Trace Adkins – Just Fishin’
Wait, who thinks they’re just fishing? Is this another one of those Rashomon country songs?
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[4.62]
Alex Ostroff: Sweetly nostalgic ode to building memories with your children, just in time for father’s day. Unfortunately, I can’t help but hear “Just Fishin'” through the whole weird thing about father-daughter relationships in our culture: the presumed desire of men to keep their daughters children as long as possible — as if the only way to have an ideal or healthy relationship with your daughter is one where she’s de- (or pre-) sexualized and not yet a mature adult in charge of her own shit. (See: purity rings, father-daughter dances, etc.) But the only line that really sets off that alarm is the one about driving boys crazy and giving daddy fits, and otherwise this type of song could easily be written about Adkins’ hypothetical son. Plus, the line about “drowning worms and killing time/nothing too ambitious” makes me giggle.
[6]
Michaela Drapes: A song like this should be touching, maybe. Instead it reads as possibly divorced (that line about the little girl being “pretty like her momma” makes me think momma ain’t in his life anymore) or long-haul trucker or oil rig foreman or traveling musician dad trying to make it up to his daughter by taking her fishing every few months when he blows through town. He does seem genuinely glad to be spending time with her, I guess — but the whole recordkeeping of important memories thing is weirdly manipulative. And really, who pronounces ‘big ’un” like that anyway?
[2]
Anthony Easton: I like Adkins better when he leads with his cock.
[2]
Pete Baran: Hey Trace, maybe she thinks you’re fishin’, cos you come home smelling of fish? Actually working the plot to death works well for Trace here, he manages a very likeable adultery song which in the final thirty seconds gets downright hilarious when Trace explains not once but twice, that that a) he isn’t just fishing, and b) the song ISN’T ABOUT FISHING AT ALL! Plus two for knowing irony there.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Listeners think this is a cheating song? It’s pretty damn literal to me: from the acoustic chug to the lines about Adkins not knowin’ whether to laugh or die or cry to the rapt baritone with which he projects his irrepressible delight, this is a father-daughter song through and through. If you want to argue that the genre boasts sexual undertones, fine. I’ll admit it’s easier to make the argument when Adkins can toss asides like “Nuthin’ too ambitious” through a grin as wide as the Mississippi. It’s no “I’m Tryin’,” one of the best country songs of the decade, but he’s made easy look easy almost as long.
[7]
Josh Langhoff: Since “You’re Gonna Miss This” proved that Adkins can do smart poker-faced tearjerkers better than almost anybody, and since my boy’s getting a fishing pole for his birthday, AND since Adkins’s vision of fishing isn’t just a boy’s club, I was all set to hand “Just Fishin’” my still-beating heart — even despite the word “big ’un’” — until the ad-libs at the end. Really, Trace?? “This ain’t about fishin’”??? You don’t have to treat your audience like we’re your six-year-old daughter.
[5]
Isabel Cole: I feel like if I had ever followed through on my vague wish to learn more, meaning anything, about country music, I would like this better. That’s not a dig at country; some things are just better understood with background knowledge of the traditions in which they operate. Without that, I’m left listening to a pretty, sweet, slightly dull song, by a man with a pretty, sweet, slightly dull voice, with lyrics that…. The Jukebox is not a therapist’s office (the decor is less chintzy, for a start), but I cried at that stupid-ass episode of Lost where we’re supposed to give sideways-Jack a cookie for being all “whoa, maybe I should stop being a shitty dad???” and I love working with children, so you can maybe imagine how someone who seems like an actual decent father poignantly capturing the restless exuberance of a little kid whose thoughts flit from ballet shoes to training wheels give this an extra point in my book.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: I have to be imagining this, right? When Trace goes off on how his can’t-be-older-then-eight daughter is all pretty, will make the boys crazy, just like her mom, time’s ticking away, etc. It isn’t even just the “well, what if she doesn’t much attract the guys, or doesn’t want to, where’s her say?” rejoinder you can always make; it’s that now none of the other lines sound anything but dodgy, lost in her holding that pink rod and whatnot, and UGH WHY.
[4]
Katherine and Alex are right, but I do like the way Adkins takes his daughter on a one-of-the-boys fishing trips like it’s no big deal, and also that she still gets to act all girly and talk about ballet shoes and kittens all the while. This could easily have been a father and son song, but it’s not.
All that said, the “This ain’t about fishin'” stuff makes this impossible to love.
Ahaha I listened to this song at least five times in a row and didn’t catch the ain’t about fishin stuff at the end, WHOOPS.
Also Katherine and Alex are totally right and the fact that that barely registered underscores my weakness for the genre.
I find it a pity that we’re concentrating on the is-he-or-isn’t-he-a-lech and overlooking Adkins’ marvelous voice.
I mean, the problem for me is that the lech-y aspects of the song completely distracted me from his totally marvelous voice. I started off completely pulled into the emotion and the narrative until the ick-factor caught me by surprise, and I haven’t been able to hear it the same way since.
I find it a pity that people think that a dad who enjoys spending time with a daughter and says so is somehow, by definition, “lechy.” That said, I found this fairly average/ forgettable as Adkins singles go — I would’ve given a five, if I’d had anything interesting to say about it. Agree he can be a great singer (and that “I’m Tryin'” is merely the most eternal proof), but even his singing didn’t sell me on this one — Just another “gonna miss this” song (and actually, I wasn’t a real big fan of that one, either.)
“Spending time with his daughter,” I meant…Though yeah, on the other hand, as a dad who just finished reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein a couple weeks ago (and whose older of two daughters just recently wrote an essay on Toddlers and Tiaras vis-a-vis doll ontology) I have to admit the ballet slippers and especially “pink rod and reel” (which I hadn’t noticed before) probably would’ve justified deducting another point, at least.
I don’t think it’s by definition — there’s just something, and I really wish I knew what specifically it was — about this version that strikes me as off.
I still maintain what’s off is that these quality interactions require some kind of frame story. Shouldn’t he be listening to her yammer about ballet and pink things more often than on fishing trips? Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it sounds like the daughter’s yearning for a little more of daddy’s attention than she’s usually likely to get. It’s just sad that he can’t quite find a place for his big important daddy feelings without some kind of “bonding” activity at the center of it all. I hate to think that what I’m endorsing here is the nuclear family, but, ugh, maybe I am?
I find it a pity that people think that a dad who enjoys spending time with a daughter and says so is somehow, by definition, “lechy.”
Seriously! I listened to the song three times and couldn’t hear what the majority did.
I mean, if half the listeners think this is a song about adultery, then there has to be some kind of unwanted undertone there.
I still can’t see how this could be a song about adultery…
And a dad who enjoys spending time with his daughter isn’t by definition ‘lechy’. The dad-and-daughter fishing trip is fine and sweet and wonderful. So is the kids-grow-up-so-fast stuff. It’s just the particular way that he does it. Somewhere in between the line about driving boys crazy and the sense that once she’s older moments like this will be impossible to have and cherish is where I get bothered.
If this were a song about a boy, it would be (or at least could be) about how in the future the narrator can go fishing with his son and his son’s son and the tradition continues and family continues and so forth. In the song about his daughter, there’s this unspoken inevitability that a close relationship with her isn’t something that is going to be possible. Or maybe just what Michaela said.
Are we listening to the same song?
holdin’ that pink rod and reel
She’s doin’ almost everything but sittin’ still
Talkin’ ‘bout her ballet shoes and training wheels
And her kittens
And she thinks we’re just fishin’
I say, “Daddy loves you, baby” one more time
She says, “I know. I think I got a bite.”
If this reads as “adultery” to you, it’s gotta at least be a bit more complicated than just adultery, right?
Oh my god. The penny finally dropped on what y’all are hearing, two days after the fact. It’s a bit of a stretch, I think!
and it suggests that you people have never been to an outdoor fucking warehouse–this is not a dick song, this is a song about these: http://www.amazon.com/Barbie-Spincast-Reel-Packaged-Combo/dp/B000P6WDJK
Adkins just aint that subtle, my homies.
Yeah, this is just Alan Jackson’s “Drive” by someone without an ability to hear innuendo, it would appear.