My Kinda Party: My Country Critics Ballot, 2010
Here's my ballot for the Nashville Scene's Country Critics Poll.
TOP TEN COUNTRY SINGLES OF 2010:
1. Little Big Town "Little White Church"
2. Sunny Sweeney "From A Table Away"
3. Martina McBride "Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong"
4. Taylor Swift "Mean"
5. Laura Bell Bundy "Giddy On Up"
6. Kenny Chesney "Somewhere With You"
7. Trace Adkins "Ala-Freakin-Bama"
8. Sarah Darling "Whenever It Rains"
9. Stealing Angels "He Better Be Dead"
10. Sarah Darling "With Or Without You"
TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2010:
1. Taylor Swift Speak Now
2. Jamey Johnson The Guitar Song
3. Kenny Chesney Hemingway's Whiskey
4. Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, Dharohar Project Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, Dharohar Project [EP]
5. Reba McEntire All The Women I Am
6. Chely Wright Lifted Off The Ground
7. Jerrod Niemann Judge Jerrod & The Hung Jury
8. Flynnville Train Redemption
9. Laura Marling I Speak Because I Can
10. Laura Bell Bundy Achin' And Shakin'
TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2010:
-
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST MALE VOCALISTS OF 2010:
1. Kenny Chesney
2. Jerrod Niemann
3. Jamey Johnson
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST FEMALE VOCALISTS OF 2010:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Miranda Lambert
3. Gretchen Wilson
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST LIVE ACTS OF 2010:
-
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST SONGWRITERS OF 2010:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Jamey Johnson
3. Randy Houser
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST DUOS, TRIOS OR GROUPS OF 2010:
1. Little Big Town
2. Stealing Angels
3. The Band Perry
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST NEW ACTS OF 2010:
1. Jerrod Niemann
2. Laura Bell Bundy
3. Stealing Angels
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST OVERALL ACTS OF 2010:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Jamey Johnson
3. Kenny Chesney
A few notes about my criteria for "borderline" entries, since I'm erratic from year to year on what to count. (1) I consider EPs eligible and I count them as albums even if they're under 25 minutes, since you don't have a separate category for them. You ought to consider it for next year - EP is a format that's getting used a lot again (damned if I know why, though I think it's part of the whole leaks, promotional-download-only-singles, real-singles, albums, deluxe-editions, Target-editions, Walmart-editions, extra-additions, let's-keep-the-performer-in-front-of-your-ears promotion-'n'-desperation activity that the biz engages in while scrambling to come up with a new business model). (2) This year I'm counting Brit folkies as country; they're as country as a lot of alt-country, and if Richard Thompson counts as country, for sure the Brit folkies do. That said, the reason I'm voting for Laura Marling and friends here is that I was feeling meh about my borderline albums: a good but subpar album by Gretchen Wilson, a good set of songs by Randy Houser that his voice doesn't come to grips with, a scattershot and unexpectedly characterless album by Lee Brice that nonetheless has a couple of my favorite songs of the year in any genre, "Picture Of Me" and "Sumter County Friday Night," and a journey to left field by Jace Everett that's got as much reverb as T-Pain has Autotune (also think it was originally 2009, though this year it got picked up by a different record company, but I'm only making sense of it now, and haven't yet succeeded) (not that I have anything against Autotune or reverb but I do wonder if Jace is overcompensating). (3) Promo download singles and charting nonsingles, of which Taylor had several; her best new song, "Innocent," was in the latter category: decided not to count it, 'cause I already like my singles list as is and the list could have easily been three times as long. I'm counting only one of the two Taylor Swift promotional downloaders (the two are "Mean" and "Speak Now," both of which are better than her actual push-them-to-radio singles), because I thought "Mean" was significant enough that I couldn't keep it off but thought one half-eligible Taylor song was enough. As always, these things depend on the situation, the song, and the year. (However, I don't want to give the impression that I usually like Mumford & Sons, since I find the guy's singing overstrained, but something clicks when they start doing dance stormers with South Asians.)
Comments (in these comments I'm referring to Geoffrey Himes' essay from last year's poll issue):
So, when last we met you were suggesting that Taylor Swift needed country mentors to root her in country soil, maybe a list of songs and a listening station, the thought not occurring in your prose that someone might possibly learn something from Taylor Swift, might even learn something from her about country music, or that she might already have some knowledge and have mentors, Faith Hill and Dixie Chicks records not necessarily being so barren (and records by who knows who else? do you know? have you asked her for her list of 100 records?), and Nathan Chapman and Liz Rose not necessarily being so dumb.
No one else in country looks back as much as Taylor Swift does, circling around in constant reassessment. She started her recording career with a retrospective song about a love affair, a song she wrote at fifteen while the affair was still underway. At twenty she remembered that at fourteen she was so embarrassed by the thought of her friends seeing her mom bring her to a movie that she made her mom drop her off a block from the theater. Not an extraordinary event, but this is the sort of detail that Taylor thinks to put in songs, the sort of incident that I imagine acts like Montgomery Gentry and Eric Church wish were in their songs, those guys not just waving their heritage like a flag (though they do that, too) but genuinely wrestling with the past, featuring rifts and reconciliation between parents and grown children, between men and women.
Taylor is always in argument with herself. She advises a little girl to never grow up (though Taylor is really addressing herself too); "just stay this little," Taylor says. But in another song she lets the little girl inside her answer back in fantasy sing-song, the little kid desperate to grow up, "Someday I'll be big enough so you can't hit me." Intriguingly, the song that sounds most conventionally country on the album goes, "Someday I'll be livin' in a big old city, and all you're ever gonna be is mean." Now, I don't see how any of these songs would have been different if she'd listened to "Lost Highway" or "Folsom Prison Blues" or "Mama Tried" before writing them (and you don't know that she didn't). Back in 2006 ("Cold As You") she started a fight just to feel something. So now what's she supposed to do to make her more country, if that's not enough? Ream out an old boyfriend in Reno, just to watch him cry?
Taylor is someone who never panders to her audience's insecurities, but shows actual insight into where those insecurities come from. So what might make her relevant, to country artists and many others, is that she actually digs at where she actually comes from, a connection to the Haggards and Williamses and Cashes and the rest being that she too has hungry eyes.
In Brantley Gilbert's "My Kinda Party," covered in an excellent rocking version by Jason Aldean, we're given instructions how to raise hell but how to keep that hell within acceptable sociological limits. There's unintended poignance in the fact of the song, reminiscent of the deliberate poignance of Merle Haggard's "Place where even squares can have a ball" and the Clash's "White riot, I want a riot, white riot, a riot of my own." The difference is that Haggard and Strummer are smart and know that they're singing within and about limitations, with great ambivalence as to whether the limits support and protect them or inhibit them or both. Whereas "My Kinda Party" fumbles around, recognizing the restrictions of the cleancut 9 to 5 (and tacitly acknowledging that the listeners likely hold service jobs not farm jobs) but not copping to the song's own inhibitions, Skynyrd and Hank once again being reduced to mere signifiers - though as you can tell I'm perpetually fascinated by this stuff, and there's genuine energy in the song, even if the song refuses to acknowledge the anxiety that undergirds the energy.
On his album Judge Jerrod & The Hung Jury, Jerrod Niemann looks at his own style of partying through easily misting eyes; has a funny little skit where a concerned female fan encompassing the ages 12 through 24 ("currently the only demographic purchasing country music at this time") writes Jerrod a letter in which she says that consumers of her sort have no interest in drinking or partying songs. Anyway, I want to contradict our representative fan and reassure Jerrod by pointing out that I conducted a survey of my own and these are the results - well, I didn't conduct the survey, simply noticed and analyzed the data, which I present here:
Billboard Magazine, biggest songs of 2010:
1. Ke$ha "TiK ToK"
Just saying.
And sure you can point out that Pebe Sebert's daughter isn't making country music, but I'll point out that youngsters who download songs by, say, Taylor Swift also have the ability to download songs that are not by Taylor Swift and not country and also have the ability to download dance mixes of Taylor Swift songs and webrips of Taylor Swift singing songs by Amy Winehouse and Beyoncé Knowles and Miranda Lambert and Eminem and Rihanna, and that Taylor Swift dance mixes get played on r&b and pop stations. But yes, Taylor, who admires Faith Hill for her classiness, has indeed stepped into a no man's land that is beyond a particular country subset's comfort zone. Maybe Taylor's kinda party is more complicated than their kind, or anyway brings complications to the surface that their party submerges, her college song not being about drinking but about waitressing and about the need to eventually earn a living.
On a different subject, or at least a tangential one, potentially the most significant country hit of the year was Miranda Lambert's "Only Prettier," which only got to number 12 on the country charts (and only made number 13 on my long list), but has a sound that really disconcerts me. It's got bluesy picking and weepy steel guitar riffs and singing with as twangy a twang as any twang freak could wish for, but also absolutely loud sloshing guitar, hard rock beats, bits of feedback and guitar roars and the vocal twang overdubbed and harmonized with the distortion needle high in the red. Now, I've made way noisier music myself and am fine with all sorts of distortion and cacophony from the days of Teenage Jesus up through the Gore Gore Girls and into the present (I've mixed feelings about Sleigh Bells but endorse their "Crown On The Ground," though it's too static, and by static here I mean immobile, not noisy, though of course it is noisy, but anyway as I said, I've made far noisier myself). And none of that disconcerts me the way the relatively mild "Only Prettier" does, the "Only Prettier" mixture making me seasick, somehow. My inner jury is still out as to whether that's a good thing. At the moment I'm rating the track below "The House That Built Me" (number 12 on my long list), even though I'm sure that "Only Prettier" is the better song. Check back with me next year.
Frank
TOP TEN COUNTRY SINGLES OF 2010:
1. Little Big Town "Little White Church"
2. Sunny Sweeney "From A Table Away"
3. Martina McBride "Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong"
4. Taylor Swift "Mean"
5. Laura Bell Bundy "Giddy On Up"
6. Kenny Chesney "Somewhere With You"
7. Trace Adkins "Ala-Freakin-Bama"
8. Sarah Darling "Whenever It Rains"
9. Stealing Angels "He Better Be Dead"
10. Sarah Darling "With Or Without You"
TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2010:
1. Taylor Swift Speak Now
2. Jamey Johnson The Guitar Song
3. Kenny Chesney Hemingway's Whiskey
4. Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, Dharohar Project Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, Dharohar Project [EP]
5. Reba McEntire All The Women I Am
6. Chely Wright Lifted Off The Ground
7. Jerrod Niemann Judge Jerrod & The Hung Jury
8. Flynnville Train Redemption
9. Laura Marling I Speak Because I Can
10. Laura Bell Bundy Achin' And Shakin'
TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2010:
-
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST MALE VOCALISTS OF 2010:
1. Kenny Chesney
2. Jerrod Niemann
3. Jamey Johnson
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST FEMALE VOCALISTS OF 2010:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Miranda Lambert
3. Gretchen Wilson
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST LIVE ACTS OF 2010:
-
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST SONGWRITERS OF 2010:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Jamey Johnson
3. Randy Houser
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST DUOS, TRIOS OR GROUPS OF 2010:
1. Little Big Town
2. Stealing Angels
3. The Band Perry
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST NEW ACTS OF 2010:
1. Jerrod Niemann
2. Laura Bell Bundy
3. Stealing Angels
COUNTRY MUSIC'S THREE BEST OVERALL ACTS OF 2010:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Jamey Johnson
3. Kenny Chesney
A few notes about my criteria for "borderline" entries, since I'm erratic from year to year on what to count. (1) I consider EPs eligible and I count them as albums even if they're under 25 minutes, since you don't have a separate category for them. You ought to consider it for next year - EP is a format that's getting used a lot again (damned if I know why, though I think it's part of the whole leaks, promotional-download-only-singles, real-singles, albums, deluxe-editions, Target-editions, Walmart-editions, extra-additions, let's-keep-the-performer-in-front-of-your-ears promotion-'n'-desperation activity that the biz engages in while scrambling to come up with a new business model). (2) This year I'm counting Brit folkies as country; they're as country as a lot of alt-country, and if Richard Thompson counts as country, for sure the Brit folkies do. That said, the reason I'm voting for Laura Marling and friends here is that I was feeling meh about my borderline albums: a good but subpar album by Gretchen Wilson, a good set of songs by Randy Houser that his voice doesn't come to grips with, a scattershot and unexpectedly characterless album by Lee Brice that nonetheless has a couple of my favorite songs of the year in any genre, "Picture Of Me" and "Sumter County Friday Night," and a journey to left field by Jace Everett that's got as much reverb as T-Pain has Autotune (also think it was originally 2009, though this year it got picked up by a different record company, but I'm only making sense of it now, and haven't yet succeeded) (not that I have anything against Autotune or reverb but I do wonder if Jace is overcompensating). (3) Promo download singles and charting nonsingles, of which Taylor had several; her best new song, "Innocent," was in the latter category: decided not to count it, 'cause I already like my singles list as is and the list could have easily been three times as long. I'm counting only one of the two Taylor Swift promotional downloaders (the two are "Mean" and "Speak Now," both of which are better than her actual push-them-to-radio singles), because I thought "Mean" was significant enough that I couldn't keep it off but thought one half-eligible Taylor song was enough. As always, these things depend on the situation, the song, and the year. (However, I don't want to give the impression that I usually like Mumford & Sons, since I find the guy's singing overstrained, but something clicks when they start doing dance stormers with South Asians.)
Comments (in these comments I'm referring to Geoffrey Himes' essay from last year's poll issue):
So, when last we met you were suggesting that Taylor Swift needed country mentors to root her in country soil, maybe a list of songs and a listening station, the thought not occurring in your prose that someone might possibly learn something from Taylor Swift, might even learn something from her about country music, or that she might already have some knowledge and have mentors, Faith Hill and Dixie Chicks records not necessarily being so barren (and records by who knows who else? do you know? have you asked her for her list of 100 records?), and Nathan Chapman and Liz Rose not necessarily being so dumb.
No one else in country looks back as much as Taylor Swift does, circling around in constant reassessment. She started her recording career with a retrospective song about a love affair, a song she wrote at fifteen while the affair was still underway. At twenty she remembered that at fourteen she was so embarrassed by the thought of her friends seeing her mom bring her to a movie that she made her mom drop her off a block from the theater. Not an extraordinary event, but this is the sort of detail that Taylor thinks to put in songs, the sort of incident that I imagine acts like Montgomery Gentry and Eric Church wish were in their songs, those guys not just waving their heritage like a flag (though they do that, too) but genuinely wrestling with the past, featuring rifts and reconciliation between parents and grown children, between men and women.
Taylor is always in argument with herself. She advises a little girl to never grow up (though Taylor is really addressing herself too); "just stay this little," Taylor says. But in another song she lets the little girl inside her answer back in fantasy sing-song, the little kid desperate to grow up, "Someday I'll be big enough so you can't hit me." Intriguingly, the song that sounds most conventionally country on the album goes, "Someday I'll be livin' in a big old city, and all you're ever gonna be is mean." Now, I don't see how any of these songs would have been different if she'd listened to "Lost Highway" or "Folsom Prison Blues" or "Mama Tried" before writing them (and you don't know that she didn't). Back in 2006 ("Cold As You") she started a fight just to feel something. So now what's she supposed to do to make her more country, if that's not enough? Ream out an old boyfriend in Reno, just to watch him cry?
Taylor is someone who never panders to her audience's insecurities, but shows actual insight into where those insecurities come from. So what might make her relevant, to country artists and many others, is that she actually digs at where she actually comes from, a connection to the Haggards and Williamses and Cashes and the rest being that she too has hungry eyes.
In Brantley Gilbert's "My Kinda Party," covered in an excellent rocking version by Jason Aldean, we're given instructions how to raise hell but how to keep that hell within acceptable sociological limits. There's unintended poignance in the fact of the song, reminiscent of the deliberate poignance of Merle Haggard's "Place where even squares can have a ball" and the Clash's "White riot, I want a riot, white riot, a riot of my own." The difference is that Haggard and Strummer are smart and know that they're singing within and about limitations, with great ambivalence as to whether the limits support and protect them or inhibit them or both. Whereas "My Kinda Party" fumbles around, recognizing the restrictions of the cleancut 9 to 5 (and tacitly acknowledging that the listeners likely hold service jobs not farm jobs) but not copping to the song's own inhibitions, Skynyrd and Hank once again being reduced to mere signifiers - though as you can tell I'm perpetually fascinated by this stuff, and there's genuine energy in the song, even if the song refuses to acknowledge the anxiety that undergirds the energy.
On his album Judge Jerrod & The Hung Jury, Jerrod Niemann looks at his own style of partying through easily misting eyes; has a funny little skit where a concerned female fan encompassing the ages 12 through 24 ("currently the only demographic purchasing country music at this time") writes Jerrod a letter in which she says that consumers of her sort have no interest in drinking or partying songs. Anyway, I want to contradict our representative fan and reassure Jerrod by pointing out that I conducted a survey of my own and these are the results - well, I didn't conduct the survey, simply noticed and analyzed the data, which I present here:
Billboard Magazine, biggest songs of 2010:
1. Ke$ha "TiK ToK"
Just saying.
And sure you can point out that Pebe Sebert's daughter isn't making country music, but I'll point out that youngsters who download songs by, say, Taylor Swift also have the ability to download songs that are not by Taylor Swift and not country and also have the ability to download dance mixes of Taylor Swift songs and webrips of Taylor Swift singing songs by Amy Winehouse and Beyoncé Knowles and Miranda Lambert and Eminem and Rihanna, and that Taylor Swift dance mixes get played on r&b and pop stations. But yes, Taylor, who admires Faith Hill for her classiness, has indeed stepped into a no man's land that is beyond a particular country subset's comfort zone. Maybe Taylor's kinda party is more complicated than their kind, or anyway brings complications to the surface that their party submerges, her college song not being about drinking but about waitressing and about the need to eventually earn a living.
On a different subject, or at least a tangential one, potentially the most significant country hit of the year was Miranda Lambert's "Only Prettier," which only got to number 12 on the country charts (and only made number 13 on my long list), but has a sound that really disconcerts me. It's got bluesy picking and weepy steel guitar riffs and singing with as twangy a twang as any twang freak could wish for, but also absolutely loud sloshing guitar, hard rock beats, bits of feedback and guitar roars and the vocal twang overdubbed and harmonized with the distortion needle high in the red. Now, I've made way noisier music myself and am fine with all sorts of distortion and cacophony from the days of Teenage Jesus up through the Gore Gore Girls and into the present (I've mixed feelings about Sleigh Bells but endorse their "Crown On The Ground," though it's too static, and by static here I mean immobile, not noisy, though of course it is noisy, but anyway as I said, I've made far noisier myself). And none of that disconcerts me the way the relatively mild "Only Prettier" does, the "Only Prettier" mixture making me seasick, somehow. My inner jury is still out as to whether that's a good thing. At the moment I'm rating the track below "The House That Built Me" (number 12 on my long list), even though I'm sure that "Only Prettier" is the better song. Check back with me next year.
Frank
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