2009 - another shot of whiskey, can't stop looking at the door ...

I guess we’re hitting the point here where I’d checked out of contemporary country radio entirely, because I remember about four of these thirty songs that hit #1 in 2009. It’s a slightly eerie feeling, a little like a peek into an alternate universe where I recognize the big names but they’re doing things I don’t remember them doing. I haven’t felt this way since the late ‘60s/early ‘70s entries where I kept finding songs I’d never heard by artists I’d considered myself pretty familiar with (Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Charlie Rich etc.). Stuff that was presumably all over the radio for awhile but it just happened to be before I was born, and in hindsight it got overshadowed by their even-bigger hits. But in those entries I feel like I was stumbling across gold. Here in 2009 it’s more like wondering what you just stepped in and looking for a place to scrape it off.

If it’s not clear by now, Rascal Flatts is just not my thing. I can concede that “Here” isn’t a bad idea for a song and it’s not impossible to imagine a more palatable version of it by Blake Shelton or something. But Gary LeVox’s reedy tenor just sort of spoils things for me, he could be covering Guy Clark tunes and I probably still couldn’t stand it. Sugarland is way easier to take, I like Jennifer Nettles’ big honeyed twang more often than not, and the brisk waltz and lyrical momentum of “Already Gone” come off pretty nicely even if you’re not grading on a 2009-mainstream-country curve.

Two of the era’s heavyweights (figuratively speaking … they’re no Trace Adkins, stature-wise) joined forces on “Start a Band.” Keith Urban at least kind of resembles the metrosexual dudes Brad Paisley was bagging on the year before with “I’m Just a Guy” but I guess they sat their differences aside enough and bonded over their shared guitar-shredding skills and cresting radio-friendly fame. There’s some tasty guitar work, as you’d expect, but the song’s a bit of a clunker with obvious lyrics and not much groove or swagger. You’d think you could mine more out of two guys with disparate aesthetics and backgrounds, talented and fortunate enough for their paths to cross at the top of the game, coming together for an event-level collaboration, but nah. Hard to imagine hearing this song would inspire anybody to embrace their own musical creativity, unless it’s in the “jeez anybody can do this shit” kind of sense.

Even the great Alan Jackson seemed like he was just sort of farting around on “Country Boy,” with only a few lines about four-wheel-drive specs raising it above the level of paint-by-numbers. It was his third single from the Good Time album to hit #1, a stat that sort of suggests he was reestablishing himself as one of the genre’s top guys, but it was more of a last hurrah. His next couple of singles, “Sissy’s Song” and “I Still Like Bologna” were more personal and playful, respectively, but they stalled out more quickly and that was about it for major solo chart hits. Still, he was sort of a legend in his own time by this point, and had enough fans that he could still crank out a record for the faithful once in awhile and gig or tour as he saw fit with no doubt that a crowd would show up to make it worthwhile. He’s put out at least five well-received albums since 2008, been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and never once came off like he was sacrificing his dignity or priorities to keep his career rolling. Country music’s been lucky to have him.

And Blake Shelton was lucky to have country music. His first single had gone #1 back in 2001 and he’d had sort of a hit-and-miss run since then, but his fortunes changed when he scored a gig as a judge on Nashville Star in 2007. Shelton’s a good singer, but he grabs an extra gear as a TV personality, confident and funny and telegenic; if it had ended at one season of Nashville Star I doubt anyone outside of his immediate family would remember. But it set him up for a gig a couple years later on NBC’s smash reality singing competition The Voice, which I’m sure you’ve seen even if you tried not to. But even the relatively modest Nashville gig seemed to boost the establishment’s opinion of him, because after “She Wouldn’t Be Gone” hit #1 in 2008 he started a near-unbroken string of #1s for about a decade, even as The Voice got so huge that being a popular country singer started seeming like his side gig. Like a lot of his stuff, “She Wouldn’t Be Gone” is just ok, but he delivers it convincingly enough, keeping up with the cascading melody and litany of romantic self-recriminations like the showbiz pro he was sure as hell turning into. 

Dierks Bentley, for his part, never got a similar ticket to multilevel celebrity; to this day, he’s more likely than not to go #1 with any given song, but he’s never broke out to the larger pop culture scene or been a stadium-level headliner. Still, his batting average is pretty good in terms of admittedly subjective quality, and he’s used some of his clout to dabble in bluegrass and Red Dirt-type stuff to keep things artistically interesting. “Feel That Fire” kind of works as a metaphor for that sort of restless artistic ambition, the feeling that continuing commercial success is worthwhile but the spark of something more volatile and unique is still worth chasing. Sure, he’s singing about romance like he usually does, but it does nicely resonate with his apparent career paths. Guys like Kenny Chesney stubbornly remained bigger deals, to the point that he could put out something as stripped-down and easygoing as “Down the Road” even if he recorded it as a duet with the song’s originator, Mac McAnally. McAnally had released a few projects as a recording artist down through the decades with middling success, finding more footing behind the scenes; he’d written hits for folks like Alabama, Shenandoah, and Sawyer Brown (and early-career Chesney, come to think of it) and been a longtime collaborator and band member for Jimmy Buffett, the latter of which presumably sparked Chesney’s reverence the most. It’s a simple, sweet-sounding song, even if you’re not crazy about how it keeps coming back around to worrying if some guy’s wealthy and religious enough for your daughter.

Toby Keith’s “God Love Her” had some thematic overlap, despite being a Tom Petty-ish rocker by contrast, a character study of sorts about a girl from a clean-living family and her romance with a relatively hard-living dude (watch out folks! he’s got a motorcycle!). It’s got a nice brisk sound to it, Keith manages to sound both tough and reverent in his vocal delivery, and even if it’s not an A+ lyrical triumph it still gets points for hinting at some complexity and conflict in life and love. Keith Urban followed up (hey, Toby-Keith-Urban … that’s kind of fun) with his 10^th #1, “Sweet Thing.” As with many Keith Urban songs, it is astoundingly OK, some nice guitar flash and pleasant vocals but it doesn’t add up to much. It’s not even the best song called that (Van Morrison, Chaka Khan, and Ben Morris have some good ones).

Darius Rucker’s big career move continued to kick up rewards with “It Won’t Be Like This For Long,” a wholesome targeted heartwarmer about how babies aren’t babies for very long so we should live in the moment, not get frustrated, savor the sweetness of it all etc. As a dad whose kids are growing up too fast I concur, and Rucker’s bighearted delivery is always worth a listen, but anyone who was hoping he might bring a new perspective or approach to modern country music might’ve been disappointed. As a celebrity who’d already seen some major career ups and downs, as a black man in a white-dominated business, as a guy who’d reached the heights of success in a whole different genre … but nah, more wholesome dad-country ballads and love songs.

Then again, George Strait had been intermittently doing that for a few decades with no complaints by this point, and “River of Love” got him his 80th (you read that right) top ten as well as his 44^th and – as of now – final #1. Despite the whole river metaphor it’s more attuned to beach music, with a vaguely tropical rhythm framing some sweet steel guitar in such a way that cleverly kind of takes the instrument back to its Hawaiian roots. In yet another display of his featly to the songwriters who helped him amass such a magnificent run at the top, Strait brings in the song’s writers (Billy Burnette, Shawn Camp, and Dennis Morgan) to sing backing vocals that sort of sound like they just got off work at one of those Broadway Lion King shows … it’s a trifle, and out of Strait’s usual wheelhouse, so maybe it’s an odd one to wrap up on but it’s not like he was done. Strait was a regular in the top ten through 2012 and soon thereafter announced a semi-retirement, mostly meaning he was backing off his usual album-every-year, tour-every-year schedule that sounds exhausting but looked easy in his hands. Ten years later, it’s probably still a little early to start framing out Strait’s legacy … he’s still highly visible, still plays high-profile shows here and there or pops up on tribute albums, still seems to be in great health in his early ‘70s doing commercials for his recently-launched Codigo tequila brand, and it’s not hard to imagine even in the current environment that he might notch another #1 hit before it’s all over, because nobody has had his sort of staying power as a commercial country powerhouse. It’s a nice bonus that so many of the songs were so damn good … nobody wanted him to leave the party. I’ve alluded to this before and I’ll say it again: when I was a kid in the ‘80s, George seemed like the only young guy on country radio, and by the time I dropped off circa 2007 or so he was the only “old guy” on the radio, relatively speaking. Legend status long since earned.

The next run of songs was not encouraging. Rascal Flatts put the ol’ nails back to the chalkboard on the explosively weepy ballad “Here Comes Goodbye.” Rodney Atkins wedged himself somewhere between aw-shucks folksy and rah-rah patriot on “It’s America,” a sort-of rocked-up song about things people like about America that kicks off with a verse about cute kids with a lemonade stand and comes back around to mention lemonade so often you’d assume the songwriters must have been dying of thirst (which presumably also distracted them from quality control but hey, they’ve already written at least one more #1 hit than I have). #1 means heavy rotation, of course, and begs the question just who the hell wanted to listen to songs like this every hour on the hour. It seems like torture.  

But at least RF was trying to sing something heartfelt, and Atkins was trying to paint a pleasant picture even if comes off as pandering. I’d listen to either of those stinkers twice a day for a week before I’d give Jason Aldean’s “She’s Country” another spin. This is Aldean’s second #1, after 2005’s earnest-enough “Why,” and why indeed. Riding a big crunchy butt-rock riff that sounds like a defanged Buckcherry, Aldean spits bars about some hellraisin’ Southern gals (who also pray, in case Grandma’s still listening after the first couple power chords) that are mostly boiled down to some sort of bangable stereotype in cutoffs rolling around in oversized pickups. It really takes some work to make hot girls in big trucks sound unappealing, but damn if Aldean wasn’t up to the task … still, it went to #1 and in the process unmistakably established “bro country” as a highly viable commercial approach, even if nobody started calling it that until a few years later. Big riffs and beats borrowed from recent rock and hip-hop, shouty but shallow lines about redneck girls and big engines and booze, attempts at tough-guy swagger to match the aggression of the music, gratuitous shout-outs to patriotism and/or Southerness or ruralness or occasionally religion … like it or not, it was here and it was officially on sale, and so was Aldean.

Sugarland sort of seemed like counterprogramming in that context: female-led with a folk-music background that informed their tendencies towards sweetness, quirkiness, and layered acoustics. Jennifer Nettles was and is lovely but didn’t seem like someone who’d get all tarted up just to please Aldean-esque jocks who’d try to shove her little buddy Kristian Bush into a locker. “It Happens” shoots for a blend of cleverness and rocked-out abandon and only sort of connects; Nettles was so good with lovelorn ballads but I assume the act wanted to demonstrate that that wasn’t all they could pull off, even if it kind of was. Brad Paisley was still among the surest bets on country radio, shuffling back and forth between his two gears of “sort of satirical upbeat song” and highly sentimental numbers like “Then.” If Aldean was spawning what would become “bro country” then perhaps Paisley, despite his touches of new-traditionalist sound, was ahead of the “boyfriend country” curve by about a decade. Starry-eyed, super-reverent songs about the perfection of your object of affection. I assume Paisley’s wife likes it. I just don’t see anything about it that lifts it above the dozens of similarly-themed songs knocking around out there.

Anyway, time to party again I guess … Kenny Chesney’s “Out Last Night,” which I just got done listening to for the first time, is upbeat and clever enough, not near Shel Silverstein levels or anything but there’s at least a few fun rhymes and a bit of a pulse to it. Dierks Bentley, who I’ve generally given credit for being among the more gifted and tasteful 2000s country dudes, sunk to the level of his surroundings on “Sideways” … even the title and concept seemed ripped off from a fairly-recent Darryl Worley song. It’s lame beer-commercial country-rock at best, from a guy who usually did his listeners one better. Things picked up a bit with Lady Antebellum’s first #1 hit “I Run to You.” Usually spotlighting Hillary Scott’s vocals with nice backing vocals from co-founders Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood, in an earlier era they would’ve made way more sense as an adult-friendly pop-rock outfit along the lines of (best-case-scenario here) Fleetwood Mac, but MOR was largely MIA by the mid-2000s (just ask Darius Rucker) so they found their spot in country music. And honestly that’s a little hard to bitch about, because their mature, intelligent but not over-your-head approach to songwriting was pretty welcome in a genre that all too often seemed to be hellbent on dumbing things down. If you’re a particularly young listener/reader and don’t know who I’m talking about, the band goes by Lady A nowadays; the same sort of heightened social sensitivities that turned the Dixie Chicks into just The Chicks convinced them to drop the part of their name that refers to the pre-Civil War American South. A bunch of conservatives were pissed off for 15 minutes, the word ‘woke” was probably thrown around a bit, and everybody pretty much shrugged and moved on.

Billy Currington scored with another likable, ambling country tune not unlike his “Good Directions” hit; this one, “People Are Crazy,” recounts a friendly encounter with a talkative old dude that results in a surprising reward. It’s kind of nice to hear a story song that you don’t mind hearing again once the ending’s spoiled, I don’t consider this one an all-time classic or anything but it stood out nicely from the 2009 pack. Darius Rucker came barreling back in with the jangly, generic “Alright,” one of those “I’m a poor boy but I got it all” slabs of modern country schmaltz that folks like Montgomery Gentry had made their bread with for decades by this point. Aside from his pleasantly familiar voice, there’s really not much to this one … I still like Hootie & the Blowfish more than most modern folks would be willing to admit to, so maybe I’m the only one surprised he didn’t bring more to the table. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift was exceeding expectations with stuff like “You Belong To Me” … I was hardly the target audience for this sort of thing, but her ability to project genuine age-appropriate emotion and storytelling with catchy, energetic verve was shooting her to the head of the class whether you liked it or not at this point. It’s sort of like her and Rucker were crossing paths in different directions … as his big-picture pop-culture relevance burned out he found a comfortably unchallenging niche, while she got too big for the niche to hold her anymore and got an opportunity to embrace bigger and bigger plays for cross-genre superstardom.   

Others, of course, would be content to double down on the core audience that was eating up “country music as a lifestyle brand” and probably found all the references to small-town and rural trappings reassuring instead of forced and repetitive. Jason Aldean chilled out considerably from the butt-rock excesses of “She’s Country” and rolled out the pleasant-enough “Big Green Tractor” as a follow-up, sort of like chasing a shot of awful rotgut plastic-bottle bottom-shelf whiskey with a bland but inoffensive domestic light beer. It’s not without its wholesome charm, painting a pretty nice picture of a country-ish dude who’s willing to take his girl out for a nice night on the town but knows she might be happier with something a little more downhome. Newcomer Justin Moore shot for a similar appeal but fell hard on the side of grating with “Small Town USA,” a slab of pandering unwitting self-parody. Moore’s pubescent-sounding chirp of a twang doesn’t do much to elevate lines about work he sounds too young to do and beer he sounds too young to drink, but I guess that’s where we were at that point because he’d stick around for multiple more #1’s before it was said and done. Toby Keith sounded like both a grizzled old-timer and a fount of lyrical ambition by comparison on “American Ride,” an angry little snarl of a song that somehow rose to the top in an era of witless feel-good numbers; “American Ride” rambles like a drunken grouch at the end of the bar, griping semi-coherently about oil prices and YouTube and cosmetic surgeries. I guess it’s supposed to come off vaguely conservative? I don’t think modern country radio would’ve played it if it didn’t, and usually they preferred to avoid explicitly political songs entirely (or at least enough to keep them out of the top ten) so maybe the song’s vagueness was intentional. At least it’s got some fire to it, that was more than you usually got atop the 2009 charts.     

And then you get Chris Young and his first #1, “Gettin’ You Back Home (The Black Dress Song).” One of those domestic love songs about date night achieving its desired effect and reminding some good ol’ boy that he’s still got the hots for his wife. Nice sentiment, obvious appeal to the married suburbanites in the audience, and Young’s baritone makes the wholesome horniness believable enough. I hadn’t heard this song until my cousin sang it in a round of living-room karaoke on a recent Christmas get-together; I’ve probably heard of Chris Young, looking over his discography he’d be a frequent #1 artist well into the more recent past, making him more or less one of the defining artists of modern country music even though I couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup. I guess the super-generic name doesn’t help. He’s pretty good, with a strong whiff of traditional country to him. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to kick him off the radio if Nashville lost their mind and handed me veto power all the sudden. It just seems interchangeable with a half-dozen or so other guys from the era making similar stuff.

And then there was the other vein of guys like Keith Urban – easily one of the genre’s defining stars by this point – who didn’t have much use for tradition and more or less cribbed together a new strain of pop music for the mainstream country listenership from pieces of big-production arena rock, the last couple decades of easy listening, and maybe even some country music as refracted through the lens of recent stars with strong pop instincts like Garth Brooks. “Only You Can Love Me This Way” is one of the better versions of this, easing in on a simple but fetching acoustic guitar riff and making more out of Urban’s earnest croon than most of his soundalike mid-tempo stuff. Meanwhile, the Zac Brown Band was still around for a good time; if their breakthrough “Chicken Fried” worked as sort of an Alabama-ish arena-country hoedown, “Toes” (as in toes in the sand) was their play for the Jimmy Buffett crowd, a vaguely Latin-y/island-y beach tune that was edgy enough to throw in a weed reference. In the bigger scheme they were catching on as something like a good-time genre-blurring jam band, but they knew (at least at the time) how to throw radio a workable single here and there.

And so did Carrie Underwood of course, still riding high and still changing it up here and there with something like “Cowboy Casanova” to mildly counterbalance her squeaky-clean Disney princess image. She can capably sing anything, of course, but despite a couple of rapid-fire verses this one was hardly worth it, a big noisy slab of arena-country with no meat on the bones. Lady Antebellum threaded the needle between pop bigness and country sincerity far better with “Need You Now” and were rewarded with a pretty massive crossover hit. It’s the sort of smart, crafty songwriting you might have gotten from Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell a couple decades prior, not quite as lyrically deft as those two but with enough melodic punch and layered, sophisticated-but-not-overdone production that draws in the casual listener and rewards the closer one. Both emotionally complicated and refreshingly direct, at least it was a good note to end on for a frustrating year.

THE TREND?

Bro-country still hasn’t kicked in entirely and the new-traditionalist stuff left over from the ‘80s and ‘90s is mostly gone at this point, Alan Jackson and George Strait’s lingering presence on the chart being arguably the only example of it. So we’re left with the same unappealing (at least to me … obviously someone was digging it) mix of “lifestyle country” that encourages everyone to identify as patriotic good ol’ boys and gals with at least some connection to rural roots (real or imagined) and big, kind-of-generic love songs meant to hit more or less the same chord as contemporary pop but slightly more targeted to a white Middle America audience. It’s pretty boring, even kind of disheartening depending on how seriously you take this stuff, but in its own way I guess it’s part of a long tradition where country music tries to both appeal to the specifics of their listeners and hit them with some approximation of whatever the contemporary pop music is, satisfying people who like aspects of pop but prefer to identify as country music fans and mostly stick to that. It happened with countrypolitan stuff back in the ‘60s and happened with folks like Eddie Rabbitt, Ronnie Milsap, Crystal Gayle etc. in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and sooner or later you got a pack of “outlaws” or “new traditionalists” to shake things up. The thing is, though, that by the late 2000s you’re well into the internet age and further cultural splintering that goes with it. Artists that couldn’t or wouldn’t kowtow to the Nashville mainstream but still had undeniable talent could build a satisfying niche of fans outside of it, and not have to worry too much about what they were going to sacrifice for the sake of major label contracts or radio play. Robert Earl Keen, Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett, Reckless Kelly, Old 97s, Gillian Welch, Drive By Truckers, all sorts of stuff. By 2009 I was mostly just listening to them, and it was pretty clear that Nashville didn’t care what folks like me thought anymore.

THE RANKING

1. Need You Now – Lady Antebellum
2. Already Gone – Sugarland
3. Feel That Fire – Dierks Bentley
4. God Love Her – Toby Keith
5. You Belong to Me – Taylor Swift
6. River of Love – George Strait
7. I Run to You – Lady Antebellum
8. American Ride – Toby Keith
9. Only You Can Love Me This Way – Keith Urban
10. Toes – Zac Brown Band
11. Gettin’ You Back Home (The Black Dress Song) – Chris Young
12. She Wouldn’t Be Gone – Blake Shelton
13. Big Green Tractor – Jason Aldean
14. Country Boy – Alan Jackson
15. Out Last Night – Kenny Chesney
16. It Happens - Sugarland
17. It Won’t Be Like This For Long – Darius Rucker
18. Then – Brad Paisley
19. Sweet Thing – Keith Urban
20. Start a Band – Brad Paisley and Keith Urban
21. Alright – Darius Rucker
22. Cowboy Casanova – Carrie Underwood
23. Sideways – Dierks Bentley
24. It’s America – Rodney Atkins
25. Here – Rascal Flatts
26. Here Comes Goodbye – Rascal Flatts
27. Small Town USA – Justin Moore
28. She's Country - Jason Aldean

DOWN THE ROAD ...

Taylor Swift's "You Belong to Me" was still pretty hot off the presses in August 2010 when her lil' buddy Selena Gomez covered one of her big hits at the Indianapolis State Fair. I don't know enough about their career trajectories to say who was the bigger star at that particular moment ... I'm guessing Tay-Tay's always had a leg up music-wise, just because she's got a leg up on virtually everybody. In a couple years Gomez would be lending her acting chops to Swift's "Bad Blood" music video alongside hip-hop superstar Kendrick Lamar and a bunch of other pop-culture hot rods more or less permanently welcoming Swift to the wider pop-music world. Not a bad move for Swift, really, and it would've even been a pretty good move for country music if there'd been something better than bro-country to fill the empty spaces left behind.

If you like Gomez (or even if you don't ... it's pretty good) check out that Only Murders in the Building TV show sometime.

2008 - swore I wasn't coming back, said I'd had enough ...

We’re about to the end of the journey here, at least as far as taking things year-to-year here. Maybe I can think of other angles to write from that’d still make sense on a country music blog called “Heartache Number One.” But circa 2012 the chart methodology changes up again and between that and my general intentional ignorance of recent mainstream country music I think that’s a good spot to cut things off.

Taylor Swift had swooped in around 2006 as a smiley, sunny, surprisingly young harbinger of change. Having a singer-songwriter still in her mid-teens hit the spotlight could’ve just been a novelty. Another Lee Ann Rimes maybe, who’s managed to maintain a career but wasn’t a meaningful game-changer. But unlike Lee Ann Rimes, who first broke through with retro stylings, or the now-legendary Tanya Tucker who’d shook things up with dark-edged material that seemed a bit shocking coming from a kiddo, Taylor Swift was making fresh-faced country pop that fit both her age and the moment. Alternately bubbly and wistful songs about age-appropriate romance and longing, written (at least at first) with guileless simplicity. Whoever was helping her shape her image steered clear of the queasy underage-sexpot stuff that got the likes of Britney Spears more attention than they could handle; Taylor was pretty, sure, but a modest-seeming kid with her head on straight. It all seemed a little too good to be true but – barring any unfortunate latecoming revelations now that she’s more or less the most famous woman in the world – it seems like it was all as wholesome and cheerful as presented. “Our Song” sounds exactly like high school country-pop, and – back to back with a winsome Carrie Underwood ballad at the end of 2007 – gave the impression that mainstream country was about to make another serious play for young audiences again. It wouldn’t be all they would do – that wholesome self-congratulatory suburban lifestyle country wasn’t going anywhere – but it’d loom heavier in the mix than it had for over a decade.

Relative old-timer Brad Paisley split the difference by writing a warmhearted “Letter to Me,” reassuring and advising his teenage self. It’s warm, not too gimmicky, a bit self-congratulatory in spots but balanced out with some humility. Rodney Atkins, meanwhile, steered into the slightly-unsettling dad-joke trope on “Cleaning This Gun (Come On in Boy),” a supposedly humorous song about being on both ends of the ol’ girl’s-dad-implicitly-threatens-her-date-with-a-firearm joke. After a promising first single, pretty much all of Atkins’ material boiled down to him cramming his forced folksiness down your barrel with a ramrod. Not that Paisley was totally innocent of this, but at least he could nail the charm quotient reasonably often. Meanwhile, Carrie Underwood came blaring out of the gate again with “All-American Girl,” another big-production vocal showcase with lyrics that felt like they’d taken five minutes to write. It’s just a big sticky anthem celebrating beautiful happy people instead of anyone who actually needs the encouragement.

Something kind of weird happened with Alan Jackson in 2008; he’d consistently fallen short of #1 for about a half decade at this point, although he was doing better than just about all of his old ‘90s peers. At his peak he’d really only taken a backseat to maybe Garth Brooks, and his knack for consistency and – far as I can tell, anyhow – personal stability kept him from ever really alienating fans or industry types even as his stone-steady approach to modern country fell out of mainstream fashion. But he managed to get on an unexpected roll with his 2008 album Good Time and hit one last hot streak on radio before sliding back down the charts gracefully with his legacy secured. Funny thing is, even if he didn’t tweak his sound he pretty much met the moment (for better or worse), material-wise. “Small Town Southern Man” was yet another round of telling the audience that what they were was exactly what they should be, although in Jackson’s dignified hands it went down easier than usual. Lines about kindness and humility, a more quiet sort of pride than a lot of the unsubtle chest-beating going around. Jackson self-penned every song on Good Time so it’s not like some suits at the label were wringing this out of him in hopes of making a few more bucks; he’d been famously (if measuredly) outspoken a few times through the years on Nashville’s steps away from country tradition, so it’s not like he was some cynical trend-hopper. Then again, Jackson had always had songs about small towns and good times and blue-collar folks in the mix, so maybe the rest of the industry was just doubling down on lamer, noisier versions of what Jackson was already doing. No wonder the O.G. was back in business.

Another really tall dude with a twangy voice was doing fine as well. Trace Adkins has always personified mainstream country music pretty well: a tough dude with some soft spots, larger than life yet relatable, capable of heartbreaking warmth and honesty but also some of the most cynical novelty-song b.s. you ever laid ears on. “You’re Gonna Miss This” veered way closer to the former, thankfully, a friendly admonition not to let minor frustrations make you start wishing time would fly along even faster. Reliable old George Strait wanted you to cherish the moment too, although his angle on it was more spiritual with “I Saw God Today.” Looking for the divine in the ordinary is a worthwhile task we’d all do well to practice, but despite my long history with both God and George Strait I don’t get a ton out of this well-meaning but kind-of-flat song.

The more modest ambitions of James Otto’s “Just Got Started Lovin’ You” were met and exceeded, though. I don’t remember hearing this back then – I really don’t remember scruffy country-rock dude James Otto at all – but this feels like a hit that earned its stripes. Otto was in on the whole MuzikMafia clique with Big & Rich, Gretchen Wilson, etc. but (at least here) he avoided their penchant for gimmicky numbers and just knocked out a soul-infused romp. It neither had nor needed big lyrical ambitions and the groove felt hearty but not overstuffed. Otto didn’t go on to be a huge deal, but this is one of the very rare late 2000s songs that makes you wonder if the whole album’s this good. And then you got Brad Paisley trying too hard to be cute again with “I’m Just a Guy,” which I don’t remember and I’m kind of sorry I revisited. There’s a couple of clever lines somewhere there in the manufactured swagger but they’re subsumed by clunkers, cliches, and a weird little rant about metrosexual guys there at the end that leaves a sour, dated aftertaste. Granted, I don’t embrace the whole excessively-well-groomed thing either, but it doesn’t seem worth writing a whole song just to make fun of them.

I guess Carrie Underwood was going for comedic swagger too on “Last Name,” another long-forgotten (at least by me) #1 that I guess was meant to balance out all her wholesome kid-friendly balladry with an “edgy” arena rock pastiche about hooking up with some stranger in a Vegas bar and waking up married to him (hence making room for one last “last name” punchline). Still technically avoiding premarital sex even when blackout drunk … image more or less intact, despite all the blaring electric guitar and Journey-esque wailing. Kenny Chesney, meanwhile, didn’t have vocal pyro in his arsenal so he played it subtle and sentimental on “Better as a Memory,” a new entry in that long tradition of songs about a restless dude telling his fling she’s probably better off without him as he loses interest and skips on down the road to his next adventure. It was written by Scooter Carusoe and Lady Goodman, who both have pretty fun names, and as wistful soft-rock goes it’s not half bad. Couple of pirate references thrown in to keep the whole trop-rock gimmick going too.

Montgomery Gentry continued to crank out assembly-line slabs of vaguely rocked-up country like “Back When I Knew it All,” distinguished from most of their other big hits by being presented as more of a traditional duet, going back and forth on verses about brash, impudent younger years thankfully giving way to the sort of middle-aged complacency they and many of their peers wanted their audience to aspire to. Blake Shelton, who usually shared similarly downhome ambitions, went surprisingly urbane and worldly on a song called “Home” that I don’t remember at all but is worth a listen if you’re not busy; a big-production ballad with a sophisticated, vaguely Paul Simon-ish melody, it follows a weary and disillusioned traveler around Europe as he longs to get back to his roots. It feels personal even though a modicum of research shows that it’s a cover of Michael Buble, the smooth-voiced traditional-pop star who sort of took over Harry Connick Jr.’s old job of bringing pre-rock nostalgia back to the modern masses. Shelton nails the tricky vocal pretty well; just a few years down the line he’d end up with a long-running gig starring on the network TV singing-competition smash The Voice and he’d be one of the bigger stars in music. Circa 2008 he was a hit-and-miss country star who was never guaranteed a trip up the charts, but “Home” was a gamble that worked.

“Good Time” shot rejuvenated veteran Alan Jackson back to #1, and it lives up to its name … Jackson changes up his usual laconic delivery with some fast-talkin’ hooks but keeps the arrangement simple, fiddles and Tele and piano taking turns jamming between standard-issue but likable lines about Middle America weekend revelry. Looking back it might’ve been a much-less-obnoxious precursor to the bro-country wave that was about to wash away most of the credibility that guys like Alan Jackson had rekindled in mainstream country music. I imagine that Sugarland was trying to be similarly charming on the lighthearted “All I Want to Do” but the bouncy tune leans on Jennifer Nettles’ whoo-hoo-hooing vocal exercises for a chorus too long until it crosses the line to annoying. Taylor Swift didn’t have that sort of vocal dexterity, at least not back then, but even as a kid she knew a hook when she heard one; I don’t recall “Should’ve Said No” from back then but it’s held up pretty well, even in retrospect after a decade and a half of ever-more-sophisticated (and inescapable) Swiftie songcraft. Blending a rustic banjo line with a crunchy post-grunge rock dynamic and some believable but not-overbearing late-teens romantic angst, it’s the song equivalent of an old high-school photo where no one can spot your awkward phase.

Keith Urban had an awkward one with “You Look Good in My Shirt,” a weirdly earnest but entirely unconvincing stab at playful sex-rock from a guy who presumably did fine with the ladies in person before settling down with one of the most famous and beautiful actresses of their mutual time. Newcomer Jimmy Wayne was mining a similar vein of earnest, kinda for-the-ladies country-pop; a hard-luck foster kid and former prison guard who was nonetheless one stylist away from modern country pretty-boy status, he’d knocked around Nashville as a songwriter and aspiring singer for about a decade before having the Top 10 breakout “I Love You This Much,” a father-son-Jesus ballad that hits pretty hard even if you don’t share his tough childhood background. But what got him to #1 was “Do You Believe Me Now,” not to be confused with the Vern Gosdin heartwrencher but solid enough on its own merits. It’s a big, vaguely rocked-out ballad that paints a painful-enough picture of a guy replaced by some jerk his girlfriend had told him not to worry about. Believable song about real-people problems. Closer than most hits got circa 2008. Wayne and Brad Paisley traded the #1 spot back and forth for a few weeks, with Paisley’s “Waitin’ on a Woman” giving him another warm, vaguely humorous slice-of-life hit. It’s one of those well-structured vignette songs with nice attention to detail and character and a hooky lyrical through-line that’s satisfying enough once, but it’s a little like doing a puzzle … once you’ve done it, do you really want to do it over and over?

Not to get all identity-politics on anyone who’s still reading this, but it was a pretty big moment in October 2008 when Darius Rucker became the first black artist to score a solo #1 country hit since Charley Pride’s long run of them finally petered out in 1983. Not counting the special exception of Ray Charles guesting with Willie Nelson on “Seven Spanish Angels,” nobody else claiming black heritage had come close. If you weren’t already aware, Rucker had one hell of a pop-culture head start; he was the lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish. Their enormous 1994 hit debut album Cracked Rear View was briefly among the hottest things in music, going platinum twenty times over. They were sort of an alternative to alternative, an earthy bunch of nice dudes who liked beer and sports and gave counterpoint to the grubby angst of the Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails types who’d gotten so big that almost every rock act of the ‘90s was marketed as “alternative” whether that fit or not. It’s easy to see why it initially worked … I still like that album, but perhaps they were overexposed (I guess that is an easy band name to get tired of hearing) because a couple years later it was hard to find anyone that admitted to listening to them. It probably didn’t matter that much to a band whose money was already made, but frontman Rucker was eager to prove himself in another arena. He had always had an affection for country music (he was particularly a champion of Texas singer-songwriter Radney Foster) and his regular-dude persona was a good fit for modern mainstream country circa 2008. “Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It” would’ve fit in fine on a Hootie record with a couple of tweaks, but instead it was his first country single, the first of several #1s and a welcome ongoing presence in the genre he chose for the second act of his career.

Kenny Chesney technically managed to get black artists atop the country charts too with “Everybody Goes to Heaven” featuring reggae act The Wailers on backup. I’ve had trouble nailing down who exactly was performing as The Wailers circa 2008; I don’t know how much overlap there was with the version that backed up the legendary Bob Marley in the ‘70s, and the track’s a bit too Nashville-sanitized to let that much distinctive sonic personality bleed through beyond a pleasant island bounce. But I’m sure it was still a coup for Chesney’s beach-dude image to collaborate with a band associated with the only reggae artist the average white listener has probably ever heard of. Meanwhile, Toby Keith sounded like he’d hired Nickelback to be his backing band on “She Never Cried in Front of Me,” a pretty decent song despite his attempts to match the crunchy guitars by pushing his usual baritone twang into something resembling a post-grunge yarl of a vocal.   

Carrie Underwood swung back to the top with “Just a Dream,” and although I’ve been perhaps a little rough on her material, this one seems way more fitting than most for her big rangy wail of a voice. Kind of elliptical by country music standards, you can still suss out that it’s the story of a young woman fantasizing about a wedding day that’s not meant to be because she’s actually going to the funeral of her beloved husband or fiancée who was killed in military action. Dramatic stuff, and with all the sincere vocal bombast it comes off like flat-out psychic implosion. I don’t exactly love it, it’s really not my style, but I can’t say I’m not impressed. Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” which had a way happier ending, was kind of a trifle by comparison. But fifteen years later, it’s the one everyone actually remembers and sings along to; I guess part of this is because of Swift’s world-beating fame, and maybe part because she’s rerecorded a lot of her older material to free it from the domain of her old label boss. It’s not like Underwood faded away or anything, she’s still a huge star, but Swift has pretty much created her own category.

The Zac Brown Band has been a little tough to categorize over the years too, dabbling in various shades of modern pop and jam-band rock, but on their breakout hit “Chicken Fried” they sounded like natural heirs to the old Alabama (the band, not the state) approach, mixing downhome sentiments and touches of country pickin’ with a sense of arena-rock bigness; this thing was everywhere for a while. And it was total lifestyle country, complete with shoutouts to the troops and lots of small-town wholesomeness, studiously engineered to basically congratulate listeners for being who they were. Catchy stuff, though. Montgomery Gentry was thematically similar but more downbeat closing out the year with the kinda-sleepy “Roll With Me,” another simple tune about small-town values, a chill good ol’ boy narrator landing somewhere between self-acceptance and self-improvement. Like many of the year’s other #1s, it made you wish Nashville songwriters were doing more of the latter.    

THE TREND?

Lots and lots of little folksy slices of life going around, leaning hard on pride and positivity and uncomplicated emotion. There’s still a strong whiff of that suburban family-friendly radio country in the mix along with some safe-but-at-least-upbeat good-time anthems, a blend that I’d call “lifestyle country” because of how carefully it all seems engineered to define and reinforce exactly what a suburban/rural country music listener should value, believe in, support and participate in. There’s obviously a kind of listener that appreciates this sort of thing and feels validated, and another kind of listener that resents getting their strings pulled even if they’ve got a lot of overlap with that way of life. For my money the year’s best songs – Darius Rucker’s “Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It” and James Otto’ “Just Got Started Lovin’ You” – are the ones that zero in on the ups and downs of love, whether earnestly or playfully. Telling the listener how you feel is almost always a better bet than telling them how they should feel.

THE RANKING

1. Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It – Darius Rucker
2. Just Got Started Lovin’ You – James Otto
3. Good Time – Alan Jackson
4. Small Town Southern Man – Alan Jackson
5. You’re Gonna Miss This – Trace Adkins
6. Just a Dream – Carrie Underwood
7. Home – Blake Shelton
8. Should’ve Said No – Taylor Swift
9. She Never Cried in Front of Me – Toby Keith
10. Better as a Memory – Kenny Chesney
11. Love Story – Taylor Swift
12. Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven – Kenny Chesney with The Wailers
13. Waitin’ on a Woman – Brad Paisley
14. Letter to Me – Brad Paisley
15. I Saw God Today – George Strait
16. Do You Believe Me Now – Jimmy Wayne
17. Chicken Fried – Zac Brown Band
18. Back When I Knew it All – Montgomery Gentry
19. Our Song – Taylor Swift
20. Roll With Me – Montgomery Gentry
21. All I Want to Do - Sugarland
22. You Look Good in My Shirt – Keith Urban
23. I’m Just a Guy – Brad Paisley
24. Last Name – Carrie Underwood
25. Cleaning This Gun (Come On in Boy) – Rodney Atkins
26. All-American Girl – Carrie Underwood

DOWN THE ROAD ... 

Doing a credible cover of a beloved Taylor Swift hit seems almost like a cheat code to get a ton of YouTube views, but then again Brittany Maggs has really been putting the work in for a few years. Doesn't hurt to be youthfully photogenic and have a sweet, expressive voice of course, plus a bit of good-but-simple production value to make it feel legit. She's got her own material too (not really to my taste, but the talent's there and I'm not the target audience anyway), which mostly leans mainstream country even if most of her covers are modern pop. It'd almost be weird if she didn't cover Taylor Swift songs from back when Swift had a foot in both. Anyhow, nice version of "Love Story" here, hope Ms. Maggs' big break comes along any day now (or at least that she keeps snagging thousands-to-millions of views per video on the reg).

 

2007 - you may not like where I'm goin' but you sure know where I stand ...

Not to make it all about me, but these writeups are just as much about opinion as history, so personal context matters I guess: I think 2007 is that tipping point I’ve been hinting at for the last few entries where I just wasn’t listening anymore. And that makes sense, because this was around the time I switched from a day job in Bryan, TX to one in Austin, TX and didn’t have a mainstream country station playing in the background anymore. The one that I did listen to in Bryan wasn’t one of those ClearChannel deals, so they didn’t play absolutely every mainstream hit, and they made some room for classic country and regional artists like Pat Green, Aaron Watson, Cross Canadian Ragweed, etc. It was a college town and live music was a big deal, so it might have been just as much a marketing choice as a matter of principle, but it did make for a better listening experience for twentysomething me. If you can put up with the Rascal Flatts there might be a Robert Earl Keen right around the corner. Could be worse.

But yeah going down this list of 2007 #1’s, out of 25 songs I can only immediately remember six, and I’ve got a feeling that my memory’s going to wish it had stayed unjogged on a lot of the rest. Ah well, nobody’s making me do this, and even if these pieces are starting to feel more like research than affectionate reminiscence, I’m gonna press on until the great chart split of 2012 gives us a logical stopping point.

I’d forgotten Brad Paisley’s “She’s Everything,” prior to re-listening, but yeah I didn’t like this one much at the time. Some folks like Paisley are so damn wholesome (at least as far as I can tell) that their material comes off corny even if you don’t exactly doubt their sincerity. Its uncomplicated domestic sweetness doesn’t do much for me but I bet the ladies out there appreciated the details and overall sentiment as well as Paisley’s warm delivery. Around this time I think I was mature enough to delineate between “this sucks” and “this is fine but I’m not the target listener.” I could go a little harder on Rodney Atkins and “Watching You,” because that opening verse about McNugget Happy Meals is full-tilt product placement cringe masquerading as regular-guy relatability. The whole like-father-like-son (in a good way) message is sweet enough, and I guess once you’ve decided you’re going to write a song like this there’s no cool or edgy way to do it, but there must be a more interesting way than what they landed on.

George Strait was in his mid-50s by 2007, dignity intact even if he usually seemed willing to meet contemporary sounds halfway. “It Just Comes Natural” had the sort of big-production rush you’d get from a Kenny Chesney song around the same time, but his recognizably earthy vocal was a better anchor than anything the relative youngsters could provide. It’s not one of my 50 or so favorite George Strait songs but so far, it’s the record of the year. Trace Adkins “Ladies Love Country Boys” wasn’t much of a threat to displace it, although it did contribute to the increasing trend of songs that put “country” right in the title and aggressively pat themselves (and by extension the listeners) on the back just for identifying as “country.” Nobody who took part in this trend ever gets to credibly accuse anyone of “virtue signaling” ever again. Maybe I’m just giving him the benefit of the doubt because he could kick my ass and your ass without breaking a sweat, but I think Adkins was too talented to be wasting his time with this kind of mess.   

Kenny Chesney’s “Beer in Mexico” was probably a fun part of his live show, lots of screaming guitars and some bouncy horns and a chance for a stadium full of Michelob Ultra cowboys to yell about beer, but it comes off a bit listless on record, sort of like a late-career Jimmy Buffett song coasting on gimmick and image without much of anything meaty or insightful to it. Chesney’s buddy Tim McGraw – one of his few rivals as a stadium-worthy live draw at the time – took the similarly carefree “The Last Dollar (Fly Away)” to the top of the charts. It’s catchier and at least a bit more lyrically ambitious but doesn’t quite raise the pulse or touch the heart. If you like these songs I ain’t mad at you, they’re carefully engineered to be liked. If you find any deeper resonance to them I’d genuinely like to hear what and why.

If mid-oughts country was a person I could see it standing in the corner of my office staring at me in dismay, shaking his or her head a little, conveying something like: why are you being mean? I’m just trying to make you a better person. I guess the memos were getting stuck in my junk folder at this point but yeah, there’s Carrie Underwood sincerely belting out about how we should all kick bad habits and take charge of our lives on “Wasted,” and there’s Rascal Flatts encouragingly warbling about the value of personal resilience on “Stand,” and there’s Sugarland again defiantly railing against “Settlin’,” in the sense of accepting anything less than true fulfillment of our desires and potential. It’s a row of motivational posters set to big grabby arena-friendly music that’s both generic and genreless. It’s those well-meaning, put-together, upbeat friendly acquaintances that you just can’t quite identify with enough to be closer friends. They make you miss your complicated drinking buddies with relatable problems.

In this context, Billy Currington and “Good Directions” seemed like a godsend. Yeah, it’s a little cornball, but amidst all the widescreen inspirational pop it sounded like Tom T. Hall by comparison. It’s just an easy-rolling grin of a song about a farm boy’s meet-cute with a briefly-lost single female motorist at his farm-to-market produce stand, but at least it’s a country song that wants to be a country song. “Moments,” the only #1 hit for kind-of-anonymous Canadian country-pop dudes Emerson Drive, took things back to that twang-free easy listening approach (they’d already done several projects produced by lite-rock king Richard Marx). But I’ve got to hand it to them: it’s an ambitious song that works pretty well. The narrative about an old homeless guy’s meaningful chance meeting with a relatively well-off but despondent younger man probably could’ve used a smidge more lyrical detail to flesh it out. But what’s there is good, and the vocals are impassioned without tipping into overwrought. But then again, they didn’t write it (that’d be Sam & Annie Tate with Dave Berg) and in a crowded field they kind of faded back away quickly, racking up a few more years of success in their native Canada as American radio moved on.

Radio had mostly moved on from Tracy Lawrence too; he’d only cracked the Top 10 once since 1999 and usually didn’t get particularly close. He’d had troubles both legal and label but even if he hadn’t, his mini-generation of country singers had already sort of moved on to the nostalgia circuit for the most part. But he did score a coup by getting Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw – two of the more notable names that had eclipsed Lawrence & co. over the past decade – to guest-star with him on (the kind-of-passive-aggressive) “Find Out Who Your Friends Are.” Aside from the novelty of three notable country stars taking turns at the mic, it’s not much of a tune, and it didn’t reestablish Lawrence as a radio fixture. He’s still out there gigging, no doubt bolstered by the recent ‘90s-country nostalgia boom, and even a 2017 album full of duets with well-known young country stars wasn’t enough to get him back in the mainstream mix. Still: “Sticks and Stones,” “Alibis,” “Time Marches On” … he didn’t define an era or anything, but the man was a legit country singer who contributed.

Brad Paisley, for better or worse, was becoming an era-defining star at this point. Undeniable in talent but hit-and-miss in taste, he must’ve had some interesting ideas about how to go about romancing a woman, “Mud on the Tires” was one thing but “Ticks” isn’t afraid to get a little grosser than your average mudhole. “I wanna check you for ticks” is apparently – to those unschooled in the ways of redneck intimacy – a roundabout way of requesting close and thorough contact with a woman’s body somewhere out in the woods or meadows where parasitic arachnids are a reasonable threat. Paisley was young, handsome, talented and well on his way to being wealthy, so maybe just about any proposition was working for him back then. We wouldn’t be talking about it here if it wasn’t a #1 hit, so it was doing it for somebody, at least for one week in an era where longer reigns were the norm.

Then you get “Lucky Man” by Montgomery Gentry, which on one hand is a modest tune from an act that was pretty good about keeping things recognizably country, but which also was kind of emblematic of the highly suspicious direction things were headed in. It’s an earnest, leisurely stroll through the pleasures of everyday middle-America life that’s implicitly reminding everyone to be grateful, and by extension content. In a world where income disparities are piling up, corporations are getting increasingly more creative about watching their bottom line at everyone else’s expense, and the internet was giving the most ordinary among us a place to voice their concerns, it felt more and more like mainstream country music was being used as a mouthpiece. More and more songs had kind-of-gratuitous shoutouts to patriotism and religion, sneaking in admonitions that we should all be happy with things as they were, with any hardship best solved by toughening ourselves up and/or trusting the greater plan. Remembering to celebrate simple pleasures and treasure the positive aspects of your life and community is one thing, but often it really seemed like Nashville was sort-of-subtly doing their part to keep their listenership in line. Also, that line about “my ticker’s still tickin’ like it should” resonates weird. Just another reminder modern country was becoming no place for heartbreak.

Big & Rich were also happily grateful or gratefully happy or whatever on “Lost in This Moment,” another one I don’t remember although circa 2007 it was hard to not notice their act in general. Big Kenny had been trying to get a sunny pop-rock career off the ground; John Rich had co-fronted onetime hitmakers Lonestar for most of the ‘90s but departed before they had their pop-crossover “Amazed” phase. Once paired together like some Great Value take on Brooks & Dunn, they got everyone’s attention with the weird 2004 almost-top-ten novelty hit “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” with even the loudly conservative Rich apparently oblivious that that sounds like a theme night at a gay bar. Or maybe they knew and just didn’t care, there was a big whiff of court-jester comedy and big-tent inclusiveness in their presentation. They didn’t have a lot of hits but they did kind of seem like they were on to something for awhile, bringing aboard country-rapper Cowboy Troy and “Redneck Woman” hitmaker Gretchen Wilson and finding ways to collaborate with revered old-timers like Kris Kristofferson and Billy Joe Shaver. It was a little like Nashville started wondering if maybe they should hedge their bets a bit on the staid white-bread balladry stuff that was boring their younger and more-adventurous listeners; then again, “Lost in This Moment” doesn’t reflect that a bit. It’s a standard feel-good pop-rocker about how pretty a bride is on her wedding day. It’s fine I guess.

Then here comes Kenny Chesney with “Never Wanted Nothing More,” an even more aggressive slab of status quo propaganda than “Lucky Man.” OK, maybe “aggressive” doesn’t apply well to something this breezy and weightless, but given that it sat blithely at #1 for five straight weeks I guess it got the job done. Rodney Atkins only got the perch for a week with “These Are My People,” but it’s in the same vein, giving itself and everyone around it a big pat on the back for being good hardworking Americans who pray and love and drink whatever kind of beer buys the most country radio advertisements.

Unlike some of his less-famous peers that were gradually squeezed off, Garth Brooks had opted for the superstar prerogative of intentionally dropping out of the game for awhile. The famously hardworking entertainer probably was legit exhausted and missing family time, but it was a shrewd strategic move too. The money was made, the legacy was secure enough if he never sang another note, why not give folks a chance to miss him a little instead of constantly trying to top himself once no other country artist could realistically compete with him on most metrics? He only occasionally tried to have a hit throughout the 2000s, usually in conjunction with some tour or product release; “More Than a Memory” was a track from his third compilation album and, as of this writing, his final #1 radio hit. It set a new record in the industry when it debuted at #1, but it only hung around a week, perhaps simultaneously proving Brooks still had the clout to jump to the front of the line but maybe not enough juice (or hell, maybe not enough inclination … what’s he got to prove?) to stay there all that long. As for the song itself, even as a Garth fan I don’t really remember it, and he’s harder than virtually any other contemporary artist to go back and review since he’s managed to keep pretty much all of his material off of streaming. So I had to settle for a live recording from some stadium show on YouTube. It’s a pretty standard-issue country-pop number reminiscent of Billy Joel, bringing up some messy emotion in an era where that was getting unfashionable, not bad but I wouldn’t buy a box set just to hear it again.

I’m still not sure who Rascal Flatts was taking their cues from; they were confoundingly popular, kind of synonymous with mid-oughts radio country, but I’m not sure who they were trying to sound like. Maybe some arena-friendly soft-rockers like Chicago or Journey, filtered through a bit of Garth Brooks and some anodyne late-‘80s easy listening? Was lead singer Gary LeVox just a botoxed Collin Raye in a before-its-time Guy Fieri wig taking a second run at stardom? It’s impossible to say, but it was all over the place back then and they were one of the main reasons I tuned out of mainstream country. “Take Me There” is a pretty good idea for a song, and to its credit it treats a female object of affection like a three-dimensional person with wants and needs and backstory instead of just some country gal in cutoffs (bro country was right around the corner). But it’s still tough for me to listen to even if easy listening was the overriding influence on it. All of their stuff sounds overcooked and screechy to me and its popularity will forever mystify me.

Brad Paisley hit kind of a sour note with “Online,” another of his stabs at clever wordplay. It’s sort of funny I guess, with lots of lyrical detail and some amusing rhymes in the portrait of a lonely nerd posing as an adventurous stud on the internet, getting the closest thing to action he could ever hope for via chatrooms and MySpace (good night does this song date itself). Maybe getting Seinfeld alum Jason Alexander to star in the video was worth the effort, but once you get through your first chuckle it kind of reeks of a good-looking wealthy guitar jock punching down. It’s not hard to imagine Weird Al Yankovic doing almost this exact song but with more of a “laughing with” vibe. Paisley’s generally known to be a nice dude and much of his material speaks to empathy and humility; guess anyone can have an off day. Meanwhile Toby Keith, who’d gone from star to superstar around 2001 largely due to some saber-rattling patriotic anthems followed by a bunch of relatively apolitical swagger, decided to musically fine-tune his own outsized image a bit with “Love Me if You Can.” A humble, measured take on his own personal and political convictions without getting too terribly deep about it, it does show some appealing self-awareness but it also bears a whiff of saying “sorry you feel that way” instead of just “I’m sorry.” It’s an interesting song, especially in light of his public persona, but aside from maybe Natalie Maines I don’t know who he thought he owed an apology to at this point anyway.   

Kenny Chesney went big, soft, and wistful on “Don’t Blink,” weaving life lessons into the story of an old man in a TV news feature getting to wax philosophical on his 102^nd birthday. There’s a couple of nice lines in there but maybe it’s emblematic of a genre (maybe a whole world? how deep do we wanna take this?) that was experiencing emotions on a screen, at a distance, safely secondhand. The best artists of other eras sounded like they were right down in the mud with you or whoever else might be suffering; some folks could still pull that off circa 2007 but they weren’t on country radio anymore. Dierks Bentley was (and is) an easy-to-like talent with engaging tunes like “Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go).” It’s got some bluegrass-inspired drive to it, lots of earthy picking and vocal warmth, it’s well worth listening to. But it doesn’t say much about a year of #1s if that’s arguably the best of the bunch.

Carrie Underwood belted out “So Small” like she was trying to win American Idol again … her voice is technically awesome and not without personality, one of those things where you admire the talent but can’t bring yourself to share the taste. Too vague, too syrupy, entirely dependent on the performance to mine any gold out of the lyrics. But again, maybe I just wasn’t the target demographic … “So Small” might’ve sounded pretty deep to a kid, and kids with an interest in country music had gained another key avatar in the mid-2000s with Taylor Swift, whose third single “Our Song” scored her first #1. She’d burst onto the scene the previous year with “Tim McGraw,” using the still-fairly-young titular singer as an avatar for even-younger days of innocent romance, and this was very much in the same vein. Older listeners (including 31-year-old 2007 me) might have written it off as teeny-bop b.s. at the time, if we even heard it in the first place. In time, of course, Swift would not only catch up with us but also make “not hearing Taylor Swift songs” barely an option.

THE TREND?

To some extent, the trend’s right there in the titles. “Lucky Man,” “She’s Everything,” “Never Wanted Nothing More,” “These Are My People,” “Free and Easy” … complicated emotions and sadness were largely being shown the door at this point. As mentioned, it felt almost conspiratorial, like the singers and songwriters of Nashville were given some sort of corporate (if not governmental) directive to forcefully remind everyone within earshot of just how good they had it in the Dubya years. I don’t think it was just as simple as trying to excise the poor-sad-bastard stigma off of country music and start fresh with new generations of listeners, but I guess that was at least part of it too. Mainstream country wanted the beer but not the hangover, the love but not the heartache, the small-town pride without the restlessness or economic uncertainty. Patting people on the back just for being Southerners or small-towners or patriots or Christians is a pretty easy way to make friends I guess, and overall it’s usually good to make people feel seen and like they’re part of something. It’s possible to do these things without a cynical motive, but if someone was up to no good, over the next few years they were just going to get more strident about it.

THE RANKING

1. Moments – Emerson Drive
2. It Just Comes Natural – George Strait
3. Settlin’ – Sugarland
4. Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go) – Dierks Bentley
5. Good Directions – Billy Currington
6. Wasted – Carrie Underwood
7. The Last Dollar (Fly Away) – Tim McGraw
8. Love Me if You Can – Toby Keith
9. More Than a Memory – Garth Brooks
10. She’s Everything – Brad Paisley
11. Beer in Mexico – Kenny Chesney
12. Ticks – Brad Paisley
13. Take Me There – Rascal Flatts
14. Lost in This Moment – Big & Rich
15. Online – Brad Paisley
16. Find Out Who Your Friends Are – Tracy Lawrence with Kenny Chesney & Tim McGraw
17. Lucky Man – Montgomery Gentry
18. Our Song – Taylor Swift
19. So Small – Carrie Underwood
20. These Are My People – Rodney Atkins
21. Stand – Rascal Flatts
22. Ladies Love Country Boys – Trace Adkins
23. Watching You – Rodney Atkins

DOWN THE ROAD ...

As far as I can tell, Rachael Turner is still out there gigging and recording around Nashville, making music and advocating for breast cancer awareness; she had a bit of a heyday making well-produced YouTube videos a few years ago, showcasing her voice and charisma on various country and pop covers. Her official website appears to be down but she's still got an active Facebook page. There hasn't been a bigger music-biz breakthrough for her I suppose, but then again maybe that's not even the goal. Hey, if nothing else, thousands of people have watched her do her thing on YouTube, and she's been a good go-to source for credible covers of recent tunes for me and whoever else is keeping an eye out for that sort of deal. Rachael, if you're out there, nice job on this one in particular.