Brad Paisley – Old Alabama
I think this might make him our most-reviewed male artist, which seems a bit weird…
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[5.43]
Alfred Soto: Someone soon will write the definite essay on mainstream eighties country: Ronnie Milsap, Eddie Rabbit, Ricky Skaggs, and Alabama. Paisley doesn’t even try. On his second straight tune reliant on namechecking forebears, Paisley does little more than insert Alabama with what amounts to a shoehorn doubling as guitar (he could have sung about “Old Bob Geldof). The cameos by the idols in question are faceless.
[5]
Martin Skidmore: I like that this features Alabama – sadly a band of that name rather than the entire state, to whom this is some kind of tribute. Perhaps they are responsible for the limp and dated rock-lite sound (though there is some very fine energetic fiddling late on). His voice has a pleasant warmth and brightness, but I always find I am exasperated by the lack of good ideas in his lyrics, as if he is constantly a step from hitting something good, but always missing, ending up with something generic instead.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: “Forget about Sinatra or Coltrane, or some ol’ Righteous Brothers song / And Barry White ain’t gonna work tonight, if you really wanna turn her on.” In which the lines of Us vs. Them are drawn, where Them not-so-coincidentally includes jazz and soul music and those who make it, and still nobody calls Paisley et al out on their crap.
[3]
Zach Lyon: You know, it is possible to write songs about how great country music is (AGAIN and AGAIN and…) without turning it into some music nerd message board battle-of-the-genres debate. Frank Sinatra isn’t around to sing about how much better he is than Alabama. The guys in Alabama probably like Sinatra! And if country music doesn’t stop being about country music, country music will eat itself, and that worries me.
[5]
Josh Love: Paisley’s on autopilot here, piling on the clichés and beefing back up his red-state bona fides after courting Obama voters in ’09 (Brad might make a damn good politician himself some day). Still, the little falsetto he slips into at the end of each refrain is lovely, and I can never resist a tacked-on hoedown either. Not sure who puts on Coltrane to get in the mood, though.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Whatever happened to Alabama? They were pretty much the transition between countrypolitian and the Garth Brooks era.
[8]
Josh Langhoff: I’m not sure why Sinatra wouldn’t work as make-out music, since Paisley spends the first verse rewriting “The Lady Is a Tramp”. But I’m guessing Paisley and his lady like plenty of non-Alabama ‘80s music too, given all those warm added-note chords he throws in, like he’s playing with Toto or something. Anyway, the “Mountain Music” stuff dovetails nicely with my ambition to listen to more old Alabama, the words aren’t anything special but they’re also not embarrassing — well, maybe “love in the first degree” should embarrass him a little — and I’ll probably still enjoy this on “Rick Jackson’s Country Hall of Fame” years from now, when people are writing songs about Paisley and I’m rejoicing that nobody says “hot mess” anymore.
[7]
Our least favorite single by one of our favorite singers.
Katherine and Zach, I’m not sure Paisley’s name-checking is as confrontational as you’re making it out to be. If anything, he’s acknowledging that his four straw-musicians are what normal people consider quiet storm music. (He’s probably thinking of Coltrane’s “Ballads” comp.) The hot southern mess he’s riding around with has unusual quiet storm taste, or he wouldn’t be writing a song about it. Of course, it’s always possible that his fans will adopt militant anti-jazz-and-soul stances, but at least now there’s a country song that mentions Coltrane. (Cue people citing all the other country songs that mention Coltrane.)
And when I say “normal people”, I imagine Paisley includes himself in that group. He probably likes Sinatra and the others as much as Alabama does.
I generally approach things, especially in this arena, with the idea that I’m probably not imagining whatever dog whistles I hear. (It doesn’t help, I guess, that initially my mind went to “old Alabama” in the sense of it being a place and didn’t even realize it was a band until a while later.)
But this one isn’t nearly as bad as — well, you’ll see.
I didn’t hear the racism here–b/c Paisley is often pretty good about race, but I suspect KAtherine might be right, and i am kicking myself for not hearing it.
Paisley’s one of the few, let’s say, openly ecumenical spirits in country. No dog whistles here.
still nobody calls Paisley et al out on their crap
Katherine, this is a bizarre thing to say anyway, since lots of us are calling Paisley (not to mention his friends Et and Al) out on plenty of actual crap, e.g. last time he showed up here, and all over Rolling Country, esp. see the posts by George Smith (“Gorge”), who’s on a vendetta. (If you just want to take a quick glance, here’s me explaining why the only reason I didn’t join in the Jukebox pile-on regarding “This Is Country Music” is that I couldn’t come up with a rhyme for “colonoscopy” or figure out how to deftly work in a reference to Brad’s new backup band, Brad Paisley & The Bloody Stools.
Whereas my only real beef with this one is that he missed the opportunity to tour the whole country; left it at listening to Alabama in Tennessee, when he could have gone on to listening to Black Oak Arkansas while driving though Missouri, to Kansas while going through Colorado, to Utah Phillips while sightseeing Idaho, to Oregon while heading down the California coast, and so forth.
True; I was thinking less in terms of here and more in terms of elsewhere, and it’s entirely possible I’m wrong on this point besides, or at least poorly phrased. (disclosure: I’d planned to word it a different way after submitting but missed the cutoff.)