Country music from a fan's point of view since 2008
The underrated Oklahoma-born country singer and songwriter Jamie Richards is back with a fine new release, his fifth album. He has a warm mellow voice which is always good to hear, a solid songwriting gift (he wrote or cowrote every song on the album), and is a real country singer. As the title suggests, some of the cuts are new versions of older songs, but there are five new ones as well.
‘Last Call’ (a co-write with Wayd Battle) comes off like an answer to the Lee Ann Womack song of the same name (although in fact it predates it, having made its first appearance on Jamie’s first album back in 2004. While coming from the viewpoint of the man calling up his latenight last resort inevitably lacks the devastating impact of the LAW song, there is some self awareness, as he admits
Don’t know why she still answers
‘Any Way You Want Me To’ (written with Walt Wilkins) and ‘When You Love Somebody’ (written with Bruce Bouton) are nice love songs.
‘Second Hand Smoke’ (the lead single) is a fine song about a man still struggling with the memory of his lost love, despite claiming he is completely over her:
You’d think three years clean would be plenty of time
While you’ve been out of sight, I’ve been out of my mind
Yeah I kicked the habit
I’ m back in control
I’m over you and better alone
But you’re still hangin’ around like second hand smoke
The languid ‘Never Gonna Hear It From Me’, which has an almost hypnotic feel to the melody, is another excellent song about ongoing feelings for an ex. ‘Drive’, the title track from his 2007 album, is another to brood over lost love.
The outstanding ‘Sayin’ Goodbye’ (one of the new songs) again balances the pain of loss and denial. Even better, ‘I’ll Have Another’ is an excellent song about losing a loved one which is revisited from 2013’s All About The Music.
The powerful ‘I’m Not Drinkin’’ is another displaying the protagonist’s attempts to try to keep his dignity and hide his pain from the woman who has caused it:
You say I look a little rough
I look like a man who’s given up …No I don’t need you to drive me home
Cause I’m not drinkin’
I’m just thirsty
Your leavin’ didn’t even hurt me
I don’t really like the taste of whiskey
The track is augmented by effective backing vocals from Charla Corn.
‘Easier By Now’ (from Richards’ Sideways) is a lovely song with a beautiful melody and another sad lyric.
The fiddle led ‘Whiskey Night’ sees a hard drinker changing his ways (and his diet from whiskey to beer) a little too late:
This ain’t a whiskey night
I won’t be tight and I’ll go home
Goin’ down a dead end road
I lost my way
I lost control
And I won’t lose her without a fight
‘She’s Cold As That Beer She’s Drinking’ is about not getting lucky.
The cheerful mid-tempo ‘Real’ sets out his country boy philosophy of life:
Old boots, old hat
For skinny jeans I’m a bit too fat…
I believe most pretty boys that sing
Don’t know a thing about country twang
That’s just how I feel
Cause I like real
There are two versions of this, one straightforwardly down the line, the other a bonus cut at the end performed as a duet with Texas radio DJ Justin Frazell.
While as a longstanding fan I would have liked more new material, this makes a good introduction for newer listeners. There really isn’t a bad note here. And if you try it you have his previous albums to catch up on.
Grade: A
Oklahoma-born Jamie Richards is one of my favorite Texas Red Dirt/country (with an emphasis on the latter side) singers, as he has a strong, distinctive voice as both singer and songwriter, and he is back with a fine self-produced set of entirely self-written material. His own band provides solid backings, particularly impressive being the multi-instrumentalist Milo Deering who at various points plays steel, fiddle, viola, dobro and acoustic guitar.
The excellent opener, ‘I’ll Have Another’ (written with Shannon Carpenter) is a great song with a wearied feel about a country singer whose “life is held together by rusty guitar strings”. His traveling lifestyle has led his wife to walk out, leading to a spiral of decline as he drinks away the pain:
I always say I’m gonna give it up this time
As a pretty girl brings a shot up to the stageIf I can’t have the one I want
Then I’ll have another
A glass of whiskey can’t take the place
Of a friend and a lover
But it’s all I know to do
Sit here and drown the truth
‘Never Gonna Hear It from Me’ is a melancholy sounding ballad with a gently soothing melody as the protagonist accepts that she doesn’t love him and decides to stop wearing his heart on his sleeve by breaking away:
You only come around
Cause it makes you feel so good
That someone really loves you
Even if you never could
‘Doesn’t Change A Thing’ (written with Shella Stephen) is a sad fiddle-led song about losing a loved one, and finding ordinary life goes on unaltered. An emotional vocal brings out the protagonist’s pain.
The romantic ballads, the melodic ‘All Time High’ and ‘Let Me Love You’ have tender vocals and are both very convincingly delivered.
Another song with a very strong melody line as well as a neatly crafted lyric is ‘Bottle Of Wine, which was co-written with Wayd Battle, and which I like a great deal. Meeting an alcoholic friend, the protagonist compares the lover who has healed his own emotional scars to the drink his friend can’t live without:
I said, “You’ve never seen me without pain
Cause I found the one who closed the door
On a shattered life that I don’t live any more”
I said, “Don’t get me wrong, I know just where you are
My wounds have healed, but I’ve still got scars”
He offered me a drink and I said “No, I’m fine
Cause I finally found the right bottle of wine”
Milo Deering’s atmospheric steel guitar helps set the mood for the haunting minor-keyed ‘Man In The Neon Moon’. This presents a group of bar room characters, most poignantly the title character, a “king among losers” who “relives his pain at that table every night” and advises others against following his example.
‘Privileges Of Youth’, co-written with Walt Wilkins, relays fond memories of youthful irresponsibility now long past, and is pretty good.
‘She’s Cold As That Beer She’s Drinking’ (a former Texas chart single) has the electric guitar mixed a bit too loud for my taste, but it is a good song about a honky tonking woman trying not to show weakness by falling in love, which is one of the most commercial moments here.
Also a bit on the loud side, but well done, the muscular Southern rock of ‘Older The Bull’ celebrates maturity and experience, getting in a few digs at the current state of country music, which he says “feels like the heart and soul has slowly slipped away. On a similar theme, but a better song, the beaty title track takes a few sharp swipes at untalented stars who look good posing on stage with guitars they can’t play, singing songs with “nothing to say” written by someone else.
This album is a refreshing reminder that good country music is still being made, at least if you look away from the major labels.
Grade: A
The chequered career of Jamey Johnson has been recounted many times by now. He started out with the sentimental hit single ‘The Dollar’ on BNA in 2006. The solid album of the same title (produced by the estimable Buddy Cannon) was a fine and under-rated record (with some flaws), but the label made a catastrophic choice of follow-up single, the stupid ‘Rebelicious’ (along the same lines as the worst song Jamey has ever been involved in writing, Trace Adkins’s horrible hit ‘Honky Tonk Badonkadonk’). When this failed to chart at all, Jamey was dropped by the label, coinciding with the failure of his marriage, and he descended into a spiral of despair. The artistic legacy of this time was the body of songs which make up the magisterial That Lonesome Song and provided an unlikely comeback for Jamey.
The bad times inspired Jamey’s songwriting to take a new, devastatingly honest, turn. He was getting a number of cuts by other artists, ranging from the aforementioned ‘Honky Tonk Badonkadonk’ to George Strait’s hit ‘Give it Away’. He recorded the bulk of That Lonesome Song on his own, with his band, the Kent Hardly Playboys, credited as producers, and released it himself digitally in 2007. Mercury Records’ Luke Lewis knew a good thing when he heard it, and signed Jamey to a new deal the following year, re-releasing That Lonesome Song with a couple of track changes.
Jamey was responsible for writing a dozen of the fourteen songs, the quality of which is consistently high. Jamey’s voice does not have the greatest range, but his rough-edged voice is capable of conveying real emotional depth, as he does to devastating effect on most of the songs here. The overall effect is of a man baring his soul to the world.
The moving ‘In Color’ became Jamey’s most successful single, peaking at #9 in January 2009, and winning various nominations as Song or Single of the Year. Beautifully constructed by Jamey with his co-writers, James Otto and Lee Thomas Miller, it was originally pitched to Trace Adkins, who generously relinquished it when Jamey signed his new deal. The deeply affecting story frames an old man’s recollections by having him showing old black and white photographs to his grandson, showing his childhood struggles in the Depression, the terrors of war service, and finally the happy memories of a wedding day, telling the boy how much more intense each experience was in real life:
And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids trying to save each other
You should’ve seen it in color
The emotional force of the song is gradually built up through the three stories. Radio-only listeners may have got a somewhat misleading impression of Jamey as an artist, based on this and ‘The Dollar’.
If the album has a fault, it lies for me in the sometimes self-indulgent snippets of talk and laughter between some of the tracks. It opens with the least objectionable of these, a slightly contrived introduction which purports to reveal Jamey released from prison, leading both literally and thematically into the outstanding ‘High Cost Of Living’, which he wrote with James Slater. While it was not directly autobiographical, the emotional underpinning of the story recounted here was undoubtedly inspired by Jamey’s descent following the loss of his original record deal and the failure of his marriage. Dark and uncompromising, this frank confession of addiction, sin and loss, and the hard price the protagonist ends up paying as he comes to realize,
The high cost of living ain’t nothing like the cost of living high
is extraordinarily intense, and one of the finest songs written in the past decade. With its reference to exchanging his home and wife “for cocaine and a whore”, this was always a risky choice as a single given the increasingly family-friendly nature of country radio, and although it charted briefly, it peaked at #34.
Jerrod Niemann seems to have something of a split personality musically. He is a competent if not particularly distinctive singer with a nice grainy quality at times, who seems determined to compensate for that by over-ornamenting his records with gimmicks. The songs are interspersed with a set of comic sketches conceived by Jerrod with Dave Brainard (with whom he shares production credits). These share the fatal flaw of not actually being funny. Most of them weren’t even funny the first time I listened to them, with the sole exception of a pointed if unoriginal little jab at radio demographics and teenage girls not being interested in drinking songs. After listening through the number of times I needed to in order to review this, I hated them. Self-indulgent in the extreme, these make an excellent argument to download selected tracks. There is a particularly annoying piece right at the end which implies one needs to be drunk to appreciate the album. I’m not so sure that’s wrong, either.
His current big hit, ‘Lover, Lover’, which has propelled this album to good early sales figures, is a remake of a 90s pop song which is very catchy with multi tracked vocals all from Jerrod himself, even though it has very little to do with country music. There is one other cover, Robert Earl Keen’s double-entendre ‘The Buckin’ Song’, which has some fine instrumental breaks but is tiresome to anyone sober over the age of about 15. Keen is a significant Texas songwriter, but this particular song is juvenile. However, I was familiar with Jerrod’s name as a songwriter, and had hopes for this album. He has written or co-written all but two of the tracks, most often with one Richie Brown.
In fact, one of my favourite tracks was a song which was already familiar. ‘How Can I Be So Thirsty’ was one of my favourite tracks from last year’s John Anderson release, which Jerrod wrote with Anderson and Billy Joe Walker Jr. Jerrod’s version is enjoyable if lacking the vocal punch Anderson brought to this hangover complaint. Jerrod has an obviously penchant for the subject matter, as Jerrod’s only solo composition here is the far less likable ‘For Everclear’, a drunken college (I hope) student’s song rather implausibly involving getting way too close to one of his teachers (an ex-stripper). Niemann appears to be about ten years past the point at which this song would be appropriate.
‘One More Drinking Song’ is a relaxed-sounding defence of that sub-genre, which has no actual reasons included, and has an irritating repeated hey-hey-hey in the chorus, but is good-humored and bearable. It was released as a single last year, but sank without trace. ‘Down In Mexico’ is very nice sounding, but a rather generic Chesney-style song about the impossibility of being depressed on the beach.
Written with Dallas Davidson and Jamey Johnson is the jazzy loungy ‘They Should Have Named You Cocaine’ which is a pretty good song about a woman with a hold on the singer, which would have been more pleasing to listen to without the pointless artificial sound effects in the mix. ‘Bakersfield’ is a pleasant sounding ballad about nostalgia for a weekend’s romance in California. Co-written with Wayd Battle and Steve Harwell, the song isn’t bad but the production gets a bit busy towards the end. ‘I Hope You Get What You Deserve’, a generous goodbye wish to an ex, also has too much going on musically. All these songs might have sounded better with a more stripped down approach.
My Kind of Country 