Archive for May, 2007
Monday, May 28th, 2007
Bruce Robison
It Came From San Antonio
Bruce Robison has always been a fantastic singer-songwriter, but he usually takes his time between projects. After last year’s superb Eleven Stories, it’s a wonderful surprise to hear some new material from him so quickly, this time in the form of an excellent seven-song EP, aptly titled It Came From San Antonio.
What distinguishes this set immediately from his earlier work is the more elaborate and experimental production. Usually a Robison collection is a sparse affair, with the focus solely on the lyrics. This time out, he’s more ambitious. See that British flag on the cover of the album? The title cut that kicks off the album is a boogie number that revels in the sound of the first British invasion.
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Monday, May 28th, 2007
Greatest Hits
June 3, 1997
Ah, the nineties. What seemed so perfect back then, time has taken the shine away from. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about the quality of the music, which remains excellent. But when Pam Tillis released her Greatest Hits album back in 1997, more than a million consumers were gladly willing to pay for what seemed like a definitive collection of hits. After all, the ten previous hits included on the set are all top-notch, and she included two new singles that outdid many of the old hits on the charts. But expectations of what a compilation should accomplish have changed with time, and with this still being the most complete Tillis compilation available, a discussion of what it’s missing becomes unavoidable.
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Monday, May 28th, 2007
Gretchen Wilson
One of the Boys
Gretchen Wilson continues her baffling descent from the promise of her debut album, Here For the Party. Its follow-up, All Jacked Up, suffered from overconfidence, a cocky attitude of entitlement based on a misreading of the popularity of “Redneck Woman.” There was a universality to that track, which had people from all background embracing the attitude of it, even if they couldn’t relate to the actual lifestyle. Wilson apparently thought that she’d stumbled on a nation of redneck women and she’d been chosen as their leader, so we had to suffer through more confrontational versions like the West-coast dissing “California Girls” and the drunk-driving, teeth-busting “All Jacked Up.”
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Sunday, May 27th, 2007
All of This Love
November 7, 1995
You can learn much about an artist’s commitment to their craft by how they capitalize on their success. Pam Tillis had credibility and commercial clout to burn after Sweetheart’s Dance, her platinum-selling 1994 collection that produced four top five hits and netted her the CMA award for Female Vocalist of the Year. That album was a radio-friendly fun-fest, capturing her infectious personality and establishing her as a major star in the genre. It also gave her big success as a co-producer, prompting her to ask her label for permission to produce the follow-up on her own.
Tim DuBois, president of Arista Nashville at the time, gave her the freedom to do so, and while the press focused on her being the first woman to produce her own album, they missed the fact that most country artists, male or female, co-produce their albums at the most. An artist producing completely on their own is a rarity in itself. (They also overlooked that Gail Davies and Alison Krauss had already been solo producers, but Tillis was the first major female artist on a big label to attempt it.)
Perhaps having complete control over the project is what prompted Tillis to turn inward with All of This Love, a somber record that replaces the bright strokes of Sweetheart’s Dance with shades of melancholy. The album opens with the lead single “Deep Down”, which matches a lyric of emotional despair – “I’ve got the bleeding stopped, but there’s gonna be a scar” – with a surprisingly bouncy melody. It’s a hard country lyric, but Tillis the producer weaves together the mournful fiddle and steel with fiery licks of electric guitar. It’s a tour de force, meeting somewhere at the crossroads between Nashville Sound and British Invasion Pop.
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Sunday, May 27th, 2007
Daryle Singletary, “Jesus and Bartenders”
Singletary covers an Rebecca Lynn Howard album track from a few years back. It’s a classic country honky-tonk number, and while Howard’s original version has its charms, Singletary’s a natural fit for a song like this. Singletary isn’t the most creative male country vocalist, given how derivative his style is of country crooners like George Jones and Randy Travis, but that style is a perfect fit for a song that sounds like a b-side from either of those legend’s careers.
Grade: B
Listen: Jesus and Bartenders
Buy: Jesus and Bartenders
More Daryle Singletary:
Album Review: Straight From the Heart
400 Best Contemporary Country Singles: #200-#176
Sunday, May 27th, 2007
Sweetheart’s Dance
April 26, 1994
After two successful albums with producers Paul Worley & Ed Seay, Pam Tillis needed a change. She approached her label with a request to co-produce her third country album, and with their full support, she entered the studio with Steve Fischell to create Sweetheart’s Dance, the album that would bring Tillis the most critical and commercial success in her career and earn her the coveted CMA Female Vocalist of the Year award.
Sweetheart’s Dance distinguishes itself among the rest of Tillis’ catalog and the bulk of mainstream country releases during the mid-nineties with its relentless, joyous optimism. The album slows down only three times over ten standout tracks, a ratio of uptempos to ballads that is incredibly rare among female country artists. What’s most impressive is the range of styles those uptempo songs explore, making each one distinctive.
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Thursday, May 24th, 2007
Sugarland, “Everyday America”
A charming slice of country pop Americana. Jennifer Nettles has such an infectious voice that she can sell just about anything, but she has some good material to work with here. I imagine that many people will relate to how big dreams fade into everyday, ordinary life without feeling like a letdown.
Grade: B
Listen: Everyday America
Buy: Everyday America
More Sugarland:
Single Review: “Settlin’”
Best Country Albums of 2006
Best Country Singles of 2006
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
So I’m checking out this week’s album sales estimates from Hits Daily Double, and expecting to see a sales bounce among country artists who performed on the ACM show early in the tracking week. Turns out, that didn’t happen, and I have to say I’m shocked. The only performer to see a sales bounce was Taylor Swift, who rose a meager 7%. Rascal Flatts stayed flat, but everybody else so their sales drop: Carrie Underwood (-20%), Tim McGraw (-25%), Martina McBride (-48%), and Miranda Lambert (-6%) .
Presenters didn’t do any better: Blake Shelton was down 25%, and while former ACM Top Female Vocalist Gretchen Wilson opened at #1 with her new album (and #5 overall), it was with sales of 72k, a shockingly large drop-off from her first two albums, which both moved more than 200k in their opening weeks.
It looks like the ACM producers haven’t gotten the message that the Grammys learned back in 2006: Stay the hell out of the way of American Idol. Ratings were at an all-time low for this year’s ACM show, which aired opposite the Idol semi-finals, and a huge national platform for country music got lost in the shuffle. The Grammys saw their ratings bounce back big in 2007 by moving to Sunday, and the performers and winners were rewarded with huge sales bounces.
So move the ACM to a non-Idol day of the week next year, or else everybody’s going to have to follow Taylor Swift’s lead and serenade Tim McGraw to get a minor sales boost. (And, speaking of McGraw, it’s worth noting that he chose to perform a non-album track tribute to soldiers on the show, which explains why the best performer of the night didn’t get a sales boost.)
Update: CMT has posted an article about this.
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
John Anderson
Easy Money
By Paul W. Dennis
John Anderson and George Strait are about the only two with a high profile left from the generation of male singers that came to prominence in the early 1980s. Obviously Strait has been the more successful but John Anderson is the superior balladeer and has much the more distinctive voice.
Here, John Anderson returns with his first CD of new recordings in several years, this time with John Rich of Big & Rich serving as producer. Fortunately. Rich stays largely out of the way and lets Anderson focus on that which he does best, as seven of the CD’s eleven songs are ballads.
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Saturday, May 19th, 2007
Miranda Lambert
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
The glimmers of promise flashed by Miranda Lambert on her debut album, Kerosene, have been delivered on and then some on her confident and fully formed sophomore set, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Over the course of eleven solid tracks, Lambert establishes herself as a potential voice for her generation of women, should they choose to embrace her as their standard. And while she’s an above average vocalist, her true talent is songwriting, as evidenced by the uniformly strong songs she has penned for this album.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend opens with a bang – quite literally. “Gunpowder & Lead” is the latest in a long string of country music songs that deal with domestic abuse, but Lambert has the courage to sing it in the first person. In abuse songs as varied as “Independence Day” and “Goodbye Earl”, there are always two villains: the man doing the abusing, and the society that is failing to protect the woman, forcing her to take her safety into her own hands. After her violent lover “slapped her face and shook her like a rag doll”, she has him arrested, but she knows he’ll be coming back for round two. So she’s waiting for him, shotgun in hand: “His fist is big, but my gun’s bigger. He’ll find out when I pull the trigger.”
It’s such a ferocious start to the album that when it segues to the Gillian Welch prohibition romp “Dry Town”, the festive twang sounds almost out of place. Give Lambert twenty seconds though, and she has you as captivated in the storyline of a woman looking for a beer as you were in the violent vengeance of the preceding track.
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