Just when you think you’ve heard everything…

…something new comes along and makes you rethink that.

I have long thought that real country music and heavy metal have a lot in common despite the radical difference in sound. They’re both gritty, real explorations of the human condition at their best. A buddy of mine made the observation that country & metal are like estranged cousins who meet at a family reunion & discover they have a lot in common. Which is an excellent way of putting it, if you really think about it.

You’ll remember some time ago that DevilDriver frontman Dez Fafara did a project with a lot of other metal guys where they recorded a lot of classic country songs. I listened to some of it here and there, and while it wasn’t quite my thing, I rather appreciated what they were trying to do. I thought it was the first of its kind…

…but apparently I was mistaken.

Screwing around on Spotify today, I saw a 2006 album from a dude named Jeff Walker called Welcome to Carcass Cuntry — Carcass, as in the English death metal band (Walker is that band’s bass player). Actually, what I saw was a song from that album on one of my Spotify daily mixes, a song called “You’re Still On My Mind.”

Wait, is that the song I think it is?

It sure as fuck was.

An old George Jones weeper that hardly anyone remembers anymore! Gotta admit, I thought that was pretty damn impressive. But that was far from the only thing. There were also a couple of Hank Sr. covers (“I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”) and Connie Smith’s “Once A Day.” (Connie freaking Smith! I NEVER would have seen that coming.) Gotta admit, those choices kinda blew my fuses. Seems like so many metalheads have more respect for country music than a lot of the people who allegedly sing it. Between Florida-Georgia Line name-dropping Hank and Jeff Walker singing actual Hank songs, I will take the latter any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Sunday music musings, 27.10.2019

Many years ago, when I was young and stupid, I would be nonplussed when my favorite artists, songs, albums, whatever, didn’t win certain awards. Then I discovered the Texas music scene and all the artists who wouldn’t ever win any of those awards, and I left that attitude behind and never looked back.

That being said, if you needed yet more proof that mainstream country music in the ’10s has been a shitshow without equal, here you go:

Luke Bryan Wins Inaugural ACM Album Of The Decade Award For ‘Crash My Party’

I suppose it could have been worse — after all, 2013 was also the year of FGL’s debut — but in a decade that brought us George Strait’s Here For A Good Time, Jason Isbell’s Something More Than Free, and Randy Rogers’ and Wade Bowen’s Hold My Beer, Vol. 1….well, frankly, I got nothin’.

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And then to top the ’10s off, there’s this:

But all of a sudden Hootie & the Blowfish—not just Darius Rucker—is signed to Universal Music Group’s country imprint in Nashville, is planning to release a new record on November 1st called Imperfect Circle, and just released a straight up pop rock Hootie & the Blowfish single called “Hold On” that has just become the “most added” song on COUNTRY radio, rocketing all the way to #30 on the charts upon its debut. That’s right, as we were all jamming out to the new Cody Jinks records, Hootie & the Blowfish has officially become a country music group with a major label deal, full support from country radio, and all the other rights and privileges of a mainstream country music act thereof.

Look, I know that Reba McEntire said a few years ago that ’70s rock was country now, and that she was at best neutral about it, but frankly, I think Dale Watson’s take on it was a lot more accurate. And that phenomenon kinda scares me, really. What’s ’20s country going to sound like? If the progression holds, it’s gonna be fucking Poison and Motley Crue. (Not Metallica or Iron Maiden, because that stuff’s too songwriterly.) And in the ’30s…well, the less said the better.

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For longer than I am willing to admit, I thought Free was “that band that did ‘All Right Now,’ that band that Paul Rodgers fronted before Bad Company.”

They had more songs than that — six albums’ worth, even. A lot of those songs were really good, too. I don’t know what I’d count as the bigger crime against music, the fact that Free is mainly known for that one song or the fact that so few people know Fleetwood Mac as it existed before Lindsey Buckingham & Stevie Nicks.