Today’s category is…
A Song That Describes You.
Here are the staff picks:
Leeann Ward: “Lord, I Hope This Day is Good” – Don Williams
There might be a song that technically describes me better than this one, but this is the song that perfectly describes how I feel each morning before I start my day. I don’t know why, but I relate to it on a guttural level.
This is going to be an unfair criticism, but here it goes.
“Staying’s Worse Than Leaving” is an awesome song. As good as anything I’ve heard lately in terms of lyrics. Mature, realistic, insightful. It’s good stuff.
The production is effective in that “stay out of the way of the song” kind of way, as it is on so many great country records.
Sara Evans was one of the most successful female artists from the earlier part of the last decade, which was not a particularly good era for women as a whole. Her ease with both pop-flavored and purely traditional country allowed her to adapt to quickly changing trends in the genre.
This makes her catalog a fascinating one to sample. In compiling this Starter Kit, it would be easy to just list the hits. But I’ve left off some of her more overexposed tracks in favor of some gems that either didn’t quite dominate the charts or wasn’t sent to radio at all. I think her crossover numbers haven’t aged that well, anyway.
Be sure to let me know what I missed in the comment threads!
“Shame About That” from the 1997 album Three Chords and the Truth
The title track got all of the love, and the most airplay of the three low-charting singles from Evans’ debut album. But I think that this is the coolest little record, with Evans sounding like the female heir to Buck Owens as she can’t even feign sympathy for the ex who is now regretting his departure.
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.
To continue Country Universe’s celebration of the nineties, I’m throwing in a nineties edition of iPod Check. The rules are simple: put your iPod on shuffle and list the first ten songs to pop up that were released in the nineties. They don’t have to be singles, and they don’t have to be country.
I’ve listed my ten songs below. Share yours in the comments, and check your shame at the door! (I’ve got 1994’s “Hakuna Matata” on my iPod, but sadly, it did not come up in shuffle.)
I’ve always been something of a chart junkie. While I don’t pay as close attention as I used to, I still have a pretty good handle on historical trends. One artist I’ve been keeping an eye on is Carrie Underwood. When each official country single from her first two albums peaked at #1 or #2, it caught my attention.
But I never expected the trend to continue, with three more #1 hits from the new album. The source of that belief was the history of women on country radio, especially in the twenty most recent years that were based on actual monitored airplay instead of radio playlists. Since that change, far less records have gone #1 or #2.
I remember thinking when I first heard Sara Evans sing “Cheatin'” that it was the best record Reba McEntire hadn’t recorded in a long time.
Listening to the new Joe Nichols single “The Shape I’m In”, I’m thinking the same thing about George Strait.
Perhaps it’s just because “The Breath You Take” is still a fresh disappointment in my mind, but I can’t help thinking Strait would’ve knocked “The Shape I’m In” out of the park.
That being said, Nichols does a good job himself, in a vocal performance that is so inspired by Strait it might as well be an homage.
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