Single Review Roundup: Vol. 3, No. 39

Three great records this week, plus the new Eric Church single.

 

“Out of Time”

Trampled By Turtles featuring LeAnn Rimes

Written by Erik Berry, David Carroll, Eamonn McLain, Timothy Saxhaug, David Simonett, and Ryan Young

Jonathan Keefe: This opens as a typical Trampled by Turtles single: Expertly played country-folk that focuses on melody and a wall-of-sound via traditional acoustic instruments. They’ve been so good at this exact aesthetic– think Mumford & Sons without the delusions of grandeur– for so long that it’s easy to overlook the skill it takes to sound so effortless.

And then LeAnn Rimes shows up, singing a high harmony on the first chorus, and my God, have I missed her voice. She’s never recorded anything this firmly in “rootsy” territory, and it’s revelatory to hear her on a track like this. Her phrasing on the second verse, which she takes solo, is extraordinary and highlights the extent to which she’s evolved into one of the genre’s finest interpretive vocalists. 

Trampled By Turtles are all about their collective music-making experience, and it’s clear that Rimes is a kindred spirit. Like the rest of the band, she’s trying to make sense of a disorienting and cruel world in which, “The only thing I know for sure is we all run out of time.” This would be a fantastic single on its own, but Rimes’ vocals elevate it into something truly extraordinary. A

Kevin John Coyne: One of my big takeaways this week is that our artists whose talents are beyond genre are often the best at understanding how to use genre elements most effectively.

Rimes can do a pop power ballad with the best of them, yet she’s perfectly at home within the rootsy atmospheric sounds of Trampled by Turtles. Ironically, the acoustic crescendo that the song builds to is the most effective attempt at pop among this week’s singles. It’s one of those money shot moments that hits me harder in the feels when it’s done with country instrumentation.

Between the Turtles’ killer harmonies and Rimes’ Emmylou-esque phrasing, I found myself dreading the record running out of time. A

 

 

“Darkest Hour”

Eric Church

Written by Eric Church

KJC: A record so spectacularly awful that it should be studied by musicologists for generations to come.

Many moons ago, I wrote about how sincerity carries far more weight with me than authenticity. Because the irony is it’s much harder to fake sincerity than authenticity. Let’s be real here. You can go to your local Spirit Halloween and get yourself a Music Row Outlaw starter kit, complete with knock off RayBans. 

Eric Church has the authenticity act down pat, but sincerity is needed here. What we get instead sounds like Church rolled up Andy Gibb’s ashes and smoked them.

If there’s a worse vocal performance on record by an acclaimed country artist, I haven’t heard it. Please share in the comments if there is, so the time spent listening to this isn’t completely in vain. F

JK: Walter Chaw, our sharpest cultural critic for a generation now, has often written that it’s only with pop culture that we allow “It’s for kids!” to be a defense to shoddy craftsmanship and lazy conceptualization. I’m wondering, listening to “Darkest Hour,” if, “It’s for charity!” might be a corollary to that.

Yes, it’s admirable that Church is rallying to the cause of supporting the communities in western North Carolina that were devastated by Hurricane Helene, when there are some of his peers who I’m confident would spend their time sending death threats to meteorologists, instead.

But hoo boy, this single. There’s a single lyric that’s worth half a damn (“I’d do everything in my power / To take another minute off your darkest hour”), while the rest of the song imagines a barely literate rewrite of “Love Can Build A Bridge.” Here, the man who sang (problematically!) about a “hip-hop hat” ages ago is now singing about a “homeless shirt,” and maybe Eric Church should just never mention articles of clothing in a song again. 

The mixed metaphors would be bad enough on their own, but the production choices here are just outright batshit. The aesthetic here is like a tackier, more dated Burt Bacharach. This man who’s spent his entire career in unconvincing “outlaw” drag is now singing over what sounds not unlike Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and what in the actual hell is even happening here. 

And then there’s the limpest, saddest falsetto any A-list act has ever committed to record. I can’t. Even Robin Thicke would hear this and say, “Hey, maybe don’t sing like that?” It may be for a good cause, but this single is just a cataclysm of bad decisions. F

 

“Silk and Petals”

Amythyst Kiah featuring Butch Walker

Written by Amythyst Kiah

JK: I’m not someone who is averse to their favorite artists’ aiming for broader accessibility; I don’t care about the authentic’er-than-thou cred of having seen an act play in a tiny venue before they blew up with a wide audience. So it’s not a slight when I say that “Silk and Petals” is the most accessible single of Amythyst Kiah’s exemplary career to date. Her work is typically dense and knotty, and her genre-fluid aesthetic makes her a difficult act to pin down at times.

Here? Butch Walker helps her lean into a slick, polished production that foregrounds the standout melody of “Silk and Petals” in an arrangement that is continuously building momentum. This sounds like a hit– in the AAA radio sense, that is– in a way that Kiah’s singles rarely have, and that’s a great thing. 

The song itself loses none of the trademarks in her writing– the multiple repetitions of the key line, “I don’t feel like myself at all / Is there a ghost in me or just a love song,” is one of the structures she deploys better than just about anyone. Kiah’s talents are a surprisingly great fit with Walker’s instincts for arena-sized pop. A

KJC: Amythyst Kiah is such a forceful presence on record that it’s really a stroke of brilliance how she approached “Silk and Petals.”

When she sings “I don’t feel like myself at all,” you hear a woman used to standing strongly on her own who is genuinely confused by these new feelings of vulnerability. 

She’s like, “Really? We’re doing this? Fine. But I’m gonna be mighty pissed at you if I get hurt.”

It’s brassy not but brazen, which is typical of Kiah’s unique alchemy of a fully realized woman dealing with the uncertainties of life and love with wit and determination.

All of which is an overly flowery way of saying that Amythyst Kiah is making damn good music and she keeps getting better. A

 

“Backseat Driver”

Kane Brown

Written by Jacob Davis and Jordan Walker

KJC: “Backseat Driver” models parenthood better than any country song I can think of.

I’m not surprised at all that Kane Brown would record this girl dad celebration. I’m more surprised that he didn’t write it in the first place. Brown’s songs about family are complicated and compelling, and “Backseat Driver” is no exception to the rule.

Brown models empathy for his daughter by giving a dollar to a man asking for money. He models patience and self-control by not responding to being flipped off by another driver. More than anything else, he models listening, taking a real interest in the way her mind works and also validating that her ideas are worth listening to in the first place.

I’m not a girl dad. But if I had a daughter, what I’d worry about the most is her not finding her voice, or worse, silencing her voice because she’s internalized going along to get along and not speaking up for herself.

Brown’s insistence that his daughter be heard is what packs the biggest punch here, especially through his achingly heartfelt vocal when he speaks in her voice. Hopefully, this record about fully hearing, seeing, and embracing his daughter will provoke similar feelings in the industry for Kane Brown. It’s long overdue. A 

JK: One of the things I respect about Kane Brown is that he doesn’t tack his name on questionable songwriting credits the way so many of his peers do. Listening to “Backseat Driver,” I was surprised to see that he didn’t have a hand in writing it. Credit to Brown, again, for finding and then choosing to record a song that is so closely aligned with his artistic POV.

What impresses most about “Backseat Driver” is how it validates the perspective of the child who’s strapped into her car seat. The narrator never once patronizes or condescends to this child: Country music has a long history of writing about children in mawkish and maudlin ways, and “Backseat Driver” is, instead, about how the child in question is a whole person.

And that’s really how this fits into Brown’s catalog: When he sings about other people, he always recognizes their agency. At a time when the genre is overrun by artists who suffer from Main Character Syndrome– Jelly Roll and Megan Moroney are perhaps the most egregious examples of this– Brown sings the stories of other people with genuine empathy. His affable performance here allows his daughter’s stream-of-consciousness observations and questions to put some of his own minor inconveniences into their rightful scale. He sings this with a real sense of fascination about the way this child’s brain works, and it’s among his very best singles to date. A

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