As all children know, this is the time of year when people like me get joyfully hysterical, it being the start of the season in which we music critics prepare our year-end best-of lists. So now I’m excitedly trying to find out what actually happened in 2007 in country music, in hip-hop, in R&B, in Swedepop. I spent an hour-and-a-half yesterday determining definitively that Linda Sundblad’s “Lose You” is better than Paula DeAnda’s “Easy” and at least for now deserves to hold down the seventh spot in my Top Ten. (I think that’s what I decided, that the Sundblad was better than the DeAnda. Unless it’s the other way around.)
I’m a voter in the Nashville Scene’s Country Music Critics poll. Last year I proved my affinity with and deep understanding of the American rural heartland by picking Norwegian singer-songwriter Marit Larsen’s “Only A Fool” as country single of the year. (Hey, Norway’s a country, too.)
This year, honing in with ever greater precision, my lead country single candidate is—seriously—teen pop star Miley Cyrus’s “See You Again.” She’s got genuine country pedigree (her dad is achy-breaky guy Billy Ray Cyrus, who also plays her character’s dad in the Disney sitcom Hannah Montana), but other than some decorative twangy guitar on “Who Says,” I’d not heard anything close to country out of her until “See You Again,” which is head, shoulders, and torso above anything else she’s ever recorded. A disco-ball arrangement of rockabilly menace music (closer to Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Chris Isaak than to Elvis and Jerry Lee), with the guitar reverberating doom, except the lyrics are all sweet-girl crush, Miley anxiously but optimistically falling in love! And there’s this great bright thwomp-thwomp-thwomp disco pop chorus about being shy and tongue-tied, though with a promise of better things to come. The title line runs close in melody and delivery to “Bad Things,” Jace Everett’s excellent neorockabilly single from 2006, though, while Jace wants to do bad things with you, Miley, at least for now, would settle for being able to stay in the same room with you without stammering.
Here are some more country songs I’ve been trying to make up my mind about, some singles, some album tracks. The Taylor Swift song has been out for well over a year, but I’ve yet to see an adequate appreciation of its lyrics.
Eric Church “Sinners Like Me”: In verse one of last year’s single “How ’Bout You” Eric Church says there are a whole lot of people just like him (cowboy boots, scars on knuckles, but no nose rings or trust funds); then when he hits the chorus he declares “To tell the truth I think we’re the chosen few.” So, how in the hell does he get from “there’s a whole lot more like me” to “we’re the chosen few”? But something feels right about this. Not that Church’s ideas are right—he’s no logician—but there’s psychological sense to the connection, or beautiful hypocrisy anyway, in his wanting simultaneously to claim a large, normal constituency for himself and to claim special, rare insights for that large normal constituency. (Biblical overtones of “chosen few” are probably deliberate. Maybe there’s an accidental parallel here to the tension in evangelical Christianity between New Testament universality and Old Testament exclusivity.)
Church’s next single was “Two Pink Lines,” in which a girlfriend doesn’t get pregnant. (By the way, the two songs are unabashed hard rockers, the first Southern rock, the second a lot like “Jack And Diane”–era Mellencamp.) And then “Guys Like Me,” which proclaims the great truth that bankers’ daughters fall for regular redneck joes. “Now there’s a lotta guys like me out there/In a lotta little towns/Now, tellin’ all our buddies/We won’t ever settle down/We say that’s just the way we are/An’ the way we’ll always be/So God sends girls like you for guys like me,” i.e., girls who will settle him down. It’s almost as if He makes all girls middle class—all marriageable girls, anyway—and all guys working class, and feminizes “middle-class” and masculinizes “working class.” The insistence here is that God brings everything into balance—the unacknowledged subtext being that things actually aren’t in balance.
“How ’Bout You” starts with “I know where I come from, how ’bout you?” In “Sinners Like Me” Church tells us he comes from a long line of sinners like his granddad, like his granddad’s granddad. “Sinning” here means drinking and fighting, which in Church’s songs and a lot of other people’s also symbolize the irrepressible spirit of the Southern man. So Church doesn’t know what he thinks, just knows that Jesus will accept him in the end.
Country music continually batters the listener with assertions about what country is like, what normal people are like, what rebel boys and hurt fathers are like. The truth is that the singers are lying, that they don’t know. The ground is moving even as they’re claiming rootedness, but out of this deep uneasiness some of them, like Eric Church, get deep feelings, grave contradictions, strong words. (The pair Montgomery Gentry do this with even more depth. But I’m not going to start quoting them today or I’ll go all month.)
Taylor Swift “Tim McGraw”: The subject matter’s been run into the dirt (memories of first love, coming of age, though strangely enough, Taylor was probably about 15 when she and Liz Rose wrote it), but Taylor’s words are exceptionally precise and evocative—no line in particular, just the way the details pile up: little black dress, box hidden under her bed, etc. “September saw a month of tears/And thanking God that you weren’t here/To see me like that.” Very skillful, makes not-quite-in-the-vernacular phrasing (“saw a month of tears”) feel normal in context (ditto for “the moon like a spotlight on the lake”). Taylor is canny in balancing wistfulness and self-assertion. She hopes that when the boy thinks of Tim McGraw he thinks of her favorite song. She leaves a letter on his doorstep to make sure he does. She uses the word “bittersweet,” and she’s not kidding. The first time she sings the chorus it means “I hope you have warm memories of me,” but by song’s end it also means something like “I hope I haunt you, f--ker, the way you haunted me. Sincerely, your discarded girlfriend, Taylor.” But it’s more subtle. It doesn’t abandon the first meaning, the sweetness; it just layers a whole other expanse of sadness and anger on top.
Brad Paisley, “Ticks”: Okay, midnight romance and moon reflecting on a backwoods lake is all fine and dandy, but what about insects? Presumably Taylor and boyfriend were confined to romantic fields and backlanes because, their being teens, motels and homes weren’t available to them. But in “Ticks” the pickup line is that the guy wants to take a gal out of the bar and into the countryside where he can check her for ticks. Okay, this is not misty-eyed romance, it’s a joke, a send-up of both pickups and moonlight romance. But I’m still mainly gaping with disbelief, the line being bizarre but just not that funny. Got my attention the first few times I heard it but ... (Obviously, thousands of radio listeners were enthralled, damned if I know why.)
John Waite’s “Highway 61 Revisited”: It’s a full-scale Chess blues reimagining of the Dylan song, as grimey and forceful and funny as a Muddy Waters track, but of course with Dylan’s collage-and-paste comic terror words, sung by Waite with no attempt to sound the least bit Chicago but instead using the same late ’70s-early ’80s high-pitched hair-rock-pop delivery he’d used back in his late ’70s-early ’80s high-pitched hair-rock-pop heyday. So this is impassioned and ingratiating while the blues grind away underneath. He lets loose with “Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah” at the end. Inspired. I can’t say I was expecting this.
Jason Michael Carroll “Angel Of Broken Hearts”: Has a classic country baritone and long hair that looks more hippie than redneck. Scored a big hit last year with “Alyssa Lies,” a manipulative, child-abuse tearjerker that set thousands of tear ducts burbling, including mine. Current single is a bore so I’m writing about “Angel” instead: a wailing pop rocker, like old-time Neil Diamond with revved-up guitars or Tom Petty with a deeper, richer throat. Easily my favorite on Carroll’s album.
Sarah Johns “The One In The Middle”: A woman with a great, broad twang, the songs tending to let her down but not this one, a spirited ode (à la Eminem) to one of her fingers, but not, for instance, the index finger, or the ring finger, or the pinkie.
Brooks & Dunn “Drunk On Love”: Their album Cowboy Town has more ass-kissing than usual (genuflecting to Hank and Hag and Buck and Cash and praising cowgirls and cowboys, which is so boring boring boring boring boring); and with great concern for broadening my tastes Arista Nashville has chosen my two least favorite songs on the album as the first two singles. But I feel a strong affection for one of the two anyway, “God Must Be Busy,” for its totally muddled theology (you know, even all-powerful dieties must get sorta not all-powerful at times; or maybe the song is ironic; I can’t tell anymore). But the album is a good one anyway, kicks hard all the way through, strong tequila song (song as strong as the liquor), strong rhythm-in-the-bucket Stones’ song, strong Mellencamp rocking song (the title tune), good stumbling-up-the-stairs Jerry Jeff Walker duet, and this one, with a deep molasses-and-quicksand groove and lyrics that tell you love enhances the effect of alcohol.
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