2001 - feels like this world left you far behind ...

Maybe 2000 was the nadir, right? It’s probably hard to imagine nowadays if you weren’t there, but that Y2K stuff was messing with a lot of people’s heads. Felt like we were in for a long stretch of technical difficulties at best, if not some end-times cataclysm. Perhaps a couple more decades of social media and 24/7 news cycles have normalized mass anxiety but back then it was kind of new to a lot of people who were too young to remember the previous constant-threat-of-nuclear-war boogeyman. People were probably having a hard time concentrating on making good country music, but now it was 2001 and we were more or less okay and it’d probably be smooth sailing, right?

No, of course. The previous year’s presidential election was pretty friendly by modern-day standards but ended in recounts and controversy, eventually narrowly handed to Bush in a move that was widely seen as pretty suspect (at least by the folks that lost, as these things tend to go). Social media hadn’t kicked in but the internet was in pretty wide use by now so the same sort of stuff that pisses off normal people on social media was kicking around email chains and message boards and stuff like that. And of course 2001 was the year of 9/11, the biggest “never forget, as if you could” moment of most of our American lifetimes. I’m not going to get into the bottomless tragedy and ongoing aftermath of it all here, but suffice it to say it was so enormous that even the normally culture-war-averse country music charts couldn’t ignore it.

Much of Nashville, like much of America (if less so recently), prefers to give off the public impression of being apolitical or at least moderate. In the ranks of the bigger country artists and power brokers there appears to be a mostly non-vocal minority of relative liberals who choose to not rock the boat lest their careers capsize, and a likely majority of conservatives who (with a few notable exceptions) keep their politics low-key and polite, perhaps confident that their viewpoint is the prevalent one in town and with much of the nationwide audience anyway. Not much incentive to rock the boat when you’re already steering it. Explicitly political songs tend to end up either being the stuff of novelty acts and has-beens desperate for attention or artists big enough to have the confidence (hubris?) to feel like their sentiments will be heard and helpful. Much like in present day politics, there’s just not much middle ground. Anyway, on to the songs.

Tim McGraw’s cheerfully self-analyzing “My Next Thirty Years” hung on for the first two weeks before ceding to Sara Evans’ similarly sunny “Born to Fly.” It was twangy around the edges but with a certain widescreen pop appeal that was all the rage amongst mainstream front-runners at the time; she looked really nice in the color-saturated Wizard of Oz-themed video, occasionally drawing from Shania Twain’s navel-sporting playbook. The Dixie Chicks also took the opportunity to flesh out a song’s meaning with a video. “Without You” was a typical (but lovely) lost-love lament with just enough hint of ambiguity to apply to other grievous losses; the video featured a pregnant actress whose newborn son shortly thereafter ended up surviving less than a week. The actress asked that, instead of her part being edited out, the video be used in part to memorialize the child alongside its general theme of vulnerability and human frailty.

Lonestar didn’t have a ton of personality or cohesion to their sound; “Tell Her” wasn’t bad as far as 00’s country-pop goes (faint praise, I know) and it did have a bit of minor-key intrigue and urgency to it. There just wasn’t much reason to be optimistic it’d signify a whole new direction or anything. Oddly, contemporary country’s new direction was suddenly pointed towards Australia, of all places. First you had Jamie O’Neal with the smoky, vaguely haunting “There is No Arizona.” An ominous ballad about a strung-along lover – perhaps a belated sequel to Tanya Tucker’s “Delta Dawn” – the sonics and O’Neal’s breathy delivery were a fine fit for the material. Her countrified countryman Keith Urban was way more chill on “But For the Grace of God,” a steel-laced easy-rolling number about a happily coupled-up dude’s gratitude at being spared the fate of his quarrelsome neighbors or that lonely old guy that’s always wandering around town. O’Neal and Urban weren’t exactly Haggard acolytes but they sounded about as country as anyone else on the charts at the moment. Not a great curve to grade on, but apparently an easy one for a couple of photogenic Aussies to climb. O’Neal ended up being a bit of a blip; Urban would grow into one of the most commercially successful singers of their generation.

Toby Keith didn’t use the success of “How Do You Like Me Now?” as an excuse for consistent belligerence just yet; “You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like This” was a nicely swoony slow-dance soundtrack, tastefully put together and sung with hearty conviction by a guy who was always a more versatile songwriter than he probably gets credit for. “One More Day” brought Diamond Rio to the next round of their occasional step to the forefront, another solid example of the sort of ambiguous lost-love songs like “Without You” that often get deputized into even sadder moments; the song was used in tributes when NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt died, and would certainly pop up again a few months down the line in the wake of all the 9/11 deaths. Diamond Rio and Toby Keith handed the #1 spot back and forth a couple times throughout March.

Despite the ongoing drift back to being music for the middle-aged and settled-down, you’d see the occasional initiative to bring younger listeners into the fold. Jessica Andrews was already two albums into a career yet only in her late teens when “Who I Am” hit the top spot, and it was probably exactly the sort of jangly wholesome country-pop that some key swaths of her non-famous contemporaries needed to hear. The youth initiative didn’t stick, though: this was the last time she’d even crack the top ten, quickly ceding to a six-week run for the relatively dad-country Brooks & Dunn and “Ain’t Nothing ‘bout You.” It had the urgent pulse of most of their uptempo numbers but felt paint-by-numbers in the writing, trying to kick up some romantic heat but landing a bit lukewarm. Kenny Chesney, meanwhile, was more or less lukewarm for life; “Don’t Happen Twice” was supposed to conjure up youthful summer romance but in its airless production and listless delivery comes off about as hot as day-old coffee. Chesney’s buddy and rival Tim McGraw hit his aim considerably better on “Grown Men Don’t Cry,” a vulnerable number about letting the little joys and regrets and tragedies of life go ahead and move you instead of being unnecessarily stoic. Over the years he’d prove to be a good hand at this sort of sensitive material, but even with the better ones you kind of wonder why people wanted to hear it over and over on the radio.

That goes triple for Lonestar and “I’m Already There.” Spending six weeks at #1, it was their biggest hit since the generic devotion of “Amazed.” While that song could’ve been about anything from infatuated young love to a decades-long marriage, their latest joint was more specific, a hardworking father calling from the road and assuring his wife and children that in some sort of metaphysical love-conquers-all way he’s actually home with them, in the sunlight and moonlight and whispers in the wind and stuff. Seems like an odd cop-out, but it probably felt pretty relevant and self-assuring to a band that was undoubtedly pretty booked up road-wise in the wake of “Amazed” (it was co-written by lead singer Richie McDonald). This topped the charts for half of June and all of July, so yeah 2001 country’s Song of the Summer was a maudlin number about a dad calling his family. Look, I’m all about sad country songs, from multiple eras and approaches. But the more the genre tried to go crowd-pleasing pop, the more the emotionally-fraught stuff started to seem forced and out-of-place.   

Jamie O’Neal was cooperatively singing “I swear I hear you in the whispers in the wind” in the unintentional sequel “When I Think About Angels.” It was an upbeat, affectionate number, theoretically well-crafted but without much meat on the bone. Still, between her striking good looks and country-pop smarts, O’Neal seemed to be giving contemporary Nashville all it could ask for, so it’s odd how quickly and completely she was ushered off the charts after her second and final #1. Then again, new competition was popping up every day; Blake Shelton scored his first #1 with “Austin” and it was pretty huge, a five-week run at the top. The song’s got a whiff of ludicrousness to it: the plotline centers around a dude’s unusually long, specific, and emotionally resonant outgoing answering machine messages, something that would probably totally be lost on a young listener revisiting it today. But still, it was more straight-country in approach and delivery than 90% or so of the year’s big hits, and Shelton’s earnest Oklahoma drawl showed a lot of promise. It didn’t immediately entrench him in the genre’s top tier: he followed up with some middling singles and took a couple years to really establish himself as more than a one-hit wonder. Eventually a prolonged reality TV gig on The Voice and a couple of high-profile marriages would make him among the genre’s biggest celebrities; figured I’d go ahead and mention that in case the next few years of 2000s country shuts this thing down for good.

“Austin” hung in there until early September, at which point 9/11 turned the nation upside down. At this point in my life I was working in a chemistry lab, often solo, and often with the radio on all day for company and I can attest that there didn’t seem to be much music on at all for quite some time. When they did pause the news updates and presidential statements for music it seemed like a frivolous afterthought. Toby Keith’s upbeat, humorous come-on number “I’m Just Talkin’ About Tonight” was pretty good but hardly the sort of song to meet the moment; it was just a little distraction already presumably wedged into the playlists before things got seriously dark. A young newcomer named Cyndi Thomson swept in next with the big swoony ballad “What I Really Meant to Say.” Thomson was model-gorgeous, had a nicely soulful edge to her voice, and the song was straightforward enough but earned its big-production framing with some hearty delivery. Maybe it was kind of a #1 by default in that autumn 2001 climate, but it still seemed pretty damn promising; counterintuitively, her next couple of singles fell short and she was more or less out of the business a year or two later, even publicly expressing in a letter to her fans that the pressures of touring and self-promotion just weren’t for her.

Perhaps a reeling nation needed to bask in the comfort of relatively old favorites for a bit. Alan Jackson landed back on top with the bluesy kick of “Where I Come From,” a fairly lighthearted number about back-to-basics life that might’ve caught a little unintended relevance among the sectors of the audience that had already switched to stubborn identity-based resilience as a response to the terrorist attacks. The verses are appealingly offbeat – Jackson was better than most at maintaining a personal touch in an increasingly generic environment – but the chorus is pretty standard blue-collar southern-pride stuff without being obnoxious about it. Similarly, Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America” wasn’t a bit of overdone chest-thumping patriotism, it was just an affectionate upbeat slice-of-life number. And of course it was written and produced prior to 9/11, but that chorus sure hit different in the aftermath. I’m retroactively surprised it was only #1 for a week.

One nice surprise amidst everything was Tim McGraw’s release of “Angry All the Time.” The song was penned by Bruce Robison, already a big regional favorite in Texas songwriting circles (which was most of my focus back at that moment). He’d already released a sublime take on it with his wife Kelly Willis on harmonies and McGraw recruited his even-more-famous wife to do the same. It’s a sad, even depressing number chronicling a marriage unraveled by the husband’s encroaching, unexplainable bitterness, tackling the difficult truth that people just sometimes change inexorably for the worse. Hell of a time to put out something this downbeat, but it snagged #1 nonetheless.

Toby Keith would soon steer hard into the cultural moment, but he still had an existing album cycle to get through and “I Wanna Talk About Me” was the sort of lighthearted distraction it’s easier to imagine catching on. It sat at #1 for five weeks; some observers that had been willing to let various degrees of country-pop slide were chagrined that this one seemed to be influenced by outright rap. It kind of is, with Keith rattling off lists of things his gal rattles on about in sort of a hip-hop cadence. I’d say it still falls short of actual rap (or, thankfully, outright misogyny) but qualifies as harmless dumb fun.

Alan Jackson, meanwhile, became the first major country artist to meet the moment intentionally and specifically with “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).” A couple of months is already a pretty tight turnaround time, but his searching, soothing anthem had already been on the radio in a live-recorded form from the CMA Awards show in early November. The official version was a no-brainer to top the charts, but intelligent and sensitive in its craft and message. Acknowledging that the events and aftermath of 9/11 could inspire anything from grief to paranoia to distraction to gratitude, it managed to feel 100% relevant without any bitter whiffs of exploitation or self-aggrandizement. Most of its run at the top would be in 2002 so we’ll talk about it more soon enough.      

THE TREND?

It’d be ridiculous to try to talk about 2001 in any avenue of American culture without mentioning 9/11, but to be fair with the exception of the last song of the year we’re talking about stuff that was written and recorded before the terroristic tragedies. Before the resultant grief and anger and paranoia had initiated, much less sunk in. But it did hang some additional gravity on songs ranging from “One More Day” to “Only in America” to “I’m Already There,” whether they deserved it or not. The nation’s political maneuvers and foreign actions in the aftermath, not to mention the increasing public voice that the internet was starting to offer almost everyone, would soon enough lead to an increased pressure to pick a side and cling to an identity. That sort of thing would resonate in the country music business soon enough, but for the moment folks wanted something sad enough to commiserate with or charming enough to distract. Not much of what topped the charts in 2001 would go down in the pantheon of truly great country music, but at least there was enough to fill those needs.

THE RANKING

1. Angry All the Time – Tim McGraw
2. Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning) – Alan Jackson
3. What I Really Meant to Say – Cyndi Thomson
4. Without You – The Dixie Chicks
5. Grown Men Don’t Cry – Tim McGraw
6. I’m Just Talkin’ About Tonight – Toby Keith
7. Born to Fly – Sara Evans
8. Only in America – Brooks & Dunn
9. You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like This – Toby Keith
10. Where I Come From – Alan Jackson
11. One More Day – Diamond Rio
12. There is No Arizona – Jamie O’Neal
13. But For the Grace of God – Keith Urban
14. Tell Her – Lonestar
15. Ain’t Nothing ‘bout You – Brooks & Dunn
16. I Wanna Talk About Me – Toby Keith
17. Don’t Happen Twice – Kenny Chesney
18. Who I Am – Jessica Andrews
19. Austin – Blake Shelton
20. When I Think About Angels – Jamie O’Hara
21. I’m Already There – Lonestar

DOWN THE ROAD ...

Rachael Turner isn't terribly well-known but, like many of the singers we're featuring in this section as the entries get more and more recent (and less and less likely to have notable covers knocking around out there) she strives to keep herself searchable by sharing well-made cover videos of hit songs. She knocks Jamie O'Neal's "There Is No Arizona" out of the park in this stripped-down arrangement; on her YouTube channel, amidst covers of everything from Adele to Miranda Lambert to showtunes the still-youthful artist chronicles her battle with breast cancer with admirable courage and frankness. So here's hoping for her full recovery, longtime health, and maybe a nice career boost once she gets a chance to fully focus on that. 

 

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