Danielia Cotton blows everyone out of the water this week.
“So Afraid of Losing You Again”
Danielia Cotton
Written by Dallas Frazier and Arthur Owens
Jonathan Keefe: The third single from Danielia Cotton’s forthcoming tribute record to Charley Pride takes a different approach from her more reflective interpretations of “Roll On, Mississippi” and “Kiss An Angel Good Morning.” She goes for a full-throated, bluesy wail on “So Afraid of Losing You Again,” and her torrid performance is an absolute wonder.
As on those previous singles, Cotton makes choices as a vocalist that are unexpected: The way she breaks into a crying falsetto midway through phrase in the final chorus, for instance, comes out of nowhere and makes her performance all the more captivating. She has such a command of her instrument– as before, I am obsessed with the raspiness of her tone– that her singing is audacious in every sense of the word. That her choices are so perfectly calibrated to this classic song makes it all the more clear that she’s an artist of rare talent and insight.
Listening to Cotton sing is like watching Simone Biles tumble: You’re going to witness something you’ve not experienced before, and you won’t know what that is until it happens, and you’ll marvel at what seems like a metahuman skill. A
Kevin John Coyne: The only way I can describe this vocal performance is with this image: a stallion without fences.
Cotton simply doesn’t operate within the normal limits of expressive singing. She can do things that most singers can’t even conceptualize, let alone execute.
Here, she takes a heartbreak standard into the stratosphere, allowing her to bend and crack with raw emotion without missing a single note.
I love this song and so many versions of it, and all of them are going to be hard to go back to after hearing this fresh and innovative take on very familiar material. A
“Bulletproof”
Nate Smith
Written by Ashley Gorley, Ben Johnson, and Hunter Phelps
KJC: If the title is supposed to be a play on alcohol proofs, it doesn’t work.
And that’s a problem, because that’s the only distinctive idea in this song, and it either doesn’t exist or is executed so poorly that it may as well not exist.
This song has been written a million times before. It’s “Bottle Let Me Down” and “Killin’ Time” and 999,998 other songs that aren’t nearly as good.
Smith also sounds like an also ran vocalist. He can’t do the soulful sound by Chris Stapleton or the intense screams of Luke Combs. He’s somewhere in the murky middle of the two.
Not much to recommend here. C
JK: I barely remembered this one from when I listened to Smith’s full album earlier this year, and how the three writers missed such an obvious wordplay is baffling: Why this isn’t called “Bulleit Proof,” would have driven home the central conceit even more?
As is? The bones of a pedestrian country song are here, swallowed whole by the Nickelback Country production and Smith’s garbled vocals. There are worse singles at country radio right now, and there are worse tracks on Smith’s album, but there’s nothing about this that justifies his rapid ascent. C-
“Ain’t Life Strange”
Julian Taylor
Written by Julian Taylor
JK: Taylor has a spectacular vocal tone– not unlike that of a young James Taylor, in fact, just with a deeper range– and a casualness to his delivery that works really well on “Ain’t Life Strange.” Rather than his performance, it’s the propulsive, bluesy groove to the single’s arrangement that creates the sense of urgency around Taylor’s low-key observations of how our actions impact the world and people around us.
“Weird” is having a moment, but Taylor’s deployment of “strange” here is certainly of a piece with that. I don’t know that he fully makes a case for time travel with this particular song, as the chorus seems to intend, but I enjoyed spending a few moments in his company. B
KJC: I love it when an artist gets so ambitious with their songwriting. In this case, Taylor is striving for a philosophical idea that is slightly out of reach, but he gets close enough to suggest that the only thing holding him back is time itself. A few more years and lived experiences, and this thoughtful exercise will evolve into deeper insight. B
“Love You, Miss You, Mean It”
Luke Bryan
Written by Rhett Akins, Ben Hayslip, Jordan Minton, and Jacob Rice
KJC: What begins with a beautiful steel guitar intro and interesting character development devolves into a naked play for the inspirational home goods market by the chorus.
A younger or more focused Bryan might’ve been able to to make this work, but his delivery is so awkward and soulless that someone unfamiliar with his catalog might think he was singing the song phonetically in a language unfamiliar to him.
I would say that it’s troubling that a future Hall of Famer is recording something so hacky, but bless his heart, the man has been hacking his way there from day one. D
JK: Based on the title, I was so sure that this would have a third verse in which whoever it was that Bryan’s narrator was addressing turned out to be dead. Mercifully, this song isn’t that.
Instead, it imagines if an emotionally stunted man-child tried to re-write “Strawberry Wine” with a wish-fulfillment fantasy ending in which his dick was so good that his high school sweetheart spent the rest of her life dreaming about it.
So it manages to be worse than I expected. Which has been the case with most everything Bryan has released since he committed fully to being king of the Bros. Is he capable of better than this? Probably, but giving his music a curiosity or courtesy listen feels like a chore at this point. D
…since his “rollercoaster” is a little guilty pleasure of mine, i basically should quite enjoy this one of luke bryan (even though it is almost unbearably formulaic, says someone, who zapped into an episode of “hart of dixie” the other day and kept on watching), if he just had been able to put the slightest bit of charm that this cookie-cutter really requires into it and come up with a production that wouldn’t make it sound like “what am i doing here still?” so blantantly.
ms. cotton definitely makes a much more compelling case about how she feels than luke bryan.
full size drama queen, nate smith.
now that they’ve been (finally) called out as “weird people”, the last thing i wanted is that the time stood still. julian taylor’s timing almost could not be more off – ain’t life strange?
Funny you mention “Roller Coaster”. When I go through Luke Bryan’s two-decade catalog, that’s the only one that legitimately and unapologetically works for me. A couple more are minor pleasures so guilty that I dare not speak their names without securing a paper bag over my head. The rest are just some combination of boring or bad. The worst part is that country radio’s continued indulgence of his mediocrity isn’t even among the top-10 list of unforgivable sins committed by modern country radio.
Luke Bryan referred to as a future Hall of Famer sends a chill down spine; I’ll admit I know very little of his catalog, but has he ever actually released anything worthwhile, even before “bro country” took hold of the genre? Honestly, I’d be surprised.