Rolling Country 2006 Thread

I've felt an affinity for the image I get of Moorer and her sister through their music, but I could rarely not be bored by the music itself. I always listen, feel the affinity, but end disappointed.

David Scott put Shelby Lynne's version of "Rainy Night in Georgia" on his annual best-of CD, which always contains a lot of stuff I seem to have missed. it's really good. and altho it's not country I really like the two songs by Devin Davis, who was unknown to me, he put on it--a really great one called "Transcendental Sports Anthem."

and I've been listening to some late-'50s Webb Pierce, too, which seems to handle its backup voices and so forth really well--great version of "Raunchy" called "The New Raunchy" and a great one called "Tupelo County Jail."

listened to the 4-song Redhill CD yesterday--thx Chuck. I got bored with it, but I think Julianne has real potential as a singer, and seemed to me they saved their best moves for, like, the codas or something. but there's something there, I just need to listen to it again.

and for those Gram Parsons fans out there, this site called youtube.com has a video of the Burritos doing "Older Guys" from '70 that's really cool, and lots of other video stuff as well--like the James Gang! seems like the site works better at night, during the day the vids seem to play pretty jerkily, and I can see it being a major time-waster, too. but worth checking out.

I've decided that I really like the Jamey Johnson record, "The Dollar." great baritone. "Rebelicious" is a good song about the ideal hard-bodied woman who can also bait her own hook. and I think "The Dollar" is excellent, altho "Flying Silver Eagle," about melting down wedding rings, is even better. I just wish it were more of a concept album about money, and funnier. but I'm impressed that he wrote most of the songs, and he seems sane, even-tempered. could be as good as John Conlee or Moe Bandy, maybe.

"by Tony Scherr at his house in Brooklyn"

I mean, Moranis may have talent -- he may even have potential to be Shel Silverstein or Bobby Braddock, for all I know. Maybe someday, in some context, I'll have the patience to listen closer to his demos.

Wait, is that what "Take Off (to the Great White North)" featuring Geddy Lee was from? Not to mention the 12 Canadian Days of Christmas single? Who were the artists on those? I am blanking out on them (even though I'm pretty sure I have the "Take Off" 45 at home).

The 20 stations* that are giving "Kerosene" the most spins:

KSKS-FM Fresno 55
S060-FM *SiriusSatellite 51
X016-FM *XM Radio 45
KKCS-FM Colo Springs 43
WUSN-FM Chicago 42
KSOP-FM Salt Lake City 39
KHKI-FM Des Moines 39
KTST-FM Oklahoma City 38
KYKR-FM Beaumont 38
WTQR-FM Greensboro 36
WXBQ-FM Johnson City 36
WIOV-FM Lancaster 36
WGNE-FM Jacksonville 36
WPUR-FM Atlantic City 36
WWYZ-FM Hartford 35
KBEQ-FM Kansas City 35
KUSS-FM San Diego 35
WQBE-FM Charleston WV 35
WPCV-FM Lakeland 34
KTOM-FM Monterey/Salinas 34

She's not even in the top 30 on KYGO in Denver, which means she's getting fewer than 11 spins, if any. Of course, the song has been around for a while, and may be having a different life cycle in different places.

*that are reporting to Mediabase, that is

The man deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

and thanks Roy, for alerting me to Ray Wylie Hubbard! just picked up his "Delirium Tremolos" yesterday. "Choctaw Bingo" is fantastic.

and for the record, for what it's worth, the Wayne Hancock song that Shelton Hank III does on his new one is "Take My Pain." exactly my feeling when I play the fookin' thing...

there's a nice little bit on Moranis in the current Paste magazine. xps

1 MIRANDA LAMBERT Kerosene 51
2 JOSH TURNER Your Man 49
3 TRACE ADKINS Honky Tonk Badonkadonk 47
4 MONTGOMERY GENTRY She Don't Tell Me To 47
5 RASCAL FLATTS What Hurts The Most 46
6 SUGARLAND Just Might (Make Me Believe) 46
7 TIM MCGRAW My Old Friend 43
8 KENNY CHESNEY Living In Fast Forward 30
9 SARA EVANS Cheatin' 30
10 JACK INGRAM Wherever You Are 30
11 TRENT TOMLINSON Drunker Than Me 29
12 VAN ZANT Nobody Gonna Tell Me What... 29
13 GARTH BROOKS/TRISHA YEARWOOD Love Will Always Win 28
14 TOBY KEITH Get Drunk And Be Somebody 28
15 ROCKIE LYNNE Lipstick 28
16 LEE ANN WOMACK 20 Years And Two Husbands Ago 26
17 JAMEY JOHNSON The Dollar 24
18 LEANN RIMES Something's Gotta Give 24
19 JASON ALDEAN Why 23
20 RODNEY ATKINS If You're Going Through Hell 23

"Results 1 - 10 of about 121 for "Rockie Lynn". (0.64 seconds)"

That's even fewer results than you get for "Frank Kogan."

I think Rockie is Canadian.

We're talking about "Because of You" (most of the discussion was on last year's thread), which I'm now trying to make sense of since it's only been on the charts for half a year and gone double platinum as a single (not to mention the 5 million the album has sold). When I first heard it I pretty much dismissed it as an OK adult-contemporary heartbreak song, suitably quiet and sad but not up to the Kelly's previous three singles. Now, having paid attention to the lyrics and thought hard about where its music is coming from and so forth (and finally doing what I can to study the video on the postage-stamp screen that Launch Yahoo gives you in dialup), I'm hearing a completely different song, something of intensity, something that feels loud even with the quiet accompaniment and the controlled singing. And I think it is out of bounds for country. Which is to say that though I can imagine Faith singing in this style she probably wouldn't go for this melody or these words; and though I can imagine LeAnn going for both the melody and these words and totally nailing it in performance, she'd probably decide that it would be bad for her career at this point to release it.

First the words: it isn't just that they're unremittingly despairing, since you could say the same about country classics like "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and "The End of the World." But those don't feel like despair, or they take a different approach to despair, or something. (I've always considered "End of the World" a beautiful, sweet delight.) In general, country's "life falls apart" story belongs to its standard romance cycle: "My heart is broken, now I'm drunk, now I'm going to fuck up again and again," is mined for a lot of rue and a lot of comedy. It's something country is comfortable with. Whereas "the relationship was fundamentally pathological and has left me unfit to live" is not standard for country, even if it's fine on Oprah and adult contemporary and Radio Disney.

Also - and this is interesting - I'd never thought of it as a domestic drama until last night when I started examining the video: house in the suburban night, we're looking in through the window at a couple arguing, then we're in with them in the fight, a child watches glumly, a man upends a table in anger; then a different scene, the little girl shows daddy something she's made, daddy burns it on the stove; a woman leaves, a little girl leaves.

Before studying the video, I'd just naturally assumed this was a romance-and-dysfunction song like most of the ones that precede and follow it on the album, that the narrator was addressing a former boyfriend who'd left her devastated. In fact, that's a perfectly good way to read the song; the "you" is never identified. But if we factor in the video, the narrator has to be the little girl grown up, and she's addressing her parents: "I heard you cry every night in your sleep/I was so young/You should have known better than to lean on me/You never thought of anyone else/You just saw your pain/And now I cry in the middle of the night/For the same damn thing/Because of you/Because of you/Because of you I am afraid/Because of you I never stray too far from the sidewalk/Because of you I learned to play on the safe side so I don't get hurt/Because of you/I try my hardest just to forget everything/Because of you/I don't know how to let anyone else in/Because of you/I'm ashamed of my life because it's empty/Because of you I am afraid/Because of you."

Anyway, I don't know of anything like this in country, though that may not be because it's not there but just because I don't know the genre well enough. Haggard's "Hungry Eyes" suggests something difficult (like, maybe sometime mommas are too hurt to try); maybe there's more. (Subject for further research: Hank Snow.) But "Because of You" is more in the territory of Faster Pussycat's "House of Pain" and Everclear's "Father of Mine" and Pink's "Family Portrait" and Lindsay Lohan's "Confessions of a Broken Heart" and Ashlee Simpson's "Shadow." The country equivalent? Maybe LeAnn Rimes' album track "No Way Out" if you decide she's talking about her relationship to her dad. (But didn't the country audience make clear that they didn't consider that album country?)

I'll continue this thought later, but there's also something going on - though subtly - in the sound of "Because of You" that also isn't yet a part of country, and that's goth.

"A Boy Named Sue"? "Up Againt the Wall Redneck Mother"? ("he ain't responsible for what he's doing 'cause his mother made him what he is")

or okay, maybe not... this deserves much more thought, though.

(According to the article Kent's and Dee's background had been in pop songwriting, and I'm assuming Kent was basically marketing the thing pop, so it's interesting that country producer Chet Atkins was the guy who heard potential in the song.)

Also (again not knowing much about country videos especially, and I'm sure there's lots of precedent here) she's being the girl who walks in and causes T.R.O.U.B.L.E. in that Travis Tritt song.

I remember Eric Weisbard played Dolly's "Down from Dover" for me, and he told me as he cued it up, "When you get to the end, your hair will stand on end." When it got to the end my hair stood on end.

i'm going to call *Totally Country 5* (which contains the montgomery gentry song in question, not to mention kerosene, homewrecker, dierks's how am i doin', suds in the bucket, van zant's help somebody, i play chicken with the train, god's will (token shitty song from a good album) and blake shelton's goodbye time) a keeper, since it also has xxl and hicktown (which is a DANCE song by the way), and i've yet to see or hear a copy of the keith anderson and jason aldean albums, and it also has craig morgan's kenny-chesney-wannabe redneck yacht club, which i've decided i like despite its strange socioeconomic contradictions even though i forget who the hell craig morgan is otherwise. ray scott's my kind of music is okay, too, at least soundwise -- talking blues with annoying pandering lyrics about how she can't get enough of whitney but he prefers waylon so she's outta there, god what a dumbass. also rans: andy griggs's if heaven (was a town it'd be my town in the summer 1985 and if it was a beer it be my last one), yucko, though i'd still like to hear the album it's from someday since i'm a fan of the more cinderella-style hair-metallic stuff on his '02 *freedeom* album; brooks & dunn's useless it's getting better all the time (which rips off the same beatles song that modern english did once except not even a tenth as well); lonestar's you're like coming home, which i forget what it sounds like even while it's on. helpful CD (despiite its odd chronology -- i.e., nothing from the CURRENT dierks or sara evans albums), since i no longer have cable and live in country-station-less NYC, which means i am sad;y months behind on the current state of hit country singles.

i like it a lot too. but er..it could be what, anthony?

>nothing from the CURRENT dierks or sara evans albums<

or martina mcbride, either. yet there's hits from the past few months on it by other people. i wonder why that is.

I've got the antho but haven't listened yet, but I did let Launch Yahoo run on its own a bit today and among others I heard "My Kind of Music" and "Redneck Yacht Club" and "Hicktown," all three of which I like, in that order I think. My notes on the Ray Scott: "Self-congratulation, singers' names heaved at us like signifiers, but does a good outlaw honky-tonk stomp. Not bad, given the stupid concept." (The concept is no stupider than "Corn Fed"'s, which you voted for, which is also a good stomp, w/ garage rock thrown in) (though I do think that "Corn Fed"'s lyrics are more interesting and must have required more thought, though the resulting narrowness and hypocrisy is even more obnoxious; I mean, I can't say I use criteria that is totally dissimilar to Ray's in evaluating potential love interests, though I might change the artist's names). (Dave Hickey once wrote that he should know better than to date someone who dislikes Robert Mitchum, since it never works out.)

OK, getting up and playing "Hicktown" right now, I think the trouble is that it's not slow enough, not spare enough, not obsessive enough. The best part comes 2:15 in, when voice and fiddle shut up and for ten seconds you've got a tough little breakbeat. Someone tell Bambaataa right away.

White, Armond

as for *totally*'s tracklist, yeah, it occured to me that licensing might be an issue. i haven't checked if the older tracks are less likely to be sony bmg, but maybe that has something to do with it. i totally stink at remembering record labels anyway. but maybe sara's, martina's, and dierk's (and brooks & dunn's, come to think of it - their song here came from their best-of album which i never heard) labels don't want their songs here to cut into sales of their current albums. whereas maybe with smaller acts like aldean and anderson (whose album edd says he's going to send me so i finally hear it - thanks edd!) *totally country* is considered a smart promotional tool.

Yeah, it's weird; I've never equated parrotheads with rednecks. And I've always assumed that anybody rich enough to afford a yacht *can't* be a redneck. (Though maybe they're not real yachts, just powerboats or something? Can you fire up tiki torches on a powerboat? I should listen closer to the lyrics, but either way, it seems kind of extravagant by Jeff Foxworthy's definition, I would say.) So part of the feeling I get with the song is boatowners lying to themselves.