Rating: 7/10
For a long time, I couldn’t think of how to write about this album. It’s not a masterpiece lyrically, and it’s not reinventing the wheel sonically. But like Randall King and Shotgun Rider have already done this year, Josh Ward delivers a solid, lighthearted album that calls to a specific time period in country music. It took me awhile to put my finger on why I enjoy this record so much, and the answer is astonishingly simple: it’s the sound that I love, the 90’s country where many like me find their nostalgia. We’ve got people like Joshua Hedley and Zephaniah Ohora trying to recreate and, in the case of Ohora, modernize the 50’s and 60’s styles, bringing the countrypolitan sound to the modern ear. We’ve got countless people trying to keep the 70’s outlaw era alive, to the point the term “outlaw” has been run through the ringer, and the music is often almost a parody of itself, and we’ve got others pushing the envelope in modern country in order to create something forward-thinking that still respects the roots of the genre. But until recently, there haven’t been many people embracing the 90’s neotraditional sound, and that’s ironic and unfortunate when you take into consideration that so many of the listeners and fans who loved that style are the ones who divorced themselves from the mainstream in the last decade because they miss those country sounds. The 90’s and early 00’s are when so many of us came to country music in the first place, and it’s a shame that more people haven’t been carrying this sound forward into the present.
I am certainly one of these people who grew up on 90’s country, and I miss that style more than I can say. Brianna heard this album before me, and she said that I’d like it because Josh ward sounded like a “twangy Travis Tritt.” I’d heard ward before but hadn’t made that connection, and she was right. And maybe that explains my enjoyment of this album–it’s so refreshing to see this sound being embraced in 2018 and not forgotten or relegated to the realm of nostalgia. You have no idea how much you’re missing this style of country, or how much it’s needed in modern music, until you hear it come through your speakers like a long-lost friend.
It’s not just that it’s embraced by Ward, though, it’s that he interprets this sound so well and makes it sound fresh and natural in 2018. It’s impossible not to smile at “Home Away From Home,” a fun little ode to his favorite bar that would have been a radio hit in 1996. “Another Heartache” features some lovely piano as Ward sings of not wanting to complicate things with the woman he met tonight on the dance floor and wants to make sure they’re on the same page about where this is going–“I don’t need another heartache, so baby, let’s don’t fall in love.” “Say Hello to Goodbye” is another in a long line of country heartbreak songs, but it’s also a reminder that some of them don’t need any analyzing and are just simply good songs. The same goes for the steel-soaked “One More shot of Whiskey.” As mentioned, you aren’t going to be blown away by the lyrics of this project, but it’s just so solid and comforting. I said this about shotgun Rider’s Palo Duro, and the same thing applies here–it’s not a record for thinking but rather a record for drinking, and we absolutely need both.
There’s one lyrical exception, though, which offers some real depth, and that comes in the album’s crown jewel, “The devil Don’t Scare Me.” This one is also a heartbreak song, but it’s told from the angle of the narrator having once been scared of God and petrified in church pews as he heard about hell and fire and brimstone, but now that she’s left, nothing, not even the devil or death, can get to him. “I ain’t afraid of dyin’ ’cause I lost the one thing I was livin’ for, the devil don’t scare me anymore.” This one is certainly the highlight of More Than I Deserve and is the one you should check out if you only pick a single track. This one’s also featured on our May playlist.
This is not some groundbreaking masterpiece, but it’s not a groundbreaking masterpiece you want playing while you sit around drinking with friends on a Saturday night. It’s a record like this one, and this is why we do need both, and why not everything has to be a piece of musical genius. Josh Ward brings us a solid, uncomplicated slice of 90’s style country music, and if you need that sound in your life, definitely check this out. Good, comforting, refreshingly country record.
