This is the last time I’m going to review a country pride song.
I have nothing left to say. From now on, I’m turning a song like this off thirty seconds in, and I’m never going to pay it any attention again.
But since it is the last time, let me say it just one more time:
You don’t have to be a blathering idiot to be country.
You can be intelligent.
You can talk about the charms and limitations of the southern youth experience, like Hal Ketchum did in “Small Town Saturday Night.”
You can let us know that you know why “(Margie’s at) The Lincoln Park Inn”, spotlighting all the moral ambiguities and complexities lurking underneath the surface of suburban America.
You can even do a list song intelligently, as Tom T. Hall proved over, and over, and over again.
You can celebrate the rural without diminishing the urban, trusting that the commonality of the human experience transcends the boundaries of geography.
Justin Moore, you’re making Tracy Byrd at his silliest seem brilliant in retrospect.
Drivel like this is making me hate country music, and I love, love, love country music.
No more for me. I refuse.
Written by Rhett Akins, Justin Moore, and Jeremy Stover
Feel that chill in the air? It’s not just climate change, friends. The music industry is suffering through historic lows in record sales, the worst since SoundScan started tallying them in 1991.
How are country artists faring? Let’s take a look at cumulative sales for current albums. Sales are rounded to the nearest hundred.
Top Selling Current Country Albums
Taylor Swift, Fearless: 6,233,900
Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift: 4,955,000
Lady Antebellum, Need You Now: 3,138,700
Taylor Swift, Speak Now: 3,078,600
Zac Brown Band, The Foundation: 2,489,200
Carrie Underwood, Play On: 1,937,041
Lady Antebellum, Lady Antebellum: 1,835,800
Jason Aldean, Wide Open: 1,364,700
Miranda Lambert, Revolution: 1,149,000
Rascal Flatts, Greatest Hits Volume 1: 994,600
Sugarland, The Incredible Machine: 815,200
Jason Aldean, My Kinda Party: 766,300
Tim McGraw, Southern Voice: 749,200
George Strait, Twang: 670,200
Kenny Chesney, Hemingway’s Whiskey: 655,200
Zac Brown Band, You Get What You Give: 636,000
Rascal Flatts, Nothing Like This: 585,800
Luke Bryan, Doin’ My Thing: 509,200
Keith Urban, Get Closer: 508,200
Brooks & Dunn, #1′s…and Then Some: 479,700
Toby Keith, American Ride: 432,100
Chris Young, The Man I Want to Be: 408,000
Eric Church, Carolina: 380,600
Darius Rucker, Charleston, SC 1966: 376,700
The Band Perry, The Band Perry: 364,000
Josh Turner, Haywire: 361,800
Justin Moore, Justin Moore: 325,600
Easton Corbin, Easton Corbin: 314,000
Toby Keith, Bullets in the Gun: 279,400
Jamey Johnson, The Guitar Song: 256,300
Gary Allan, Get Off on the Pain: 238,000
Reba McEntire, All the Women I Am: 224,800
Jerron Niemann, Judge Jerron & The Hung Jury: 222,700
Billy Currington, Enjoy Yourself: 222,000
Tim McGraw, Number One Hits: 220,500
Dierks Bentley, Up on the Ridge: 204,900
Zac Brown Band, Pass the Jar: 202,100
Trace Adkins, Cowboy’s Back in Town: 194,200
Johnny Cash, American VI: Ain’t No Grave: 190,100
Brad Paisley, Hits Alive: 189,200
Alan Jackson, 34 Number Ones: 181,000
Blake Shelton, All About Tonight: 160,700
Little Big Town, The Reason Why: 158,300
Blake Shelton, Loaded: The Best of Blake Shelton : 142,300
Jaron and the Long Road to Love, Getting Dressed in the Dark: 119,700
Sometimes – most of the time – I fall behind on my planned CU work and wind up with a backlog of opinions. And it can be so mentally taxing carrying all that around, you know? Gotta clean out the file sometime. So if you happen to be feeling nostalgic for, oh, five months ago, please join me in considering a bunch of singles which came out around then and pretending like they’re brand-new.
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Rodney Atkins, “Farmer’s Daughter”
A warm production, likable vocal by Atkins. I just can’t bring myself to care about the story. Nothing about it feels urgent or revelatory. Grade: C
How this has crept up to become his first Top 30 single in eight years is beyond me, since it’s about as exciting as a dreamless nap. A true “sleeper hit,” yuk yuk. Oh! And does it not totally sound like that “Ooohhh, but I feel it” song from the 90′s? Anyway, a pleasant enough listen if you’re in the mood for it. Grade: C+
It sounds like what would happen if Taylor Swift listened to one Caroline Herring track – just one – and decided to come up with her own version. I mean that in a good way, mostly. Kimberly Perry has written and performed a very pretty-sounding record here, gratuitous “uh oh”s aside, and and Republic Nashville should be commended for releasing something with such ambitious subject matter as a second single.
I just wish the song itself had undergone some more revision first. The pieces are set for a sweet, eloquent hypothetical about premature death, but then that third verse comes and it sounds like she’s actually anticipating her demise and has an agenda for it. It’s muddling.
So, not the home run it could have been. But still an admirable effort. Grade: B-
It looks like this single has already fallen off the radar, which is a big shame. Bundy’s controlled performance demonstrates why she’s among the most promising new acts out there, and the song is a sweet sip of lounge-y countrypolitan.
What’s missing is a great hook. “Drop on By” is a kind of a ho-hum central phrase, and it isn’t matched with a memorable enough melody here to make it really stick. Then again, the tracks on Bundy’s album that do have good hooks (“Cigarette”, “If You Want My Love”) won’t fit radio anyway because they’re too sharp and unique. The gal can’t win. Grade: B
For a number of reasons – the biggest of which was “Love Your Love the Most” dancing on my gag reflex, but there were others – I passed altogether on listening to his sophomore album, and ignored this single’s existence for a good while.
Now I’ve heard it, though, and damn it, I can’t go back. This ode to substance-fueled escapism may be the most daring country single of the year, even without the “stash” reference in the album version. The record actually sounds like a weird high, with snaky acoustic guitars, jarring electrics, and creepy-cool effects on the vocals, yet it never sacrifices accessibility in pursuit of its aesthetic. It ain’t a country sound (check those Collective Soul-aping “yeah”s), but it’s serving a very country theme, and for once, Church’s frat-boy cockiness actually works. Grade: A-
More lightweight, breezy Strait-gazing. The chorus has a bit of an awkward meter, but I’ll deal. In earlier days, this might have been a bit boring compared to its company at radio. Today, it’s just refreshing. Grade: B
Don’t care for this guy’s name – sounds like a rodeo emcee’s or something – but what a cool-sounding debut single. Mournful guitar licks, propulsive beat, appealingly gritty vocal. If only the melody were as confident throughout as it is in the second half of the chorus (“The heaven we had / The hell that I’m going through / Other than that / There ain’t much left of lovin’ you”). Still, not too shabby. Grade: B+
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Justin Moore, “How I Got to Be This Way”
Strike three. Moore seems to have potential, and I don’t mean to pick on him or his writers, but his output since “Back That Thing Up” represents everything I don’t like about mainstream country today. This is loud, one-dimensional, and worst of all, uninteresting. Grade: D
I’ll say this for David Nail: he’s ambitious. Though his first two singles didn’t win me over, I found something bold to admire in each. “I’m About to Come Alive” cast him as a co-dependent loser – not exactly flattering – while “Red Light” aimed for psychological depth with its focus on the mundane nature of break-ups. Both were refreshingly moody for country radio, and both could have made great breakthrough hits were the songs themselves a bit more compelling.
From a compositional standpoint, “Turning Home” isn’t actually as risky or complex as those forerunners; in fact, it’s very much your typical nostalgic Kenny Chesney co-write. But it’s crisp and coherent enough to give Nail some interpretive room, and he reaches for the stars, delivering an emotional, octave-sweeping performance that goes a long way toward breathing new life into the well-trod themes.
He unfortunately has to do battle with a screechy electric guitar that surfaces in the instrumental break, and there’s no denying that this single owes much more to Elton John or Gavin DeGraw-type artists than it does to anyone in the realm of traditional country. Nevertheless, Nail’s ambition was well-spent here. Grade: A-
His ”Beer on the Table” was enjoyable, if a bit derivative-sounding, but I’ll pass on this one. It’s pretty much a less friendly, slightly wittier version of “Small Town U.S.A.”, of which I was never a fan in the first place. Grade: D+
What can you say when the song title tells you upfront how generic the song itself is going to be? I mean, the thing practically reviews itself, doesn’t it?
Seriously, though, the problem here isn’t that the song is about why living in a small town is (as you might guess) awesome. The problem is that it doesn’t really give anyone who doesn’t feel the same way any reason to feel otherwise. It was clearly written solely to appeal to a demographic of people who also live in small towns and can relate to surface-level ideas like “everybody knows me and I know them” and “give me a Sunday morning that’s full of grace” (or in Moore’s case, “grA-a-A-a-A-ace”) without any further development of those ideas.
But that’s the thing: without further development, the ideas just sound really, really clichéd. Simply pointing out that you enjoy a “six-pack of Lite” doesn’t really tell me much about you, because guess what? Lots of people from lots of different living environments like lite beer. You have to give your ideas a little context for them to mean anything to anyone but you.
The problem reminds me of “Redneck Woman,” which also glorified a particular rural lifestyle but felt a lot more accessible in how it did so. I think what made the difference was that Gretchen Wilson explained why she liked being a redneck instead of just saying, “hey, I like being a redneck.” For instance, when she mentioned that she liked to drink beer, she set it up as a contrast to being a “Barbie Doll-type” who “swig[s] that sweet champagne,” so that even if we couldn’t relate to that particular preference ourselves, we could see where she was coming from and apply the greater principle in play to ourselves. If her life was a party, she let us in on it.
Moore, on the other hand, is like that guy who calls you from inside the party to let you know how awesome it is without actually explaining what’s going on. It’s not that you don’t believe him; it’s just that he never explains why you should happen to care.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed that this isn’t a countrified version of the Juvenile hit. Alas, it’s just a hillbilly rave-up that finds a country boy trying to get a city girl used to farm life, using backing up a truck as an awkward sexual metaphor (“Throw it in reverse and let Daddy load it up.” Seriously.)
To his credit, Moore throws himself fully into the lyric like he’s Joe Diffie singing a mid-nineties novelty number. I’d like to hear him use that personality on more interesting material, and leave songs like this to Rodney Carrington, who is the master of the dirty country song.
That’s it. I’m done.
Empty barrels make the most noise.
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