A song about finding liberation on the open road shouldn’t put you in danger of falling asleep at the wheel.
I don’t know what’s going on with Mary Chapin Carptenter. She made my favorite album of all-time, Stones in the Road, and it wasn’t particularly upbeat. But the songs were amazingly good. I’m still learning new things from that album a full sixteen years after its release.
This single review is written by Guest Contributor Jennifer Bernard.
“Draw Me a Map,” the second single from Up on the Ridge, contains lyrics which are cleverly evocative and packed with passion. The acoustic arrangement combined with the vocals of Dierks Bentley and Alison Krauss make for a soothing delivery of words that definitely dive below the surface. Specifically with lines such as “I’d beg forgiveness but I don’t know where to start” and “I’ve never been so at loss, I’m at a canyon I can’t get around or cross,” you can truly feel the anxiety and hopelessness that Bentley illustrates.
This isn’t very good.
Perhaps it could have been, with a stronger melody and a more refined concept. The song itself is pretty good, but Evans turns in a listless performance, delegating all of the “oomph” to the background vocalists and studio musicians. And they’re pretty listless in their own right.
It’s pretty rare that the CMA nominations garner much attention outside of the country music press, but the always excellent Whitney Pastorek at Entertainment Weekly has a lengthy article trying to rationalize the exclusion of Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift from the Entertainer category.
It’s amazing that in a year where a record was set for the most nominations by a female artist, there can still be a valid accusation of gender bias among the nominations. Women have been poorly represented in the Entertainer category for pretty much the entire history of the CMA Awards. Even when you include duos or groups with female members, there have never been more than two out of five nominees that are women.
Last month, I suggested an infusion of new blood at the CMA Awards. They’ve exceeded even my wildest expectations, rejecting the usual nominees in nearly every race. Lady Antebellum, Zac Brown Band, and Dierks Bentley have quite a bit to celebrate, but this year’s awards belong to Miranda Lambert, who earned a stunning nine nominations, a record for a female artist.
Let’s take a look at this year’s nominees:
Entertainer
Who’s In: Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert, Zac Brown Band
I’m getting tired of the dime store theology in country music today. It’s officially reached pandemic proportions.
Up for airplay are two new singles in which religion is just a decorative prop used to elevate a human role to something divine. Instead of achieving that impossible goal, all they do is cheapen the divine into something that is only human.
Love ain’t no fairytale.
The latest single from Carrie Underwood knows and embraces this. I can’t remember another wedding song that is so understated in its declarations. As she prepares to marry, she reassures her mother that this man is good. That’s pretty much it.
Pretty much it on paper, at least. But notice how the term is repeated – “He is good, so good.” Underwood chooses to emphasize those five words more than any others in the song, singing them as if just being good is enough to qualm a worried mother’s fears for her daughter’s future.
Most of us can admit that Toby Keith is a premier balladeer. Something that has been largely forgotten about him in the last few years, however, is that he’s also rather good at having good fun too. Lately, he’s mostly associated with swagger and subpar music (with the exception of some decent ballads here and there), but “Trailerhood” is here to remind us of how jovial Keith can sound when he lets his boisterous guard down and just allows himself to have some fun.
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