What would you choose: Dolly or your house?

A British woman may face losing her house if she doesn’t curtail her Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynnette fandom: neighbors of Diane Duffin have complained that the mother of four plays country music loudly all night, sometimes playing a single track over 20 times in a row. The judge allowed her to keep her house — for now — but assured her that it could be taken away if she continues her twangy ways:

“You’ve made the lives of your neighbours a misery so if you breach the order or fail to comply by the terms of your tenancy in the next 12 months you’ll be out, I promise you that.”

Misery? I thought she played Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynnette all night? Which is it?

Album Review: Carrie Underwood Carnival Ride

Carrie Underwood is someone everyone seems to be rooting for, which is unusual in a celebrity world of “Team This Blond” versus “Team That Blond.” Some love her for “Jesus Takes the Wheel” while others prefer “Before He Cheats” and a lot of people love both (interesting society we got going here). Unlike the other singers her age, Underwood is poised, gracious and clothed. All of which makes Underwood’s sophomore output — Carnival Ride — all the more disappointing. With few exceptions, the album is largely a combination of big production values and innocuous platitudes. While the girl can sing, that can only make up for so much. I don’t need to be instructed that having a baby boy or a baby girl are equally good fortunes (”All-American Girl”) or that love makes everything else a-ok (”So Small”) — most kindergarten lessons cleared these issues up pretty well. I mean, two out of the album’s 13 tracks have the word “dream” in the title. Only Mariah Carey could ever get away with that percentage.

But the watered down message conveyed in the music could be forgiven if the album was just a little more fun. I have this vision of my head of like 100 studio musicians and Carrie Underwood standing in a studio and the producer yells “Okay, now everybody make as much noise as possible!” Underwood fights to be heard over untold numbers of unnecessary instrumental overtures. Didn’t we learn from Underwood’s fantastic summer single “I’ll Stand by You” that less is more? Then again, that’s not a lesson that Nashville’s interested in learning.

The best tracks are “Flat on the Floor” and “Last Name” which are Underwood’s more raucous tunes, but, frankly, “Flat on the Floor” seems a bit like a Miranda Lambert rip-off and “Last Name” just seems like “Before He Cheats Part 2″ (which I’m all for, but still, originality would be good). I’m still optimistic about Carrie Underwood, but I doubt this will be a seminal album of her career and I certainly hope not.

**

Porter Wagoner 1927-2007

We will always love you.

Album Review: Merle Haggard The Bluegrass Sessions

Oh, Merle Haggard.

While Merle Haggard’s transition in song from a reactionary hawk to a progressive everyman might say something about him, I suspect it says more about us. In 1970 Haggard sang “I hear people talkin’ bad/ About the way we have to live here in this country/Harpin’ on the wars we fight/An’ gripin’ ’bout the way things oughta be” and now it’s “Yea, men in position but backing away/Freedom is stuck in reverse/Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on the track/And let’s rebuild America first.” America’s spun
so far out of control that we need Merle Haggard to reel us back in. Damn.

With his new album The Bluegrass Sessions, Haggard delves deeper in to the populism and farther back into time with bluegrass arrangements and instruments. For a country artist, doing a bluegrass album is equivalent to an actor gaining 75lbs for a gritty role. They show they can, they almost never do it again. But Haggard’s album does not seem belabored; bluegrass suits him. In Paste Magazine’s November 2006 issue, Rich Torres wrote of Tony Bennett:

Bennett is the lone authentic practitioner of a dying tradition—authentic because he was alive when the Great American Songbook was being penned. To modern singers, these are standards, relics of a bygone era…But to Bennett, this—the sound of his youth—is pop music. He understands these compositions and gets their arcane references.

A similar argument could be made of Merle Haggard and Bluegrass. Though a Californian and musical child of the Bakersfield sound, Haggard seems to reach use the bluegrass sounds in an authentic and powerful way — to tell stories, stories about Momma.  So many songs today seems to be nonsensical or spouting platitudes (and it’s difficult to tell the difference), but Haggard uses the bluegrass sound to tell both personal stories of destroyed families like “Holding Things Together” as well as larger political themes “What Happened?”.  Haggard leaves most of the bluegrassification of his work to the pros: Marty Stuart, Carl Jackson, Rob Ickes, and Aubrey Haynie play mandolin, guitar and fiddle; even Alison Krauss lends some guest vocals, but it’s certainly Merle Haggard’s voice, and of course his personality that shine.

Haggard recreates some of his own material “Big City,” plays tribute to the greats, “Jimmie Rodgers Blues Medley”  and showcases new material.  Particularly of note is “What Happened?” a humorous — but astute — comment on 2007’s America: “Everything Wal-Mart all the time/No more Mom and Pop, five and dime/What Happened/Where did America Go?”

Liberal or conservative, Haggard’s a competent artist.

***

The Confessions of Carrie Underwood

Entertainment Weekly’s cover article this week features Carrie Underwood opening up, or her version of opening up. You can read the whole article here.

Underwood addresses an issue which inspired a lot of diverse opinions from readers on this blog, namely sexism and the Entertainer of the Year award.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: At next month’s CMA Awards, you have three nominations, but not Entertainer of the Year, the biggest prize. In the last six years, no women have been nominated for that. Why do you think that is?
CARRIE UNDERWOOD: Um, I don’t know. And frankly, I get mad when I think about it. I feel like we have to work three times as hard as the guys just to be almost where they are. I don’t think it’s fair, and I don’t think it’s right, and I’m hoping I can do something about that.

EW: I’ve heard people say it’s because that award is primarily about touring, and the guys are the ones who play the big arenas.
CU: ‘Cause they get the opportunity! People like Martina McBride, it’s not like they’re singing in front of 25 people — they’re singing in front of thousands and thousands of people every single night. Someone like that should be nominated.

Rolling Stone names “Fifteen Best Songs about Cheating”

Rolling Stone has decreed that folling songs are the “Fifteen Best Songs about Cheating”:

1. Marvin Gaye - “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
2. Hank Williams - “Your Cheatin’ Heart”
3. Squeeze - “Tempted”
4. Dolly Parton - “Jolene”
5. Naughty By Nature - “O.P.P.”
6. Led Zeppelin - “Your Time is Gonna Come”
7. Jimi Hendrix - “Hey Joe”
8. R. Kelly - “Trapped in the Closet”
9. Arthur Alexander - “Go Home Girl”
10. Justin Timberlake - “Cry Me a River”
11. Billy Paul - “Me and Mrs. Jones”
12. Carrie Underwood - “Before He Cheats”
13. John Lennon - “Jealous Guy”
14. Fleetwood Mac - “Everybody Finds Out”
15. Loretta Lynn - “You Ain’t Woman Enough”

Not surprisingly, country has a big presence on the list with four of the fifteen tracks. I would add John Prine’s “Great Compromise,” Dixie Chicks’ “You Were Mine,” Dwight Yoakam’s “Intentional Heartache,” and, of course, Reba McEntire’s “Does He Love You?”

How would you change Nashville?

In this week’s Nashville Skyline, Chet Flippo outlines what he would change about Nashville if he ran Music City. These are my favorite three changes that Flippo would make:

• I would look into setting up a limit on the number of annual Waylon Jennings musical rip-offs and perhaps license them to potential worthy rip-offers — only after careful screenings to determine the degree of Waylon-worthiness.
• Ditto for licensing fake-exuberant shouts of “whoo!” at the beginning of lame songs that clearly do not merit such faux celebration.
• Also for endless, noodling, pointless rock guitar solos that do not fit the songs they’re shoehorned into.

For my part, I’d make the following changes:

• Give tax breaks for record companies that sign and develop real musicians of traditional instruments like mandolin, dobro, autoharp — it’s national heritage.
• Multi-platinum selling artists must stop mentioning that you shop at Wal-Mart; if you are a multi-millionaire you don’t come off “real” by shopping at Wal-Mart, you come off as “desperate to maintain a everyman image.”
• Run tutorials on what makes a good music video for rising stars. Nashville really needs to stop making terrible music videos. Stop. making. terrible. music. videos. There have only been like four good country music videos ever; try harder!
• Get diverse — quick. Cowboy Troy can’t be the lone Afircan-American country singer (rapper? hick-hop artist?) with name recognition. Cultivate interests in African-American, Hispanic and Asian communities. I live in a city of almost 300k where over half the residents were not born in the US. One day non-Hispanic white Americans will be the minority: don’t let country music fade away because it wasn’t willing to fight for diverse fans.

What would you change about Nashville, and, by extension, country music?

American Music Awards exist; people nominated for them

Did you wake up early to hear the nominees for the American Music Awards announced this morning? NO?!

Well, lucky you, I’ll list them here:

Favorite Male Artist:
Toby Keith
Tim McGraw
Brad Paisley*

Favorite Female Artist:
Martina McBride
Taylor Swift
Carrie Underwood*

Favorite Band, Duo or Group:
Big & Rich*
Brooks & Dunn
Rascal Flatts

Favorite Country Album:
Let It Go Tim McGraw
Me and My Gang Rascal Flatts
Some Hearts Carrie Underwood*

Unlike many award shows that are defacto popularity contests, the American Music Awards actually is a popularity contest and you can cast your vote at ama.abc.com; I starred my choices so you can just copy off me — I don’t mind.

Crossfire Mashup: He Said, He Said

Perfection versus reality came up in two recent interviews and there seems to be a generation gap:

When Merle Haggard was asked what he thought of mainstream country music, he responded:

“Perfect” is a good word. Perfect, always perfect. Nobody’s gonna take a breath. You’re not gonna hear breathing on it. Used to, you could hear Elvis breathe. You knew he was a man. But nowadays, it seems like everything is digitally perfect — boringly perfect. [via CMT]

Josh Turner has trouble reversing the trend on his new live album:

You know, we walked that fine line when we were listening back to it after the show that night. I don’t know how to describe it. It was kind of a tough situation because out of habit, we were just so used to critiquing it and trying to make it sound just right. But we had to keep reminding ourselves this was a live album and it needs to have those imperfections and that’s what makes it cool. It makes it real. [via GAC]

In the end Haggard and Turner are striving for the same thing, but it’s a lot harder for Turner to keep it real, if you will.

What do you think sounds better?

Underwood to launch album in NYC

Carrie Underwood will jump start her new album, Carnival Ride, at Good Morning America’s outdoor concert series in Times Square on October 23. w00t. [via CMT]