I have a soft spot for March. It seems that all the best material comes out in March. Now obviously that isn’t literally true, but it feels accurate. The reason for this is that March is the real beginning of the year for music. In December things start to go into hibernation. The holiday season takes over and generally even the artists that are not actively pushing holiday music take a step back. Some of it is to focus on their families or because commercially it does not make sense to invest time, effort, and money to fight against the onslaught of holiday material to get noticed. January and February are a slow season. Things are recovering slowly. People are starting to get back into things. Maybe you push a new single to slowly get the ball rolling. March is when things really take off commercially. Additionally, with the changing seasons, a little bit of warmth in the air and a little less snow on the ground, you’re in a more cheerful mood and you can relate better to the music.
Naturally, with March ending, I thought this would be a great time to check in on what I have been listening to. Over the past couple of years, I have put more focus on album listening. This is in contrast to playlist listening, which is what I did before I started to get into albums. I’ve gone back-and-forth between what is better. Obviously, there’s a certain powerful impact to an album, but a playlist can easily be more enjoyable. For instance, it’s very rare to have an album over 15-20 songs which can maintain your interest the whole way through. However, I'd hazard a guess that all of us have playlists significantly longer that we can listen to for hours on end. For me, I delved more into playlists in the past few months. It worked out nicely because there wasn’t much material being released. Still there were a few albums that stuck with me.
I want to talk about some albums that came out now and some that are older. The first we’re going to discuss is the deluxe edition of Ernest’s Flower Shops titled Two Dozen Roses. I was somewhat harsh on Ernest’s album. I thought it had some cool ideas, and some very nice sounding production, but overall suffered. I thought and wrote that the issue lied with Ernest himself and his abilities as a vocalist. The argument is fairly simple. If you give a songwriter a microphone he won’t be as good on the microphone as a proper singer. Tongue-in-cheek, I suggested to some friends of mine that if Jake Worthington had sung the Ernest album it would’ve been album of the year. I think it is fair to say I was wrong.
This deluxe album proves that like the best performers in any human field, a thorough and robust understanding of limitations is only a tool towards greatness. What I mean by this, is that knowing your limits, going as far as can be pushed, and focusing on areas of strength to balance things out is far superior than misunderstanding your place. A pitcher in baseball knows how hard he throws and if he throws 98 miles an hour, he can build his pitching repertoire based around his fastball. If he only pitches 91 miles an hour, then he really needs to focus on offspeed pitches and breaking balls to build his repertoire. You can’t use a middling fastball as the basis for a plan of attack. If a pitcher with a 91 mile per hour fastball attempts to build his repertoire as if he can throw 98, it’ll be a disaster. If he understands his strengths and weaknesses and crafts a plan around that, he can experience much success. That is precisely what Ernest did on the expansion of Flower Shops. Gone are the not so subtle nods to 1980s heartland rock. The thick percussive grooves that overpowered and overwhelmed the thin vocals are instead replaced with lush, organic, and traditional textures that enhance the atmosphere, all spaciously arranged to allow each instrument and vocal note to be heard.
The album extension demonstrates a tremendous amount of growth from the prior release and honestly is worthy of being viewed as an independent project. This is the actualization of an artist with a vision, creativity, and who understands what it is that he wishes to be. He finds that lane and sticks the landing with the utmost precision. I am very impressed with what was accomplished. Also, Jake Worthington sounds great on his feature.
The next album I'm going to talk about is by Ryan Shupe and the Rubber Band. It is entitled Dream Big and it is their mainstream debut (and only label release thus far) from 2005.
It is funny how I came across this album. I saw a tweet about a single that this band pushed 20 years ago on the charts and how it was fresh and innovative for the time. I was curious. What exactly does fresh and innovative sound from 20 years ago sound like today? Is today’s genre melding music a new trend or is that something that has been done forever? Would “being ahead of the times” simply just sound like 2015 pop country albeit 10 years early to the punch? I decided to give it a try. Turns out this band put out one of the best albums from the entire decade of the 2000’s. Admittedly, I’m not the strongest when it comes to that decade. I have a list of about 30 or 40 albums from both major and minor artists throughout that decade that I wish to give a listen. Even for more seasoned country listeners than I, Dream Big seems to have slipped beneath the cracks.
The album is a potpouriie of different influences that range from bluegrass to rock, contemporary country to pop, even rhythmic elements of hip-hop mush together with a sort of Dave Matthews jam band vibe that permeates the album. There is a sincerity and earnestness to the vocals which tie everything together. The songwriting veers between standard topic choices and unique expression. It is really an exceptional project and touches on ground that would be considered new even 20 years. I'm not surprised it didn't take off. Experimental music has never done well. I am more surprised that a major label took such a swing on a potential artist, even pushing a single for them which sounded nothing like anything else on the radio. Compare that to the Nate Smith’s and Jamison Rodgers’ of the current day scene. These artists are required to put out a safe, same sounding single for radio, and only after experiencing a little success and building up an image are they worthy of investment. It's remarkable and very surprising that this Ryan Shupe album happened as it did. Unfortunately they weren’t successful any further and were dropped from the label. The album seems to have left not much of a legacy. For this listener however, it probably will end up as one of the most unusual and entertaining projects that I have heard from that entire era. ( And that includes anything Eric Heatherly ever put out.)
The next object of discussion is the 1968 Everly Brothers album, Roots. I don’t think of Everly Brothers need an introduction, but for those unaware, they were a tremendously popular and impactful pop rock group in 1950s. They owed some degree of their sound to country and folk music, but mostly were grounded in the pop rock of the day. For a more contemporary example of what their sound looked like, I would recommend the Cactus Blossoms. The Everly Brothers brought something very unique to the landscape with their family style harmonies and guitar picking. They were very popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but by 1968, they had struggled. They released a string of mediocre albums throughout the middle part of the decade and had the misfortune of that coinciding with the British invasion. Like many struggling pop artists, they decided to pivot to country for their next record.
But this was no ordinary pop artist gone country record. The Everly Brothers came from small town Americana (Shenandoah, Iowa) and grew up listening to country and gospel like pretty much anyone else from those areas. Even their pop music relied heavily on the folk traditions and harmonies that they grew up with, albeit transplanted into the modern pop scene. Going back to their “roots”, so to speak, wasn’t unnatural. They attacked contemporaneous country music with a merger between their harmonious pop rock music as well as more traditional country sounds and arrangements. Many credit this with being the first country rock album.
There is a real sense of homecoming all throughout the project. Old clips from the 1940s and 50s of the family singing together and performing are laceed throughout even sometimes serving as a duet partner. Frequent references to youth, family and upbringing permeate the project both via song choice, and the aforementioned use of old recordings. Really a fleshed out concept album. Unusual for country music in that era.
I especially enjoyed that rendition of T for Texas. T for Texas is one of my favorite old country songs. It is one of the oldest songs in the country music canon. Jimmie Rodgers famously wrote it and performed it. Johnny Cash has a great version of it. Waylon Jennings and all the greats of country music at some point have given the song a shot, and the Everly Brothers maybe topped them all. (As it as an aside, there is an interesting contrast to be drawn between the straight up violence in the song T for Texas and the more wholesome family focused music of the Carter family. Both were contemporaneous to each other and both artists have been correctly noted as being the forefathers of the country music genre. I do think it’s emblematic of a certain push and pull between small c conservatism and small p progressive inclinations that both exist within the genre. That’s definitely a topic for a different time, but I thought it interesting).
The point is that the Everly brothers executed one of the best pivots from a pop act to a country album and this album really holds up. I especially enjoyed the fidelity of the record. The harmonies are all very clear and crisp. It doesn’t sound like it’s from the mid-1960s and it’s really worth listening to even just as a pleasant background music. But if you want to dig in deeply and start taking note of some of the wondrous musical bits within really stand out. There is a tremendous down home aw shucks sophistication to the way they deliver vocal lines, and the instrumentals back that up. Defined, clear, precise, perfect.
The Shootouts dropped an album recently named Stampede. We need to talk about it.
The Shootouts are a midwestern neovintage country band which the locus of their sound is to be found in the melting pot of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some combination of honky tonk and rockabilly, mixed together to the point where you can’t really see where one begins and the other one ends. It's an infectious sound, perhaps held back by the unique vocal tone of the lead singer. I personally enjoy his distinctive tone a tremendous amount but I can see how the overly sincere, somewhat pitchy style doesn't land for everyone. I first discovered them on their previous album Bullseye, which in my opinion was one of the best of 2021. This feels minimally different to me. They have a formula and are mostly sticking to it. Upbeat twangy telecaster and old school grooves ground the record and provide most of the backbone. If you've heard both of the albums, one thing you notice is that the prior album had a few instrumental tracks. The band shines the most when fully let loose. They are an energetic bunch and in places, the second album suffers from not having that creative outlet emphasized. Not trying to take away from the singer, but when you have a really tight band that knows how to hit a groove properly, sometimes this vocal thing just gets in the way. They actually double down on the singing and perform numerous duets with higher profile artists like Marty Stuart, Raul Malo (The Mavericks), and Ray Benson (Asleep At The Wheel) and it really shines best in the features. It’s a contagious recipe and one that I greatly enjoyed. Definitely a sound over songwriting group but they aren't inadequate in that realm either.
I was planning on covering the big commercial smashes of Wallen and Combs, but this has been running long and I could use some more time in the Combs project to fully concretize my thoughts. Expect that to drop in a week or so.
I decided to only focus on gold music, because I wasn't interested in wasting my time relistening and relitigating music that I wasn't interested in. Hope you don't mind the positivity. The internet doesn't seem to like that kind of thing.
Joe