With song titles like “Storm Warning” and “Rainy Season,” one might very well wonder if Hunter Hayes had at one time been an aspiring meteorologist. At any rate, the frosty-haired twenty-year-old has been gradually making inroads on country radio with the support of his hordes of cheering female fans.
So far, it’s a familiar story: A strong voice crying out for strong material.
Chris Young’s third single off of Neon continues to position him as an artist with a skill so few of his contemporaries possess: the ability to gracefully tread the line between vintage and current.
It’s easy to compare this title track to Brooks & Dunn’s dance hall classic, for example, but Young’s ode to a bar has legs all its own. “Neon” puts a different spin on melancholy – less aching and more content in defeat. If there’s a broken heart in the mix, Young’s too deep into his sweet escape (on the rocks) to care.
This one’s a dead ringer for one of those nineties lukewarm rock ballads. You know the kind.
A faceless band with a generic frontman singing a plaintive love song that relies on pounding guitars for its intensity. It’s their one hit that gets played everywhere, but nobody buys the album because it’s just going to pop up on some late-night hits collection anyway.
1993 | Peak: #4
“(Who Says) You Can’t Have It All” is not just an average song of lost love. Rather, the loss translates into a certain resolution from a man who is the lord and master of his proverbial castle that has turned into nothing more than a lonely room with “a ceiling, a floor and four walls”, full of pictures and memories of the broken past.
2000 | #30
The eleventh single from Shania Twain’s Come On Over was one of the least successful in the U.S., barely scraping the bottom of the Top 30. This was due in part to a lack of promotion for the single, though it did go Top 5 in Twain’s native Canada. In some ways, “Rock This Country!” comes across as a standard Twain up-tempo – peppy, with a fun Mutt Lange-style pop-country production, but the lyrics are surprisingly flavorless.
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What ever happened to the Rodney Atkins that put out a string of interesting and memorable singles in 2006-2007? Is he now content to remain a continually middlebrow purveyor of radio filler?
So let’s talk about hooks and melodies for a minute.