How depressingly generic. Sarah Buxton has one of the most distinctive and interesting voices I’ve ever heard, but you’d never know it from listening to “Outside My Window.”
Here, she sounds like any one of the countless 21st century country acts who have to put all their effort into getting close enough to being on key for auto-tune to fix it. There are layers of backing instruments and vocalists crowding out her vocal so that it’s barely there.
If you live your life only for yourself, all that you’ve lived for dies with you. If you live your life for others, your life’s work lives on long after you’re gone.
That’s the lesson Big Kenny is imparting on his new single, his first since breaking through to stardom as one half of Big & Rich. He may seem a bit young to be concerning himself with what his legacy will be, but he’s remarkably clear-eyed, reaching the conclusions that many others fail to reach until it’s too late, if they ever reach them at all.
It’s a message that could be preachy if told in the second person, but since it’s presented as self-revelation, the lesson can be learned by example rather than prodding.
It’s time for an album sales update, our first since May 23. Brad Paisley is off to a strong start with American Saturday Night, selling 130k in its first week. That’s about 70k less than his previous two studio albums – Time Well Wasted and 5th Gear – opened with, but not a terrible drop-off, considering the state of the music market.
Meanwhile, the new studio albums by Rascal Flatts and Keith Urban are slowing down considerably, now being outpaced on a weekly basis by 2008 releases by Taylor Swift, Zac Brown Band, Darius Rucker and Lady Antebellum.
Among younger acts with a new album in 2009, the most impressive sales are coming from Jason Aldean, while 2008 releases from Kellie Pickler, Billy Currington, and Randy Houser are showing new signs of life.
Biggest disappointments? It’s hard not to look in the direction of Martina McBride, who has barely cleared the 100k mark on her new studio set. Lee Ann Womack’s 2008 set just made it over that mark, too. Then again, one only needs to have sold 455 copies to make the chart this week, with the anchor position going to Wynonna with that total. Her covers album Sing – Chapter 1 has sold 41k to date.
Here are the latest totals for albums released over the past three years that are still charting:
2009
Thus far, 2009’s releases have done little to fire up the charts, with most of this year’s strongest-selling albums being holdovers from 2008. While Rascal Flatts, Jason Aldean, and Keith Urban have sold strongly, the chart remains dominated by last year’s releases from Taylor Swift, Sugarland, Zac Brown Band, Lady Antebellum, Darius Rucker, and Jamey Johnson.
So what’s left for 2009? Here’s what we know so far:
New Releases
The unintended consequences of requited love. Such is the story told by a sympathetic narrator about a young woman who has to leave town after the consummation of her love for the high school football hero. Ronnie Dunn gives a nuanced performance of an interesting story song, revealing toward the end that he isn’t quite the impartial narrator that he appeared.
The arrangement is reminiscent of the Eagles at their Henley-best, with the only thing holding back the track being that Dunn’s sincerity isn’t matched by his enunciation. It’s often difficult to make out the details of the verses, which makes following the storyline more of a task than it should be.
Tim McGraw sounds fresh and rejuvenated on “It’s a Business Doing Pleasure With You”, an energetic and quite cleverly written song about a man who is going into debt trying to underwrite his woman’s material desires.
“You’ve got more purses than Versace, more rings than Liberace”, McGraw wails, with tongue firmly planted in cheek. McGraw’s always been a great example of how you don’t need to be a powerful vocalist with a multi-octave range to effectively deliver a great performance. He mixes up a perfect balance of frustrated annoyance and helpless infatuation, all while keeping pace with a complicated lyric that features far more brand names than it does common nouns and verbs.
Country Universe is sending out good wishes and prayers for the health of country music legend Ferlin Husky, who has been hospitalized with serious ailments.
Husky is best known for the gospel classic “Wings of a Dove”, which spent ten weeks at #1 in 1960. His other chart-toppers are “Gone”, which also spent ten weeks at #1, and his debut single, “A Dear John Letter.” He was the featured artist on that record, with Jean Shepard being the lead artist, and it spent a cool six weeks at #1.
Husky’s popularity at his peak was not limited to the radio dial, as he appeared in eighteen films and several television shows. At 83, he remains an active performer. Here’s hoping he heals up soon and gets back on the road, where he still has fans waiting to hear him sing his classics, five decades after he began his long and successful career.
You can watch Husky perform some of his classics after the jump.
As song titles go, “Johnny Cash is Dead (And His House Burned Down)” doesn’t have quite the eloquence of “The King is Gone”, does it?
Not that subtlety would suit anything about this record anyway, which is as bluntly written and performed as you’d expect from the combination of title and artist here. Plenty of other late stars are name-dropped along the way, including Marty Robbins, Waylon Jennings, and Chet Atkins, with predictable lamenting that the “empty cowboy hats” of today can’t replace those who we’ve already lost.
Sara Evans is an excellent singer in desperate need of a better production team. She sings the fire out of a fairly decent pop-country song here, but the arrangement is an overwhelming distraction, with far too much clutter in the mix.
It’s to her credit as a vocalist that she’s not drowned out completely, but she’s ill-served by the production philosophy that bigger is better. The opposite is true with both pop and country music, so it never ceases to amaze me how difficult that concept is to grasp for too many of those who make pop-country records.
I certainly didn’t expect to create a third Country Universe post on Michael Jackson, but longtime readers know that this site would enter an extended period of mourning should anything ever happen to Dolly Parton.
She posted a video diary today about Jackson’s death. As usual, she radiates humanity and warmth. Those who are fortunate enough to have Parton as a character witness on judgment day should count their lucky stars!
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