morgan wallen

double album dropping this week -- who else is excited?

"7 summers" & "somebody's problem" are two of my fav songs of 2020, and the jason isbell cover and "more than my hometown" are also great. going back to the last album, "chasin you" & "whiskey glasses" are classics to me.

piece on him by kelefa sanneh in the new yorker recently

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/28/how-morgan-wallen-became-the-most-wanted-man-in-country

30 songs seems like a lot! have you heard it? is it mostly/all good?

i haven't heard it! easily one of my most anticipated albums of the year tho

30 songs is def crazy, i'm sure they know it will help him stream. you can tell just looking at the tracklist that it's pretty ridiculous ("country ass shit" -> "whatcha think of country now" -> "me on whiskey" -> "need a boat" lol) & the sanneh story backs that up. i'm not really complaining tho. it does seem like the first record is better & more what i'm into of his, the stuff that has a bit of a softer touch.

thinkin bout them tan lines, and i'm thinkin damn i'd
love to drown in them heartbreaker blue eyes

this is my fav lyric of the year

i'm a dinosaur who looks at an album as a whole, whereas 30 tracks will help his streaming #s and ppl will just put the songs they wanna hear on playlists anyway.

i like all the singles, looking forward to listening to Dangerous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpFuqF4ASXA

fuck me up

banger

i'm pretty happy w/ how this album turned out ... the second disc is more tuneful than i would've guessed, stuff like the title track, "rednecks, red letters, red dirt." some of the melodies on that side are actually a bit more developed than on the first disc. the first disc really has some knockouts tho... "sand in my boots," "865,"... "whiskey'd my way" especially.

he has this incredible knack for writing songs that are easy to memorize... his choruses are often verbose but simple, economical in their own ways. "somebody's problem", "whiskey'd my way" ... i was able to sing these entire songs back from memory after listening for less than an hour... even going back to "chasin you," the way that chorus unfolds, same with "7 summers"... it keeps unspooling the imagery in a way that is efficient but also generous

and then lyrically there's these bits in his songs that feel as if the tropes are being examined w/ fresh eyes... the "heartbreaker blue eyes" line in "somebody's problem", or in "sand in my boots" when he sings about dodging potholes in his "sunburnt silverado." he has this goofy meatheady public persona but his music is overall very romantic and often intelligently written (save the song on here about buying a harvard sweatshirt from goodwill and ppl then assuming he's smart)