Vince Gill, “How Lonely Looks”
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
Good Lord, this man is good. This year’s Hall of Fame inductee turns in his third straight stellar single from his four-disc opus These Days, and he’s never delved this deeply into the Eagles realm of his influences. With any justice, this warm, achingly beautiful track will find itself alongside “How Long”, the Eagles single that country radio has already embraced. Grab the full album version to hear some killer guitar close out the track.
Grade: A-
Listen: How Lonely Looks
Buy: How Lonely Looks
Category Single Reviews
Tags: Vince Gill
So who the hell is Patty Griffin, anyway? If you’re asking that question, I highly recommend clicking through and hearing one of Americana’s most consistently interesting and incisive songwriters. Here, she emphatically rejects fear and those who promote it, choosing instead to push to get to know the strangers around us until they aren’t strangers anymore. Political message? Perhaps, but I read it more as a call to discard all of those assumptions of ill intentions that we make about the people in our life, and choose instead to believe the best about them, even if we end up wrong in the end. Open the doors, instead of close them. Music to my ears.
Trisha Yearwood
“Living in a city of immigrants, I don’t need to go traveling.” Steve Earle has apparently become a New Yorker, and has taken it upon himself to celebrate everything that makes this city great. Celebrations of my hometown don’t come around too often in country music, and this is a damn good one. His keen eye for the minute details of New York life – the streets, the people, the tension, the energy – is so vivid that it has me looking at my own city with fresh eyes and renewed appreciation.
Shortly before his death, Johnny Cash was asked who he thought the best male vocalist in country music was. His response: Dwight Yoakam. Anyone wondering where Cash was coming from need only spin “Close Up the Honky Tonks”, a tantalizing preview of Yoakam’s upcoming Buck Owens tribute.
If “Lost” revisited the smoky romance of “Breathe”, “Red Umbrella” is just as reminiscent of Hill’s whimsical pop-country confections “This Kiss” and “If My Heart Had Wings.” Her joy-filled performance and the candy-sweet production come together for a typically charming and entertaining single. She’s a great singer, without a doubt. But it’s her infectious personality that makes this so darn good. Methinks I’ll be blasting this in the car quite a bit this fall.
This their finest single to date. Jennifer Nettle turns in an achingly vulnerable vocal, with only an acoustic guitar backing her up for most of the song. “Stay” is the story of the other woman who slowly finds her pride and refuses to “live this way.” It’s very difficult to make the woman on the wrong side of the marital affair to appear sympathetic, but “Stay” is startlingly effective at doing so. I first heard this months ago, but it still blows me away every time I listen to it.
Good enough. She sounds fully engaged, it’s up-tempo and rowdy without being in-your-face obnoxious, and every detail from this last call scene sounds authentic and believable. It’s certainly more realistic than “All Jacked Up.” I doubt it will fire up her career at radio again, but it’s good enough. That’s about all I can say.
Forgive me, but the awkward writing int he chorus keeps making me think that he’s married to his sister.
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