Single Review Roundup: Vol. 3, No. 40

Joy Oladokun and Shaboozey lead another solid week of releases.

 

“I’d Miss the Birds”

Joy Oladokun

Written by Olubukola Oladokun

Jonathan Keefe: Oladokun’s new album is one of the year’s finest and a significant step up from her prior records. “I’d Miss the Birds” is indicative of everything she does so very well on her latest. She’s always walked a fine line between confessional songwriting tropes and lapses into full-on therapy-speak, and “I’d Miss the Birds” highlights how she’s learned to mine her personal narratives for deep points of accessibility. Listening to “I’d Miss the Birds,” I don’t feel like– to borrow a phrase from my own therapy experience– a trauma voyeur the way I have on some of Oladokun’s previous work.

That’s not to say Oladokun doesn’t tap into some heady, difficult feelings of alienation. Her observations of her time in Nashville (“Made it farther than they thought I would / But it doesn’t mean I should hang ‘round and suffer”) are especially pointed in the current landscape. I thought of Luke Bryan’s spectacularly ignorant recent comments about how Beyoncé owed the “country music family” some glad-handing at an awards show as Oladokun sang, “The Proud Boys and their women just made me feel out of place.”

Needless to say, Oladokun’s observation that, in retreating to a house in the woods, she’d miss “the birds and the music that they make” but not many people is maybe the most quietly delivered indictment of the country music family I can recall. What makes the single so spectacular, then, is that Oladokun’s autobiographical reading is just one of many that resonate. 

When alienation and disaffect are so prevalent, there’s a genuine appeal to the (near-)solitude Oladokun sings of here. It’s not about echo chambers but about knowing when your presence is no longer desired or appreciated and reading the room accordingly. “I’d Miss the Birds,” really, is about the degradation of the social contract and the loss of genuine human connection. One person’s neighborliness is another person’s socialism and all that. When neighborliness isn’t just lost but is actively harmful to some folks, the question becomes one of what losses we choose to grieve and where we choose to find hope for something better. A

Kevin John Coyne: What Jonathan wrote is so definitive that I’ve only got one thing left to say:

All of your most beautiful and talented birds keep flying away, Nashville. Do something about the snakes. A

 

“Highway”

Shaboozey

Written by Collins Obinna Chibueze, Sean Cook, and McKay Stevens

KJC: The opening notes are so similar to “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” that my initial reaction to “Highway” was that it would be too derivative of his breakthrough hit.

Then he started singing, and I realized the bait and switch that Shaboozey pulled off. This is a dark and meditative composition that is emotionally heightened by the sparse and eerie production.

Shaboozey joins Kane Brown as one of the only guys on country radio who is seriously wrestling with the mental health and wellness strains of modern life, something Americana, R&B, and even pop male artists have already been doing for a generation or two. 

Here, Shaboozey confronts a paradox of modern manhood: he knows his partner is better off alone, but he can’t live without her. To be the man that she needs, he has to leave. His journey toward letting her go is perfectly captured by the driving metaphor, and the evocative open-endedness of the lyric leaves open the question of whether he thrives or even survives after he says goodbye to her.

There are so many country songs about long suffering women who don’t give up on a weak man. Now we have a country song about a suffering man who is strong enough to release the woman he loves from her suffering, even though he’s signing his own heart’s death warrant. A

JK: There’s quite a bit of online chatter from people who are already fully committed to the idea that Shaboozey will be a one-hit wonder, and it should come as the opposite of surprise that it’s the usual gatekeepers who are the ones slobbering all over themselves at the prospects of seeing a talented black man dismissed as a novelty and an “interloper.” Proud Boys and their women, indeed.

All credit to Shaboozey, then, for choosing a follow-up single that’s even better than “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” To be clear, “Highway” is no less catchy than its predecessor, and without the benefit of relying on elements of a familiar pop hit. What Shaboozey very specifically brings to country from hip-hop is a mastery of the cadence of language and how language itself is a source of rhythm. And what’s so striking about “Highway” is how he marries that foundational element of hip-hop music to a traditional country narrative.

As Kevin noted, metaphors of the open road are commonplace in country songs, but Shaboozey’s entry stands apart for its subversion of the genre’s toxic masculinity. I’ve reviewed what feels like one billion albums this year from mediocre young white men in flat-brimmed ballcaps who are fundamentally incapable of considering the interior lives of the women they sing about or of conceptualizing those woman as anything more than a backboard off of which their own behaviors simply bounce. 

“Highway” is a song by a man who realizes that he isn’t the protagonist in the life of the woman in this song, and he’s actually sitting with the discomfort of that realization. That shouldn’t feel revolutionary, but for the men in country music in 2024, it’s a perspective that’s rare and important, and “Highway” is just one of the many standouts on his album that proves that Shaboozey had the goods for a lengthy and rich career. A

“Much Ado About Nothing”

Waxahatchee

Written by Katie Crutchfield

JK:  On one hand, I am obsessed with “Much Ado About Nothing” just purely in terms of how Waxahatchee has structured this song. How, for instance, there’s a proper B-section for a chorus, but she doesn’t actually repeat any of its lyrics outside of a single, “Oh, no,” and what a brilliant way to highlight how this moment of infatuation has destabilized even familiar territory. Or, as she sings herself, “The earth is moving / The groundwork’s compromised.” 

And then there’s her use of internal rhyme in lieu of a traditional rhyme scheme to emphasize a point (“Yeah, I leave the light on, hunting bygones / Play it off like I’m cynical, but I sweat and I swear / Say a prayer, stare at your picture / It’s visceral and it’s crushing”). There’s a level of sophistication and purpose here that is truly next-level.

On the other hand, I’m just in thrall of the clear-eyed, emotional purity of these lyrics. I said when we reviewed “Right Back to It” earlier this year that Waxahatchee’s songs stop time, and this song is perhaps the best example of that. She’s captured the exact instant in which she recognizes that she’s fallen for someone, and she gives voice to every possible conflict, to every internal and external source of doubt, to every bad decision she’s ever made, all within that one stopped second, and every line of it just bleeds. “Much Ado About Nothing” is Waxahatchee at the peak of her powers. A

KJC: I share Jonathan’s enthusiasm for the sharp and creative songwriting here. It’s like Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough” reflected through the prism of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero,” all done in a pleasant country arrangement. 

For me, the melody doesn’t quite work, and I think it’s because she’s singing it in a lower register than the song needs. Waxahatchee is a great singer, and I think that this is one of those songs that will get stronger through live performances over time.  B 

 

“Wide Open Heart”

Dwight Yoakam

Written by Bob DiPiero, Shane Minor, Jeffrey Steele, and Dwight Yoakam

KJC: Has there ever been someone made more of a fool by women than Dwight Yoakam, yet who still managed to remain effortlessly cool despite their efforts?

The scoreboard has to be something like Former Lovers 363 – Dwight Yoakam 7 after all these years, and he’s aged into being the old guy giving advice to the young guys out there, warning them not to make the same mistakes that he did.

Yoakam is sounding stronger on these new tracks, and I’d say this single and its predecessor are his most consistent vocal performances since Blame the Vain. I appreciate this being a solo Yoakam track, and his relentless energy throughout bodes well for his upcoming album.

He doesn’t pull off the lover/car metaphor as well as Shaboozey does this week, despite assists from three A-list Music Row songwriters. But damn, does Dwight sound good.  B+

JK: It’s one thing for Dwight to show up Post Malone on a record. It’s another thing entirely for him to show up solo, sounding undiminished from his This Time era. There are only a handful of 90s acts whose voices have truly held up to what they were in their primes, and “Wide Open Heart” puts Dwight in the company of Trisha and LeAnn and Raul in that regard.

As for the song? It’s pretty good. Certainly nothing that breaks new ground in a catalog that, as Kevin noted, has plenty of times when Yoakam plays the part of a guy who was thinking with the wrong head and gets burned for it.

More importantly, I dig the production on this as a return to his trademark sound after a few albums’ worth of more exploratory work that wasn’t always fully-baked. It’s immediately identifiable as a Dwight Yoakam record, and remember being able to tell artists apart? Hallelujah. A-

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