Monthly Archives: July 2018

Memorable Songs

Memorable Songs From Overlooked Albums: July 19th

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This has been awhile in coming, mainly because several albums we had originally intended to feature here got better with time and ended up getting full reviews. For new people to the feature, here we place good songs from mediocre albums, songs from albums we didn’t review due to time constraints or out of deference to artists, and sometimes tracks from albums where we just didn’t have the right words for a full review. It pops up at random whenever we have enough songs to produce one.

Gretchen Peters: “Wichita”

This song is on the May playlist, along with one other song from Dancing with the Beast. Gretchen Peters is definitely a great writer, but this album just bored and depressed me. “Wichita” is the only somewhat upbeat moment, differing from the elegant, polished ballads that make up most of the album. It’s still an intense song about a disabled child protecting her sister from being raped, but here, the production is more interesting and really sells this song. Peters’ record is still something I”d recommend if you like darker, more depressing material–for someone in the right frame of mind, there could be a lot to appreciate because the writing is undeniably strong throughout.

Parker Millsap: “Tell Me”

I swear, I’ve really tried to get into Parker, but it just hasn’t happened. And I also don’t care for the sort of rootsy, vintage pop style he adopted on Other Arrangements. I think it does work well on this song, though, as the soulful style really suits his voice.

Neko Case: “Sleep All Summer”

Neko Case’s album Hell-on just went right over my head lyrically; she’s a great writer, but often it’s at the expense of relating to her audience, or at least to me. This is not country, but fits in the vein of Americana well, and I can tell it has been great for a lot of people unlike it has been for me. She’s a wonderful vocalist, and her melodies are enchanting. There are a couple songs I like here just for their melodies and her performance. This duet is the one I chose to feature here because I think it’s the most accessible lyrically.

Tami Neilson: “A Woman’s Pain”

Sassafrass! is a fascinating album, and much of it is fueled from uniquely female anger, covering discrimination and double standards and sexual assault scandals. It’s the musical style I’m not sold on personally, but of all the albums here, it’s the one I’d recommend everyone listen to the most because it really has some cool things to say. I loved this song on first listen.

Tami Neilson: “Manitoba Sunrise at Motel 6”

After all that anger and energy throughout the whole album, it’s such a great moment when this song comes on near the end and displays a tender side to Tami Neilson. An excellent song of life on the road and missing those she loves that stands out even more on such a record.

And now to Brianna, for her selections from the latest album from Cody Canada & the Departed.

Cody Canada & the Departed: “Lipstick”

Cody Canada is an artist I’ve liked for a few years now. I was a fan even before he announced the formation of The departed. I really liked their last two albums, so needless to say when 3 came out, I was quite excited to hear it. Therefore, when I listened and only liked about six of the fourteen songs on the record, you can imagine my disappointment. While this album did not grow on me  personally, I think that any fan of this band should check it out. The songs have various tempos and instrumentation, so you will definitely not be bored with this material. My main problem was that the writing left a little to be desired with a lot of vague lyrics, but that could be just me. I cannot come up with enough things to say about this album for a full review, so I thought I’d highlight my two favorite tracks.

“Lipstick” is a very catchy and more upbeat song. From my interpretation, it has to do with how beauty can lead to sin and cause people to lie. I like the melody a lot, and I find myself going back to this song whenever I look at this album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh3nbFGfY-E

Cody Canada & the Departed: “Footlights”

“Footlights” is my second favorite song from this album. I think it’s a very honest look at what singing as you get older is like. I definitely feel like Cody Canada is speaking from personal experience on this track even though it’s a Merle Haggard cover, and it makes it one of the most relatable and real songs off this record.

Random Reflections

Reflecting on: Trio by Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt

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My last reflection was on a Linda Ronstadt solo album, and I promised the next would be on this record, for the trio of Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, and Emmylou Harris is receiving a well-deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Release date: 1987

Style: traditional country

People Who Might Like This album: fans of any of these three artists’ solo work, fans of any female group with three-part harmony

Standout Tracks: “The Pain of Loving You,” “hobo’s Meditation,” “Wildflowers,” “Those Memories of You,” “Telling me Lies”

Reflections: What a joy it was to revisit this record; I hadn’t listened to this in full in many years. As mentioned in the last reflection, Linda Ronstadt has been a really important artist to me personally, and she’s the reason I loved the Trio albums in the first place. Parton and Harris have been more important to country music, but it was Ronstadt whose music I loved first. Even to this day, I am not nearly as familiar with the discography of Emmylou Harris as I should be or as I’d like to be. This album, though, surpasses anything any of them could have done on their own, for it takes three already outstanding voices and puts them together in three-part harmony that can only be described as chilling.

Ironically, as I’ve been listening to this album, I’ve also been giving the new self-titled El Coyote record multiple spins. I should have a review on that project soon, but what I keep coming back to with the trio is that groups like El Coyote and others that are carrying on this tradition of three-part harmony in these modern days overwhelmingly lean toward the folk end of the spectrum. That’s no disrespect to any of these groups or to folk music, but there’s something about hearing Parton, Ronstadt, and Harris singing in perfect harmony with fiddle and steel and country chords supporting them that’s just beautiful and irreplaceable and hard to find in 2018. And to those that discount Linda Ronstadt as a singer of pop and rock who only crossed over into country briefly, this record and the other Trio material should solidify her place in country music history. It doesn’t get much more traditional than the Ronstadt-led “Hobo’s Meditation,” a song penned by Jimmie Rodgers.

It is true I came to appreciate these records first because of Linda, but each of the three has a highlight on this album. “The Pain of Loving You” is an excellent tune led by Emmylou Harris, and the Dolly Parton-penned “Wildflowers” is another standout. More than their individual highlights, though, this record is about the magic of these voices together, an album that none of them could have made without the others. It’s hard enough to write duets, let alone songs that fit three voices. Then, it’s difficult to make sure the voices all blend well, and care must be taken to ensure that each element of the harmony can be heard. They do all this perfectly, and bring character to these songs that none of them could have achieved on their own. Their star on the Walk of Fame is well-deserved, and this album has earned its iconic place in country music history.

Buy the Album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHcDD3H964

Reviews

Song Review: Cam’s “Road to Happiness”

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Rating: 7.5/10

We’ve been waiting for Cam to deliver us something in the vein of “Burning House” ever since that song came out and showed such promise. There was nothing really like it on her debut album, and “Diane” was really a great single lyrically, but it was bogged down by busy, pop production that rendered it virtually ruined. “Road to Happiness” is the closest thing we’ve yet seen to that beautiful song, acoustic and heartfelt, and it’s this type of song where Cam really shines as an interpreter.

Similar to “Burning House,” there’s not much here in the way of instrumentation; it’s primarily driven by acoustic guitar and keeps the main focus on the lyrics and vocals. Cam sings thoughtfully of the paths we all take looking for that elusive thing known as happiness–“it’s the wild unknown, it’s a ball and chain” seems like such a simple line, but it’s a great showcasing of how we all seek happiness in different ways. Some of us don’t want to be tied down and find joy in freedom, while others find their greatest fulfillment in loving another for the rest of their lives. She asks, “is the future that we’re chasing worth the right nows that we miss, on this road to happiness?” What a question, putting everything into perspective, and what a bleak way to look at things if we’re so caught up in reaching some indeterminate destination that we lose sight of the little joys in life right at our fingertips. It’s a really simple song, much like “Burning House” was, and yet, like that song, the lyrics are deceivingly complex and thought-provoking. Cam is at her best when she’s capturing that beauty in simplicity, and when her voice and lyrics aren’t drowned out by overproduction. As a fan of Cam and her potential, this song is exactly what I’ve been waiting for from her.

Written by: Cam, Tyler Johnson, Hillary Lindsey

Reviews

Single Review: Eric Church’s “Desperate Man”

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Rating: 7/10

Eric Church and Ray Wylie Hubbard may be the most genius musical pairing I’ve seen since George Strait and Dean Dillon. Why? Because Ray Wylie Hubbard is a master storyteller, especially when it comes to God and the devil and using biblical and paranormal references in his songs. However, the problem I had with his last album was that all those insanely good and interesting lyrics were brought down by samey, bland melodies that plagued the whole record. But take lyrics like Hubbard’s, and give them to Eric Church–here’s a vocalist who sings with fire and passion and understands the value in the sheer delivery of a song and interpretation of a lyric. Now it becomes something only a co-write like this one could have produced, a song with darkness and substance that appeals to independent music fans while also being pretty accessible to the mainstream.

That mainstream sensibility does lead to the strange, almost disco arrangement, and the “boo boos” in the background can be more distracting than catchy. The production style isn’t a problem within itself, but you do feel like it could have cut loose a little more, in the vein of “Chattanooga Lucy,” a song which this one calls to mind rhythmically. That song did a better job of letting the instrumentation take over than this one does, but the organic nature of an Eric Church song is always refreshing to hear in a world of drum loops and electronic sounds.

Ray Wylie Hubbard’s hand is all over this, as this tune was borne of his story about going to a fortune-teller and being told he had no future to read. It’s weird and quirky in the way a Ray Wylie song always is, but Eric Church makes it lively and fun, and before you know it, you’re singing along to lyrics about nailing crucifixes to walls. And Church slays this vocally; when he comes in at the bridge belting the lyrics with only percussion behind him, just like in “Lucy,” it’s one of those magical moments that you can’t forget as a music listener.

It’s an interesting song; the first time you listen, it’s kind of strange, and the production can get in the way. But a few listens in, and it hooks you. The very lines that made it weird are the ones that make it stand out in mainstream country, and the very aspects of the production that can be annoying at first are the ones that hold this together and render it a really catchy, fun song. More collaborating from these two, please.

Written by: Eric Church, Ray Wylie Hubbard

Reviews

Album Review: Down Low by Wes Youssi & The County Champs

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Rating: 8/10

It’s a strange state in which country music finds itself in 2018. You swear it’s dead and gone, the music of a forgotten and simpler time. The mainstream has gone pop, and many of the radio stars wouldn’t know a steel guitar if it fell out of the sky and hit them in the face. You find authenticity and substance in Texas and Oklahoma, but much of that music is a hybrid of country and rock. You seek it out in Americana, and find great music there as well, but in the end, it’s still not the sound you miss. When you do hear someone make a “classic” country record, it’s so hell-bent on being old-fashioned that it sucks the beauty right out of the discipline. Then you find a random Internet comment from someone about a band from Portland, Oregon, and you stumble upon the most country thing you’ve heard in years, and you realize it’s not dead after all, you just have to know where to look.

Wes Youssi & the County Champs haven’t been affected by any of those trends in the mainstream or in Texas and east Nashville; they’ve just calmly released a staunchly country album. To all those people who want their country music to be forward-thinking and genre-bending, this may not be the album for you because it’s more a reimagining of styles than a reinvention of the wheel. It’s soaked in steel and layered with fiddle, and Wes Youssi sounds like he could have emerged from the earliest days of country music, both in his tone and his phrasing. It’s three chords and shuffling beats, and flavored with a rockabilly influence at times to give the band a unique sound. It’s like you just walked into an old country bar and heard this record coming out of the jukebox.

But at the same time, it’s not bogged down by outdated language or by a labored effort to sound retro. It’s modern in lyric and timeless in theme, it just happens to be delivered in a throwback style. That fresh approach is sprinkled all over the record, but it’s never more apparent than in “Green dream,” where the character in the song starts growing weed to make his living–“in these hard times, the treasure’s under your feet.” A song like that would have never come out of classic country, and even today, it wouldn’t have come out of the South so naturally as it does out of Oregon. And there’s passion and life in this material; you can tell Wes Youssi has a passion for these songs and stories, not just for the traditional sound itself. This is the record I wish I’d had on hand when I heard Joshua Hedley’s album because this puts a record like that to shame and explains perfectly what I struggled so hard to make sense of with that project–I wanted to like it so much, and stylistically, it was excellent. But it lacked the passion and freshness Wes Youssi brings to the table here–a record like this isn’t a copy of the old styles, reimagined for the sake of nostalgia and irony, it’s proof that those old styles can still be relevant and relatable in 2018.

Another problem with some of the more traditional records I’ve covered in the past two years is a lack of energy. Some recent examples of that would be Vivian Leva and Kayla Ray’s albums. Although I enjoyed both, I can understand how some may find those records a bit sleepy. Down Low can hardly be accused of that distinction. It’s full of upbeat moments, from the infectious title track to the catchy, more rockabilly “Cadillac Man” to the bluegrass-influenced “Southbound Train.” The band seems to understand the desperate need for upbeat traditional music like this, as displayed in the closer, “Champ Boogie,” where Wes Youssi laments the number of girls standing around in bars and clubs looking for romance, but with “hardly any dudes that wanna dance.”

There’s a humor and wit in these songs that is missing in a lot of modern country. That’s best exemplified in “crazy Train.” The song tells us of a dysfunctional marriage–they’re always yelling and fighting and breaking dishes. But in the end, they are right for each other; he advises: “Let’s talk about what we do right. we sure as hell can start a fight. And when it comes to old-time lovin,” all we need’s the moon to get goin’.” He also resolves to use paper dishes from now on.

This classic, throwback style isn’t going to be for everyone; even among the more country fans, it’s going to be a bit too unpolished and rough around the edges for some. This is for the people who like a little more grit in their classic country, and it’s fresh enough to appeal to some of the more progressive listeners as well. It’s the record I’d show to people who enjoy good modern-sounding country, to show them this traditional style isn’t archaic and outdated, that it doesn’t always sound as lifeless as many think it is, and that it can be fresh and fun in 2018. It’s an album that could turn those fans onto this sound and to older music. Just a solid, fun, replayable collection of traditional tunes keeping the sound and spirit of country music alive and well.

Buy the Album