“Freedom Was a Highway”
Jimmie Allen & Brad Paisley
Written by Jimmie Allen, Ash Bowers, and Matt Rogers
An unmitigated disaster.
I was already prepping myself for some “Accidental Racist”-level awfulness here, with the title “Freedom Was a Highway” immediately evoking the Civil Rights movement. Releasing in a year of racial reckoning, that title couldn’t possibly refer to anything else, so I braced myself and clicked play…
And it’s a God-awful small town party song. God-awful. The yawning generation gap between Jimmie Allen and Brad Paisley already makes a shared nostalgia song ridiculous. But it’s not like there’s any specificity of time and space in these lyrics. They could just as easily be waxing poetic about last weekend, rather than the long gone days of youth.
The vocal effects are so heavy that I can barely tell the difference between Allen and Paisley, two men with quite distinctive voices.
There’s no reason for this to exist. A complete waste of time and talent.
Grade: D
unmitigated disaster is right on – wouldn’t accept a free download
The title made me think of the Great Migration. In the hands of the right artist a song about that could be really good.
Yikes. I didn’t even recognize Brad’s vocals ’til near the end. This sucked. Not much else to say.
In a time when “boyfriend country” plagues radio, a song that actually doesn’t gush over a female’s perfection is a breath of fresh air.