Best of 2018: The Ballot

12 Comments

1. I am shocked you guys didn’t even list Lauren Alaina “Ladies In The 90s” as one of the singles since it is still climbing the charts, I imagine people forgot/no one here besides me likes the song.

   Anyways, I will also disagree the mainstream was bad this year. I actually thought it was solid, there was no outright horrible songs besides Walker Hayes and “Meant to Be” and I felt like country radio while doing horrible at their women problem had a pretty solid year quality wise.

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2. I’ve been a big fan of Canada’s the Western Swing Authority since I discovered them in a March 2015 article in Country Perspective. They released their 4th studio album “Big Deal” on October 26, 2018. It would be on my list of Best Albums of 2018.

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3. @Raymond

   The ballots definitely aren’t exhaustive: I’ll admit that I was far more lax in maintaining them this year than in years past. But the Crew can vote for anything they like that meets our nebulous definition of a single, which would include Alaina’s latest. Also, with as unreasonably slow as turnover is, anything that is still actively climbing the charts now would still be fair game for next year, too.

   I think it was a great year for country music literally everywhere except for country radio. That includes mainstream acts who released singles that radio didn’t embrace and includes a ton of women who were making the genre’s best music overall.

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4. “Ladies in the 90’s” by Lauren Alaina isn’t something I would recommend, but at least it is not aggressively offensive like “90’s Country” by Walker Hayes. That thing is the country music equivalent of saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards to summon Satan.

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5. For me country radio did have some gems that did hit like “Break Up In The End” by Cole Swindell and “Hide The Wine” by Carly Pearce is a guilty pleasure. I’d also add “Cry Pretty” by Carrie Underwood, and “Most People Are Good” by Luke Bryan.

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6. @Raymond,

   “Hide the Wine” made my personal singles ballot, and I like that Bryan song well enough.

   I don’t think there’s any real defending the state of radio: “Hide the Wine” took over 40 weeks to crawl to a top 15 peak, and “Cry Pretty” was the lowest-peaking single of Underwood’s career to date. By an overwhelming margin, what radio played in heavy rotation was all within a couple of degrees of the same mediocre song by a legion of interchangeable post-Bros, while they either balked at or completely ignored better offerings by mainstream stars or by acts who certainly could fall within the purview of the mainstream.

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7. I didn’t find too many albums that I really liked the majority of this year. I’ll admit to not having heard quite a few of these, but the usuals for me didn’t have albums that I connected with well consistently (Kelly Willis, Kacey Musgraves, Ashley Monroe, Brandi Carlile, some others). I need to make time to sort through Jason Eady’s music some day. Eric Church’s Desperate Man album is pretty strong throughout. Singles I loved include Manitoba Sunrise, People Get Old, and Cumberland Gap. I’ll have to look up the Marlon William’s single.

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8. @Jonathan Keefe

   Hopefully mainstream can get better in 2019 both with the women problem and the quality problem. Maren Morris will have a new lead single soon, “Love Wins” is picking up steam on the chart finally, and if MCA Nashville could think for a second they should start promoting “Die From a Broken Heart” by Maddie & Tae since that song is actually connecting. That and the latest singles from Carly Pearce, Kelsea Ballerini, and Lauren Alaina are off to solid starts.

   Hopefully one of the major labels can sign this one female country singer I recently saw online on my recommendations on YouTube called Lacy Cavalier. She is very pop country, but girl is both very talented, and has a decent sized fanbase for an independent artist (over 28,000 youtube subscribers and her song “Cheatin’ On U” has been viewed over 1.2 million times in the past 2 months). She is someone I see as a total star, and hope a label signs her.

   I do remain hopeful in 2019 for the mainstream but radio has so many problems between interchangeable male artists and lack of females and I wonder if radio even realize the issue and how bad of a look it is in 2019 to be so blatantly sexist.

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9. My picks for Album and Single are both by Lindi Ortega: Liberty, and “The Comeback Kid”. Lindi just had one of the best albums of the year in any format, bar none, in Liberty, a great concept album rooted in the parched landscape and mythology of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, and mixing country, rock, Western film music elements, and Mexicana.

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10. @Erik – Love “The Comeback Kid” – cool song. I’ll have to check out more of Ms Ortega’s music.

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11. @ bob:

    The interesting thing about Lindi is that she is Canadian by birth (she was born in 1980 in Toronto), but her father is originally from Mexico, which is how Lindi came by her Mexican roots. It also helps that Lindi has named Linda Ronstadt as a sizeable influence, particularly Canciones De Mi Padre, on the approach she took on Liberty. Liberty was arguably the most purely cinematic album released in 2018 by anyone (IMHO).

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12. I’m so behind on 2018 singles, which is why I didn’t participate in the 2018 rankings this time around. I’ve just listened to both of the Nineties themed songs mentioned on this thread and that Walker Hayes song is an abomination for just the production alone! I’ll admit that the Lauren Alaina song is ajam though.:)

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