with a funky vibe in her timbre, complimented by strange but pleasant harmonies throughout the song by her band mates. She’s on the edge of falling in, but not letting go of his hand. Nobody wants to be the only one in love.
Reba – ‘Have I Got a Deal For You’ … This is just a fun song, with Reba in full New Traditionalist mode – this time with a western swing number as good as any George Strait has given us. Reba talks about her heart like it’s a used car, hinting at a bit of wear and tear, but quickly pointing out that ‘it’s a one time only offer’ and she’s letting this one-of-a-kind, life-time guaranteed heart go at basement prices.
Linda Ronstadt – ‘Tracks Of My Tears’ … The Miracles had the first hit with this oft-covered gem. Ronstadt’s California Rock-inspired recording of the Motown classic went top 5 in 1976 on the pop charts, and just missed the country top 10.
Elton John – ‘Turn The Lights Out When You Leave’ … In 2004, Elton John released Peachtree Road, an album of songs he had recorded in Atlanta. While it wasn’t billed as a country album, nor should it be, much of the press surrounding it called it country, and an appearance with Dolly Parton on the CMA Awards that year helped cement that classification. The CMA performance of this song lead me to buy the CD, and I still find myself spinning the lead single – which doesn’t feature Dolly’s magnificent harmonies – quite often.
Patty Loveless – ‘When The Fallen Angels Fly’ … The (almost) title track to Patty’s CMA Album of the Year features one of the singer’s finest vocals, set to a pure country backdrop, while lines like ‘I near drowned myself in freedom, just to feed my foolish pride’ elevate it from other similar-themed songs like Patty’s own ‘Lonely Too Long’ and Trisha Yearwood’s ‘Like We Never Had a Broken Heart’.
What’s new in heavy rotation in your library these days?
The CD may be a dying format, but it’s still my personal preferred way to buy music. Partly that’s because I like having proper printed liner notes to refer to and keep physically with the music they refer to. But I often have cause to complain. Here are my top ten peeves with unsatisfactory liner notes:
10. Songs not listed in the correct order (most recently I found this on Marty Raybon’s religious album from 2008). This is deeply confusing when you’re listening for the first time and aren’t yet familiar with the material. You wonder why a song has the apparently dissasociated title it appears to, before you realize they’ve had a last minute change in the sequencing, after the liner notes were printed. Not a frequent error, but really annoying when it happens. It’s more common for the songs to be listed in order, but only if you unfold the paper in just the right way.
9. Print too small to read without a magnifying glass or a torch. What’s the point of printing it if no-one can read it?
8. Text and background in a color combination too faint/dark to read ever.
7. Mis-spelling songwriters’ or musicians’ names. This looks embarrassingly amateur as well as being disrespectful to the person in question. On Brandon Rickman’s very good album last year, for instance, fiddle player Jenee Fleenor’s name was spelt correctly twice and incorrectly three times. Misspelt sogwriters’ names are even more common.
6. Mis-spelt words on printed song lyrics or in commentary. There is no excuse for this on a high-budget release. If the person responsible for putting the notes together can’t spell, employ a proofreader.
5. No lyrics at all.
4. No songwriter credits – not common these days, but some low-budget releases do omit them; this is an economy too far for me. I want to know who wrote the songs.
3. Your liner notes are printed on a glossy, multi-page brochure with room for dozens of fetching pictures of the artist in various outfits, holding instruments, posing with pets, etc, but somehow they still have no room for the lyrics. (Okay, I like the odd picture of a dog. I’d stil rather have the lyrics, though.)
2. You can’t be bothered to print the lyrics in the liner notes, but tell buyers you can see them on the label or artist website. Websites are transitory. I hope to still be listening to your album in 10, 20 or more years’ time: is your website still going to be there?
1. A note saying lyrics (or credits) are available on the label website, when they aren’t, at least when the album is released (Anita Cochran’s Serenity and Randy Kohrs’ Quicksand are recent guilty parties here). This is extremely frustrating.
I recently stumbled on this Roger Miller medley on The Muppet Show. Songs include ‘Do-Wacka-Do’, ‘Dang Me’, ‘My Uncle Used To Love Me But She Died’, and ‘You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd’. These are real novelty songs. If you like these shortened versions, be sure to check out the entire songs at Roger’s Last FM page.
Certainly, in every era of country music since Miller’s hey day, there have been those artists whose catalogs have been chock-full of humor and irreverence. Tom T. Hall was a master a conveying pathos with humor in a lyric. Listen to ‘The Year That Clayton Delaney Died’ or ‘Ballad of Forty Dollars’. And then others made entire careers out of comedic music, such as Ray Stevens and Cledus T. Judd.
The 1990s saw the rise of the likes of Joe Diffie and Tracy Byrd, who still injected humor into traditional country music, but gone were the sad overtones, and any sign of irreverence. I don’t blame Diffie, or other of his ilk, but it just seems to me that the shift in the usage of the novelty song in country music sparked forth the desire for more and more artists to venture into the comical side of their music in order to hit on the charts. Humor began to exist as a commodity rather than an extension of the art, and essentially it began to take on a larger role in the genre’s form. Now we’re to the point that the term novelty song doesn’t really describe the attempts at humor, mostly because there’s nothing novel about most of them. But I digress.
For me, the best way to enjoy the real wealth of country music’s novelty songs is in its past, and not the ditties of today.
What do you think? And what are some of your favorite novelty songs?
We didn’t do too well with our predictions of this year’s CMA Award winners. In part, that’s probably because we gave the CMA way too much credit for artistic integrity. Next year, I’m going to take a look at the nominees and predict the very worst person in each category, and I suspect I’ll do better than I did this year.
None of us expected Taylor Swift to walk away with four awards, including Entertainer and Female Vocalist. After she delivered yet another poor live performance on the telecast, the Association looks like a set of idiots whose critical faculties have been drowned out by the jangle of cold hard cash. Yes, commercial success has always had an impact on CMA and other award voting, and that’s probably fair enough – it’s one of the factors that measures any artist’s impact on the genre. Carrie Underwood’s three wins as Female Vocalist were largely based on her high sales and radio play rather than her vocal prowess per se, but never, in my experience, to the degree that someone as poor a technical singer as Taylor, who doesn’t even sound good with ProTools, and whose vocals are truly horrific without them, is rewarded quite so generously with so little artistic merit. I wouldn’t have given her Album of the Year myself, especially when Jamey Johnson’s near-masterpiece was on the ballot, but at least there was some possible logic underpinning that decision. It is fairly widely agreed that Taylor’s main strength is in writing songs that appeal to young girls, rather than actually singing them, and this at least rewarded her for her body of work. And in this category, rewarding sales figures does make some sense. But Entertainer for a teenager who has only been recording for a few years and Female Vocalist for someone who manifestly has trouble singing in tune both bring the Association into disrepute. I said, “making her Female Vocalist would rightly attract derision, especially if she sings live on the telecast,” and after watching her performances on this year’s show, I feel I was absolutely right.
On a happier note, there was one award I was thoroughly pleased by – ‘In Color’ winning Song of the Year. It should have won Single too, as it was by far the best record in that category. It appears that the industry really likes Lady Antebellum, though. It was good to see them winning Group of the Year, if only because they aren’t Rascal Flatts. Lady A aren’t really country to my ears, but their music is pleasantly inoffensive melodic pop or AC– that’s a major improvement over Rascal Flatts, who make my ears hurt. I wasn’t very familiar with the Zac Brown Band’s work but I think I could get interested in them.
It was also nice to see the voters weren’t swayed by the sentimental thought of Brooks & Dunn breaking up. Perhaps they too realized that in all likelihood they’ll still be on the ballot next year. In fact, with a big farewell tour planned, they would be eligible for Entertainer of the Year next time around, and they could even win it. Of course it will be even more overdue for Brad Paisley then, but I’m starting to wonder if he ever will win this award, having lost out to Taylor this year.
Back to our predictions, and I am happy to report that Chris was the best predictor among the MKOC staff, with six accurate picks. His faith in Lady Antebellum and Sugarland paid off there. Meg and I got four each, and J.R. and Razor only managed two each. Congratulations, Chris!
When we announced Patty Loveless as our Spotlight Artist, all of us here at My Kind of Country were very excited about the opportunity to write about one of our favorites. In past months, we’ve brought in Guest Contributors to help out with the reviews. But this month, all the reviews were snatched up pretty quickly by the regular staff, so we didn’t have room for our guest writer friends to share their thoughts with you on Patty’s albums. But we have one reader who is admittedly a bigger fan of Miss Patty Loveless than any of us and he came up with his own idea for an article, just so he could be part of October’s Patty coverage. Stephen Fales, who you will all know as Steve from Boston, composed the following piece as a tribute to his favorite singer. We’re glad to have him as a Guest Contributor here at My Kind of Country, and hope you enjoy his tribute to a peerless artist.
- J.R. Journey
No one has done more to bring the mountain sound to modern country music, and few with such compassion and grace as Patty Loveless. There have been accounts of fans trying to thank Patty for the profound impact that her music has wrought in their lives, and all they were able to manage were tears when they tried to speak. Patty, with genuine humility and understanding, attributes this transfomative effect to “the power of music”. Indeed, music is a divine gift, the language of the angels and of the heart. But this is not just any music, and Loveless is not just any singer.
Patty Loveless has been blessed with one of the purest, most authentic and profoundly resonant mountain-country voices in the music world. It is an echo of her own empathetic heart, and seems to emanate from the very depths of her Appalachian soul, and the voice of Patty Loveless touches people right to the core of their being.
Loveless’ warm Appalachian alto is rich and expressive, and her gentle Kentucky drawl and twangy mountain timbre come as naturally to her as breathing. Her skillful phrasing, measured melisma, and mature sense of nuance convey a depth of emotion that is extraordinary, almost otherworldly. She is a true vocal virtuoso and knows both restraint and abandon. Patty Loveless inhabits the heart of a song, and has no need to resort to histrionics or ostentatious vocal gymnastics. She is all about the music, and allows her music to speak for itself.
At times Patty’s musical pendulum swings deeply to the countryside, as with her album Sleepless Nights and at others, to the mountainside, with offerings such as her Mountain Soul albums, but she never settles for the middle road of mediocrity. On the contrary, Loveless has found her golden mean with a unique mountain blend that combines the best of both traditions. This is best exemplified on her On Your Way Home, and Dreamin’ My Dreams albums, but it is pervasive throughout her catalog. It is real mountain-country music, and Loveless is perhaps it’s most inspired and accomplished practitioner.
I’ve been listening to country music since I was 9 years old. When I was a kid listening to some of these songs, I just sang along, memorizing the melody and the lyric, never really knowing what the song meant. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized Garth Brooks was singing about murder, Reba about prostitution, and what people meant Faith Hill was doing under those sheets. See, I’ve learned so much from the music I play. I’ve learned to love, learned what heartache is, learned to forgive, and to hold on.
The introverted and heavy-hearted lyrical stylings of Mary Chapin Carpenter have kept me sane during the craziest times and they still feed my brain regularly. This is in contrast to Alan Jackson, who takes a straight-forward and bare-bones approach to his songwriting and his music feeds the simple soul in me, the country boy that remembers catching crawdads in the creek and how great it felt to come home muddy and dirty. And while Alan doesn’t directly sing about those things much – or I’d have already gotten bored with him – he just gives off a good ol’ boy energy in whatever he does. I need reminded there are still good ol’ boys in the world now and then.
I couldn’t begin to tell you everything country music has taught me. But I can tell you about some of my favorite albums, and what I learned from them, and how they shaped me into who I am today.
Alan Jackson – Here In The Real World … Alan’s debut album is the best example of his simple and universal appeal. Maybe it’s because it was my introduction to Alan Jackson, so I have a soft spot for it. I learned all about Music Row and ‘how the wheels turn slow’ from ‘Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow’, I’ll never forget there’s no place like ‘Home’, and that love can still be just as strong after a decade – from this record.
Randy Travis – Storms of Life … If nothing else, it taught me to appreciate traditional country music, especially in this neo-classic form. These songs were already country standards by the time I got to them, and were still relevant. This album told me about the reasons to cheat, broken-hearted madness, and assured me there’ll always be a honky tonk somewhere. God knows we need one after all that.
Mary Chapin Carpenter – Come On Come On … I call this album my ‘school of hard knocks’. Mary Chapin Carpenter is a deep soul and also one that has stumbled more than once on the road of life, and it comes across in her songs. ’The Hard Way’ and ‘I Take My Chances’ were lessons in the real world for me, pointing out all the grim realities. Other songs like ‘Passionate Kisses’ and ‘I Feel Lucky’ keep the album from being too abysmal.
Reba McEntire – Rumor Has It … This one taught me just how great a country album really can be, from start to finish. Reba mixes some stone country numbers with a few snappy tunes and also a few soaring ballads. Maybe just playing these songs so much embedded them into my consciousness and because of that, their lyrics are closely tied with my own intuition. I find myself assuming the bitter character in ‘You Remember Me’ or the indecisiveness of ‘Now You Tell Me’ too often. And I’m constantly ‘waiting for the deal to go down’.
Reba performing at the 2009 ACM Awards in Las Vegas.
They say confession is good for the soul, right? I have to confess that I’m a bit of a lead foot. It’s one of my few vices. I like to push it somewhere between 5 and 10 miles over the limit. You probably understand if you live in a state like Nebraska with a lot of wide open spaces, or you live in a smaller town or in the country and need to drive somewhere to get any place.
Fortunately, I seem to have a nice face and a clean driving record so I haven’t gotten an actual ticket in close to ten years. But lately, since I’ve started listening to mostly country music, I’ve gotten a lot of warnings. Just gets my toe tapping I guess.
I got stopped twice while playing Reba CDs all the way to a Reba concert in Minnesota (once in Nebraska and once only 30 minutes from the venue). It was understandable to be speeding toward that concert, right? I mean, it was Reba! I got stopped here in town coming off the interstate while listening to the “Fast Song Friday” request program on our local country station. They were playing my request, Reba again.
And just this week I got pulled over while listening to George Strait’s Beyond the Blue Neon CD going a bit too fast in a construction zone. I think it was ‘Angel, Angelina’ that got me in trouble. (Took the cruise control off for the construction zone and my speed crept up.)
I usually turn the radio down, but not off when talking to the officer. Perhaps that’s the real reason I only get warnings – they’re country fans, too – or at least Reba and George fans.
So, if you were caught speeding what might you be listening to? You can either speak from experience or hypothetically.
I have a confession to make- it may destroy any credibility I might have had here and it may drive away readers, but here it is: I’m addicted to the song “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas. On Tuesday a friend of mine sang two lines of the song, before I had even heard it, and when I heard the whole song, I got hooked. I know it’s a nonsensical and terrible song, but it’s so infectious that I can’t stop, I even know all the words…
So it’s weird, but I like having it stuck in my head, no matter how embarrassing, I actually love the song! This hasn’t happened since Sugarland released “All I Want To Do” over the summer. After the song came out, I went on a 10 day backpacking trip and that song was constantly playing over and over. At one point I whistled the song, and it actually started getting stuck in other people’s heads- even when they’d never heard it before! Then I looked around on the internet to see this song getting lambasted, so I felt like I couldn’t say that I liked it because so many others hated it!
Want to hear some more of mine? “Feel That Fire” by Dierks Bentley, “Lucky 4 U (Tonight I’m Just Me)” by SHeDAISY, “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” by Beyoncé and “Love Story” by Taylor Swift. Obviously these songs tend to be not very country, but still, I want to know:
What songs are your guilty pleasures?
If you really want to hear it, here’s a link to see the music video for “Boom Boom Pow”. I sire hope none of you like it…
A comment made by Kevin at Country Universe got me to thinking more about the minuscule playlists of today’s country radio stations. Satellite radio almost seemed like a savior for the format at one point, but since that idea didn’t really catch on with the mainstream even enough to affect the Top 40, hope for the classic country stations that popped up on subscriber radio has since been lost. It’s always been beyond me why so many radio stations have consistently-shrinking playlists.
Every station (even the one in your town) will have a list (albeit undersized) of recurrents from the past 15-20 years they still play regularly. But this list is usually limited to artists who are still making waves or are favorites of the program director for that station. Much has been said about the small playlists at radio – across all genres. And the consensus always seems to be the same: the listeners want a wider variety. So why aren’t program directors and music consultants listening? And why can’t we hear hits from the 1950s and 60s mixed in with today’s hits?
The first question is the hardest to answer. Radio is obviously a business and their goal is to acquire – and keep – as many listeners as possible. More listeners mean the commercials are worth more money. So it’s understandable that radio chooses to play it safe. However, there are several downsides to this, not the least of which being the shrinking playlists. But this play-it-safe approach also makes it harder for new artists to break through and for veteran artists to take many risks. A good example of this is Alan Jackson’s Like Red On A Rose album. Jackson has been a radio staple since his debut album, but the two singles released performed poorly, with neither reaching the top spot at radio, and a third single not being released. As a result the album became Alan’s first not to reach platinum status.
Now, even though some stations still play selected classic country songs, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a station playing anything recorded before 1980. I think the main reason for this is that the sounds of country music have evolved so much over the past 3 decades that there’s a huge schism between classic and contemporary. The classics that do hold up alongside today’s hits don’t sound as vastly different from their contemporary counterparts. Those that do are relegated to the classic stations.
On one hand, you have artists like Randy Travis and Dolly Parton, both of whom delivered excellent albums last year and both had songs as good or better than the current Top 40. Neither Travis or Parton were able to score a significant radio hit from their latest releases. Then we have artists like Tanya Tucker and Hank Williams Jr. whose hit-making days are also past and aren’t releasing singles to radio with the consistency they used to. Still, Tanya and Bocephus made the kind of records that stand the test of time. Their music should still be played today alongside the latest hits.
What artists do you think should still be played on the radio that are being ignored right now? And why do you think their music can stand the test of time?
So among critics and bloggers alike, it’s usually cool to blast “list songs” as being lazy excuses for songwriting right? I’m sure by now you guys have heard the song “It’s America” by Rodney Atkins (I envy those that have not heard it yet…)? Well songs like that give list songs a bad name- it’s lazy and uncoordinated pandering. However, I want to talk about list songs in general- but I’ll start with “It’s America” as an example.
It's America by Rodney Atkins
Let’s look at this song, because it really is lazy. What really annoys me about this song is how almost every thing listed in the song could be about any country on Earth. A rock and roll band? Kids selling lemonade? Cities and farms? Fireflies in June? God‽ I find it incredibly hard to believe that these things solely define America and no other country can have them- especially the last one. It’s that kind of arrogant attitude that Americans have sometimes that annoys people from other countries and Atkins’ incoherent list perpetuates that stereotype in every way- and it’s a terribly annoying song. The objects mentioned have nothing to do with each other, let alone even making any sense. They literally made a song trying to pull at all the heartstrings possible in their audience and it seems people are taking the bait, seeing as the song is currently at #5 on the charts. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m a newbie lover of Country music. There’s just something about it that’s drawn me in. I know it has a great deal to do with the stories – both in the songs and of the artists themselves. Similarly, I love it when the tune or the arrangement or the inflection in the singer’s voice nuances the story, and makes it come to life.
For example, I love Jamey Johnson’s ‘In Color’. It’s my pick in the Single Record and Song of the Year categories at Sunday’s ACM Awards. The whole song literally turns those black and white photos into color, from the lyrics to Jamey’s vocals to the arrangement and production.
The intro quietly starts with a little guitar and light keyboard, as though a couple of family members are improvising in one corner of the living room while a young man and his grandfather are sitting at the kitchen table flipping through an old photo album from the ‘30s and ‘40s. The young man points and asks if that’s Grandpa in one of the photos. Grandpa acknowledges that yes, he was 11, farming cotton in the depression. The instrumentation remains sparse and Jamey’s solo vocals are as dusty as that decade.
There’s a build on the chorus: ‘If it looks like we were scared to death like a couple of kids just trying to save each other, you shoulda seen it in color’. The instrumentation deepens with some additional guitars, the trap’s cymbals and some urgency in Jamey’s voice turning the black and white into color. The next shot is one of Grandpa and his gunner during the war sometime in the winter of 1943. The music includes the hint of military snare and the addition of a background vocal, but is sparse and transparent again, just like Grandpa’s breath on that winter day. As he remembers his friend, a teacher from New Orleans, the color develops in the drums. Some additional guitars playing melodic lines weave in and out with Jamey’s voice as it builds again to the next chorus with an added line – ‘A picture’s worth a thousand words but you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered.You shoulda seen it in color’. A single guitar solo brings the pace down for the last verse.
The next one is Grandpa’s favorite – he and Grandma’s wedding day. The acoustic guitar and keyboard are back with just a sigh of electric guitar and a partner background vocal as Jamey sings tenderly how the ‘rose was red and her eyes were blue’. You can almost see Grandpa sit back looking at that last photo as Jamey thoughtfully pauses on the last line of the verse, and the melody and chording take a new turn, reflecting Grandpa’s new insight: ‘That’s the story of my life…right there in black and white’.
The full instrumentation and background vocals rhythmically drive to the final chorus: ‘A picture’s worth a thousand words but you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered. You shoulda seen it in color’. The song closes by peeling off the layers of “color” down to the “black and white” of the solo acoustic guitar.
For a country song, you just can’t get much better than that.
Lately I’ve noticed that the worst songs seem to be picked for release as singles from a number of artists. Alongside that, labels seem to be increasingly confused about how best to promote albums, with songs being announced as the next single from a given artist, and then hurriedly replaced by something else. It all seems like a terrible muddle. What’s going wrong?
Our March spotlight artist Eric Church has released one of the poorest songs on his new album as its lead single. A particularly egregious example is Tim McGraw. His label, Curb, released a ridiculous number of singles – seven – from his last studio album, 2007′s Let It Go. How, then, have they managed to miss the one song on that set that’s really worth hearing, ‘Between The River And Me’? George Strait released the unimpressive ‘River Of Love’ as the third single from Troubadour when he could have released the memorably quirky ‘House With No Doors’ or the duet with Patty Loveless on ‘House Of Cash’. There are plenty more examples.
Trace Adkins and his label have taken something of a middle course with his current album, X. The two singles released so far, ‘Muddy Water’ and ‘Marry For Money’ are perfectly listenable, but they really aren’t the outstanding tracks, either. Will anyone who isn’t already a fan ever get the chance to hear great songs like ‘I Can’t Outrun You’, ‘Til The Last Shot’s Fired’, or ‘Sometimes A Man takes A Drink’? Warner Brothers seems to have abandoned Randy Travis’ Around The Bend in favor of his new hits collection, I Told You So – understandable enough, and to be fair the singles from Around The Bend made no radio impact, but that means they are apparently not even going to try with the stunning ‘You Didn’t Have A Good Time’.
Then last year we saw two of the most commercially successful of today’s artists – Keith Urban and Brad Paisley – release singles taken from older projects rather than either something from their then current album or a new song to herald an upcoming 2009 release.
We’ve also seen record labels second-guessing themselves at the last minute, by not only announcing one song as a single, but going to the trouble and not-inconsiderable expense of making a video for it, and then changing their minds and offering another song as the single instead. Sometimes they pretend there was never any intention of making the song they have made a video for the official single (as with Eric Church’s ‘Lightning’), but I’m not sure I’m convinced.
I was a senior in high school in 2002. It was a cold gray January day in Ohio, and I was driving home from school all by myself that day. For reasons I’ve forgotten, none of my regular car pool buddies were with me that afternoon. I was what I would call a casual fan of country music at the time. My CD player regularly spun really mainstream acts like Garth Brooks and Reba, and I had a passing affection for Brooks & Dunn, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and a few others. But I was hardly the country fan I am today.
That afternoon, a song came on my radio that forever changed how I perceived country music. One of my local stations (I get 3 country stations from around the tri-state) used to play lots of album cuts in the afternoon and ask listeners to call in with their comments. Well, this day the D.J. (or the program director) decided to test Trisha Yearwood’s recording of the Rosanne Cash classic ‘Seven Year Ache’, a track from 2001′s Inside Out. Rosanne Cash sings harmony and even takes the lead for a couple lines in the second verse here – and I am a big fan of her version too. However, the Yearwood version brought me to the dance, so it’s still the one I dance with most often.
The song kicks off with its signature guitar riff – which is catchy in its own right. But, this was the first time a song had ever really grabbed me with its lyrics and drew me in. When the song was over and I learned it was actually a classic country song Trisha Yearwood had covered, it was then that I decided to dig deeper into the catalogs of country music’s artists and seek out more gems like this one.
I was instantly taken with the protagonist in this song. The verses paint a vivid picture in my imagination – like a mini music video playing inside my head as the story unfolds. I see a woman at home alone, sitting on the edge of the bed, lost in thought. I see a man in a seedy dive, with all the characters that usually inhabit the places. And I wonder, just like this woman does, why? Why has the man lost interest in his wife?
Rosanne reportedly wrote the song after a fight with then-husband Rodney Crowell. Heartache and anguish are often the sources of life’s greatest inspiration. The songwriter herself says of the lyric: ”That’s one of those gifts you only get once in life. I wrote it in about an hour. I just poured my soul out into the song.” She bared a lot of herself in the process, but gave us, in my opinion, one of the greatest lyrics of our time.
It’s been over seven years now since I first heard these two verses and chorus, and I still haven’t had a single song affect me as much as this one. Some have come close, but just like a first love, my introduction to true lyrical genius was a once-in-a-lifetime experience – but one I’ve spent the past seven years trying to recapture. So goes the seven year ache.
It’s a generations-old question. Is country music country enough these days? And when does the want to go mainstream override the need to remain traditional? Remixing country songs for pop radio is certainly nothing new. But it’s a subject that seems to be coming up more and more these days. Taylor Swift’s done it, and Carrie Underwood’s reps refuse to. Lee Ann Womack took her remix of ‘I Hope You Dance’ all the way to the Nobel Prize ceremony, and Shania Twain sold millions of albums worldwide with remixed singles.
Sugarland is now on an extended tour of the UK and Europe. And in an effort to sell their music over there and get it played on mainstream radio stations, they’ve been asked to take the ‘twang’ out of their hit ‘All I Want to Do’. To me, the only twang in that song is the vocal of Jennifer Nettles. So, is Kristian Bush going to sing lead now in an effort to take the Georgia accent from the song? I certainly hope not.
Sugarland’s latest album – Love On The Inside, which I would categorize as more acoustic pop than country anyway, is probably the most ‘country’ of their three releases, but only in the loosest sense of the word. The most country instument on the album is the voice of Jennifer Nettles. So why the need to remix the songs? Nettles attempts to explain the ‘disassociation’ in an interview with London’s Financial Times:
“As opposed to ‘disassociate’, I would say it’s more to open us up, to say: ‘hey this is what we do, we love all kinds of music and we play all kinds of music’. We embrace it, and I think our fans do too. We want to broaden ourselves and quite frankly we want other people to hear our music and see how it’s accepted.”
I am still in the dark about the logistics behind this thinking though. Broadening the fan-base and the visibility of country music sounds like a great idea to me. But when you have to take out the very elements that make it country music to sell it as mainstream music in another nation, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Aren’t you then, by default, just selling American pop to an overseas audience? Dolly Parton (who has always been as much a pop star and cultural icon as a country star) recently wrapped up a very successful tour of Europe without changing her sound.
What do you think? Is it necessary to tweak the music to sell it to larger numbers? Should acts like Sugarland and Taylor Swift change the sound of their music to appease the European audience?
I’ve spent about 5 hours today in my car. My best friend Angel and I were about an hour north of our hometown in the city of Columbus, OH doing some shopping. So, half of the time was just ‘road time’ where we were on the same highway going directly from point A to point B. The other half was spent hopping the parking lots and parking garages, and maneuvering our way around the busy streets of the Polaris Center in Columbus. Those are two very different driving experiences for sure. Open road as opposed to congested city streets. But there was one constant for the entire trip that both Angel and I agreed on: music. What is a road trip without music? Hell, what’s a jaunt to the grocery store without a tune along the way? One of the first things I like to do when I get in the car is make sure I have a CD (you know, those round plastic circle things people used to listen to music on?) in the car stereo.
I usually opt for up-tempo stuff when I am driving. My friend Angel, on the other hand, always prefers the weepers. So, we went from Jo Dee Messina’s ‘Bye, Bye’ to ‘Helping Me Get Over You’ from Travis Tritt and Lari White. Then, we might listen to Garth Brooks’ ‘Callin’ Baton Rouge’ followed by ‘Texas Tornado’, the Tracy Lawrence classic. And you can guess who picked what. Now, when I was on the air as a DJ for WPAY, I hosted a show from 3pm to 7pm for a short time and we called it Drive Time with J.R. Journey. The show was designed for the rush-hour crowd as they were making it home from work. Not that I really had any say about the music I played, but it’s always been my thinking that at the end of the day – and especially in their cars – people want to hear music that kicks a little.
But, based on some of the requests I used to get (which I wasn’t allowed to play anyway), there are a lot of people who want to hear the ballads at the end of the day. I guess it depends on the mood I’m in too. Some days it’s Shania Twain’s Come On Over and others it’s Trisha Yearwood’s Hearts In Armor. It’s usually the former though. Like I said, I like the fun, snappy, fast-paced songs when I’m driving. Then I’ll let the ballads pour out once I get home and get my shoes off and a glass of bourbon in my hand.
So, do you agree with me and Angel; is music essential in the car? What’s your music of choice on the road?
Timeless
I have never been a fan of cover albums- until recently. Last year I went on a Martina McBride kick, getting all of her albums after her Greatest Hits album, including Timeless. Listening to it, I found that I really didn’t like it at all, save a few songs (‘Rose Garden’, ‘Once A Day’, etc.). Now remember, this is back when I didn’t care for more traditional country music (Read as: “Before I started reading The 9513″), but as a result I just had disdain for covers in general. I felt like they were lazy efforts by an artist who didn’t feel like making new music for his/her fans, so they used old music instead. I just didn’t like the album at all, and I never really understood why.
Sleepless Nights
More recently, as in this past December, I bought Patty Loveless’ cover album, Sleepless Nights. Since this blog was brand new and I was trying to compile a list of my favorite albums from 2008, I felt like after all of the glowing recommendations of that album, I needed to hear it for it to be able to make my list.
On the first listen, as I was driving around to different grocery stores looking for powdered sugar (different story), I was sufficiently distracted that I labeled the album as “boring”. All I heard was a bunch of slower songs by a female artist that I wasn’t familiar with, so I didn’t notice anything else. Then, due to a large snowstorm, I was stuck at home, where I finally listened attentively to the album- and boy was I impressed! Listening to it closer, I discovered a heartbreaking set of classics (that I had never heard before) performed by my new favorite singer. I fell in love with almost every song for different reasons, whether it was the great steel guitar (‘Crazy Arms’) or the riveting emotion in Patty’s voice (‘Sleepless Nights’), I found the greatness that had made these songs classics.
I was driving home today and had the radio tuned to my country station. As much as we all like to berate the current state of top 40 country, I think every one of us is guilty of turning it on now and again – if only out of morbid curiosity. Anyway, the new Toby Keith song came on, and afterwards, the chorus was stuck in my head all day. So, for the rest of the afternoon, the inside of my head was singing ‘she holds tight to me and the Bible/on the backseat of my motorcycle’. And while I’m not at all a fan of the female characters in Keith’s songs, I couldn’t help but find the chorus too damn catchy to shake off.
Now, I have nothing personal against the song itself. Though I do think Toby’s view of a modern woman is a bit warped, to say the least. And I’ve yet to meet one believable lady in any one of his lyrics lately. I don’t know any high maintenance whiskey girls myself. I did meet a hottie last month, but she never cried in front of me and when I asked her to crash here tonight, she left me a big blue note.
Anyway, some intense Lee Ann Womack therapy has pretty much cleansed my brain of the pesky earworm that is ‘God Love Her’, thankfully. But I know the next time I turn on my radio, there’s another tune – just as mundane – waiting to take its place in my consciousness.
What songs that you don’t like get stuck in your head? And what songs do you think make good earworms?
Emotional truth is at the heart of almost all truly great country songs. There is a very fine line in country music between the true tearjerkers, for which the genre is justly known, and the cloying sentimentality which outsiders sometimes ascribe to the music. Not, I have to admit, always completely unfairly – if the strings are too obvious, the emotion feels forced, and the song just doesn’t work. But as I said, the line is a fine one, and a song’s impact depends on a number of factors.
Country music does not consist solely of confessional singer-songwriters, and we do not expect every song recorded to be a personal slice of the author’s life – certainly not when it comes to a love song or cheating song. However, when we are aware a song draws on its writer’s experiences, I think we are more disposed to respond to them as “real”. If a love song is said to be for its writer’s spouse, and the marriage subsequently breaks up (as, for instance, with Vince Gill’s ‘I Still Believe In You’, written for first wife Janis Gill before he left her for another woman), the song may suddenly seem emotionally dishonest in retrospect, purely because the listener has bought into the story behind the song. In the case of a song specifically designed to elicit an emotional response, this authenticity is all the more important.
There is a line in the Mavericks’ song ‘Children’ which refers to “a life where everything’s real and nothing is true”. I do not believe a song has to be factually real to convey emotional truth, but it does help to dispel accusations of sentimentality. An example of this would be Tammy Cochran’s ‘Angels In Waiting’. This tribute to Tammy’s two brothers, who both died young as a result of cystic fibrosis, would be cloying if the song were an invented one. It probably wouldn’t even work if it were sung by an unconnected singer, even though it was written from the heart and is a well-constructed song. Here it is almost completely the fact that it is the true story of the person singing it which carries the emotional force of the song.
Another instance is Jimmy Wayne, whose first self-titled album was filled with intensely emotional songs inspired by his childhood. These songs — the hits ‘I Love You This Much’ and ‘Paper Angels’, and other less-known numbers on similar themes — would undoubtedly fall in the emotionally manipulative category if they were not genuinely based on Jimmy’s appalling childhood in foster-care. That lends an emotional truth which is not found in the same singer’s love songs which are forgettable. American Idol finalist Kellie Pickler is frankly not a very good singer, but her song ‘I Wonder’, about the mother who abandoned her in childhood, has an emotional resonance, which is lacking in her other material, and is genuinely moving — as long as you know the story behind it is true. I don’t think it stands on its own merits.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved country music. I’ll admit that I wandered into the genre in the 1990s, like most, a fairweather fan of hugely popular acts, and didn’t know anything about its past. It wasn’t long before country music, with its charm, simplicity, and oh-so-relatable themes had won me over completely. I’ve since spent a great amount of my time listening to and learning the makings of and history of country music. Likewise, I’ve began to love every cliche’ image commonly found in the country song, and I’ve made it a point to familiarize myself, at least to some degree, with everything from the neon signs of the smoke-filled barrooms to the wide open fields and even the prison cells.
We didn’t do too well with 
I’ve been listening to country music since I was 9 years old. When I was a kid listening to some of these songs, I just sang along, memorizing the melody and the lyric, never really knowing what the song meant. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized Garth Brooks was singing about murder, Reba about prostitution, and what people meant Faith Hill was doing under those sheets. See, I’ve learned so much from the music I play. I’ve learned to love, learned what heartache is, learned to forgive, and to hold on.
A comment made by Kevin at Country Universe got me to thinking more about the minuscule playlists of today’s country radio stations. Satellite radio almost seemed like a savior for the format at one point, but since that idea didn’t really catch on with the mainstream even enough to affect the Top 40, hope for the classic country stations that popped up on subscriber radio has since been lost. It’s always been beyond me why so many radio stations have consistently-shrinking playlists.
I’m a newbie lover of Country music. There’s just something about it that’s drawn me in. I know it has a great deal to do with the stories – both in the songs and of the artists themselves. Similarly, I love it when the tune or the arrangement or the inflection in the singer’s voice nuances the story, and makes it come to life.
Lately I’ve noticed that the worst songs seem to be picked for release as singles from a number of artists. Alongside that, labels seem to be increasingly confused about how best to promote albums, with songs being announced as the next single from a given artist, and then hurriedly replaced by something else. It all seems like a terrible muddle. What’s going wrong?
I was a senior in high school in 2002. It was a cold gray January day in Ohio, and I was driving home from school all by myself that day. For reasons I’ve forgotten, none of my regular car pool buddies were with me that afternoon. I was what I would call a casual fan of country music at the time. My CD player regularly spun really mainstream acts like Garth Brooks and Reba, and I had a passing affection for Brooks & Dunn, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and a few others. But I was hardly the country fan I am today.
song affect me as much as this one. Some have come close, but just like a first love, my introduction to true lyrical genius was a once-in-a-lifetime experience – but one I’ve spent the past seven years trying to recapture. So goes the seven year ache.
It’s a generations-old question. Is country music country enough these days? And when does the want to go mainstream override the need to remain traditional? Remixing country songs for pop radio is certainly nothing new. But it’s a subject that seems to be coming up more and more these days. Taylor Swift’s done it, and Carrie Underwood’s reps refuse to. Lee Ann Womack took her remix of ‘I Hope You Dance’ all the way to the Nobel Prize ceremony, and Shania Twain sold millions of albums worldwide with remixed singles. 
I’ve spent about 5 hours today in my car. My best friend Angel and I were about an hour north of our hometown in the city of Columbus, OH doing some shopping. So, half of the time was just ‘road time’ where we were on the same highway going directly from point A to point B. The other half was spent hopping the parking lots and parking garages, and maneuvering our way around the busy streets of the Polaris Center in Columbus. Those are two very different driving experiences for sure. Open road as opposed to congested city streets. But there was one constant for the entire trip that both Angel and I agreed on: music. What is a road trip without music? Hell, what’s a jaunt to the grocery store without a tune along the way? One of the first things I like to do when I get in the car is make sure I have a CD (you know, those round plastic circle things people used to listen to music on?) in the car stereo. 
I was driving home today and had the radio tuned to my country station. As much as we all like to berate the current state of top 40 country, I think every one of us is guilty of turning it on now and again – if only out of morbid curiosity. Anyway, the new Toby Keith song came on, and afterwards, the chorus was stuck in my head all day. So, for the rest of the afternoon, the inside of my head was singing ‘she holds tight to me and the Bible/on the backseat of my motorcycle’. And while I’m not at all a fan of the female characters in Keith’s songs, I couldn’t help but find the chorus too damn catchy to shake off. 
