Carrie Underwood, “Cowboy Casanova”
It’s been well established by this point that Carrie Underwood’s eighties pop/rock runs deep in her musical roots. Being part of the MTV generation, this isn’t surprising, as the days of country artists who were only exposed to country music are long gone.
Underwood draws on those roots more than she’s ever done on a traditional single, but fans from her Idol days will have flashbacks to her star-making performance of “Alone” when they listen to “Cowboy Casanova”, as Carrie does her very best to channel Ann Wilson and often pulls it off. I have to say that the verses are catchier than the chorus, though, and if you’re going to do eighties power pop, you need a stronger, bigger chorus.
It’s hard to fault Craig Morgan for recording yet another “we’re a bunch of rednecks having a good time” anthem. Such songs have been his bread and butter.
In lesser hands, “To Say Goodbye” could have been hopelessly maudlin. But Joey + Rory deliver a heavy message with a light touch, without any bells and whistles in the production or the vocal. The end result is that the stories of a woman who loses her husband in a plane crash and of a man who tends to his elderly wife who has lost her memory don’t focus on the tragedy. Rather, there’s an emphasis on the quiet emptiness left in the wake of these events.
Somewhere underneath “Everywhere I Go” is a great song, but to find it, you have to dig a little too deep. The song’s pleasing melody and bittersweet lyrics –Vassar sings of haunting, lingering memories of a lost love– are coated with layers of dramatic, distracting production. Even the conviction Vassar brings to the song starts to feel slightly artificial when he pushes his vocals over the top in the chorus, the most off-putting aspect of the song. 
Yesterday marked the end of the eligibility period for the 2010 Grammy Awards, which will be presented in January. To accommodate the earlier award ceremony, this year’s period lasted one month shy of a year: October 1, 2008 – August 31, 2009.
There were two solo artists who changed the course of country music history in the nineties. The first was Garth Brooks, who ushered in the boom years with his mega-selling albums No Fences and Ropin’ the Wind. The second was Shania Twain, who permanently altered the female point of view in country music with her mega-selling albums The Woman in Me and Come On Over.
She’s one of the most successful female country artists of the past two decades, and though it was the 2000s that brought her most of her accolades, Martina McBride became a star in the nineties. She also released her strongest music during that decade, and her first three albums remain her strongest efforts to date.
When you’re a teenager, parents can give you all the advice in the world, based on their wealth of experience, because, after all, they were once teenagers too. But will you listen? Is it really possible to separate parents’ advice from parents’ perceived restrictions? It’s a rare teen who can.