Rolling Stone

Sugary edges, vintage husk, and misguided love: An album review – Nikki Lane’s “All or Nothin'”

I can’t help but wonder, would calling Nikki Lane “outlaw country” have ever crossed NPR or Rolling Stone‘s minds if she didn’t wear vintage western country outfits or if the album’s first track didn’t include the lines, “I’ll knock on [Ol’ Willie’s] door and ask him for a toke // Just because, hell, we’re both outlaws”?

It “outlaw” refers to a mindset, then maybe Lane, a South Carolina native, is an outlaw – but if it refers to the general sound first made famous by the 1976 album of that name, then no. This is a good album, but it is not outlaw country. Perhaps a little closer to the mark is the similarly named Baron Lane over at Twang Nation, who described the album as “Gram Parsons playing in a saloon in a Quentin Tarantino flick.” I think Parsons was twangier than Nikki Lane, but the rest fits. It’s tough to label this album — the title track is even a little bluesy — but “indie roots rock with pedal steel” might be the best description. Perhaps all that comes together as “alt-country,” maybe with “country rock” a distant second? This is why we tend to just label anything even remotely rootsy and non-mainstream as “Americana” and just get on with it!

Labels aside, I do like this album. Lane has a wonderful voice – a high alto with an original mix of singer-songwriter husk and ’50s sugar. Her voice never has a weak moment, but it’s probably showcased best in the style of “Out of My Mind” and the range and speed of “Seein’ Double”. Unfortunately, producer Dan Auerbach (of the Black Keys) used vintage equipment to record the album, so she sounds kind of muffled and echoey the whole time. That could have been a neat effect in places, but used across the whole album, I think it detracts from the overall sound – but only a little. Lane’s voice still shines through. I also like the overall instrumentation balance. It’s the perfect amount of pedal steel (I do love me some pedal steel) and even a little fiddle for an album that wants to borrow from country without sounding like it’s trying to be something it’s not.

The album’s best feature, though, is Lane’s songwriting. She wrote or co-wrote all twelve tracks, and while none are truly breakout songs on their own, several come close. Closer “Want My Heart Back” has some great lyrics and piano riffs that really capture what it feels like to be post-breakup and ready, but still unable, to move on (the reviewer writes from experience). The first track, “Right Time,” does a great job of being mischievous and naughty without getting in-your-face or trite about it. So often those songs are just hackneyed, but Lane hits the right balance. Perhaps my favorite track on the alubm is the duet with Auerbach on “Love’s on Fire,” a song about a couple deeply in love and fighting like hell to keep from drifting apart while he’s on the road, a need she understands but laments. With Lane’s voice and the song’s melancholy context, the line “Won’t you sing me to sleep tonight?” preceding the chorus has a lot of power.

More important than any individual song, however, is the picture they all come together to paint as a whole. The album opens assertive, fast, and strong with the line, “Any day or night time, it’s always the right time // It’s always the right time to do the wrong thing.” That vibe escalates with track 8, “Sleep with a Stranger” – a song that’s pretty much what the title suggests. But don’t think this is just an album about a tough woman declaring her independence, using lovers as props. Some of the songs are practically pining for a lost love, while others either profess love or, like “You Can’t Talk to Me Like That,” describe the feeling of falling in love when one doesn’t want to: “You can’t talk to me like that // It makes me wanna be your baby // I know you want me but it’s such a drag // It’s just not in a girl to act like that.”

Put it all together, and what it sounds like is a woman trying to be strong and independent but who finds that identity betrayed by her own emotions and under attack from our society’s expectations of its women, and trying to find her righteous way among it all. I’ve got a lot of very-strong women friends, and given how f*d up our society can be, I have to imagine that many of them can identify with that position. Judge for yourself it that interpretation fits with Lane’s own description of the recording process:

“My songs always paint a pretty clear picture of what’s been going on in my life, so this is one moody record. There’s lots of talk of misbehaving and moving on… During the first round of recordings, I was in an awkward mood every night I left the studio. It was hard for me to trust that Dan was right when he said I should move a verse around or add an extra chorus. He pushed to find the right feel for each track one by one, and a few months later, I found myself with a damn good record.”

3.5 whiskey bottles out of 5, and I don’t blame anyone who gives it 4. I like it more every time I listen to it, and would bump the rating up a little if the vocal recording wasn’t so muffled/fuzzy. I don’t know if it will be heavy rotation for me, but if not, it’s only because I’ve been on more of a neo-traditional country kick lately than an alt-country kick, and that’s the kind of thing that changes every four or five months anyway.

Eric Church Praises the False God of Homogenization Once Again

I wouldn’t call myself an Eric Church fan. I don’t change the station when his music comes on. Most of his stuff is middling, but every now and then he does a great song. It’s more rock than country, but at least it’s closer to rock than it is pop or rap, unlike most of of today’s radio. And since Church only puts an album out every three years and wrote 120+ songs for the new one, I do believe he’s in it for the music. Best yet, in the cover article for this week’s country issue of Rolling Stone, he praises Kacey Musgraves, rightly says “Brandy Clark should be the face of the genre,” and criticizes laundry-list bro-country as “shallow”. Bravo!

But on the giant other hand, Church is an arrogant jerk who glorifies and encourages violence, hypocritically performs with and thus enables some of the very acts he calls “shallow,” and insists he’s an “outsider” despite his industry awards, giant label, and huge sales. That’s either the biggest case of self-delusion the world has seen since Harold Camping, or just pure marketing crapola.

But my real issue is that Eric Church doesn’t respect country music or even understand what real country music is – to the point that he says that, like Santa or the Tooth Fairy, it doesn’t exist. From the RS story:

You can’t really put Bruce [Springsteen] in a box – what kind of music does Bruce do?” says Church. “It could be country. If he came out right now? No doubt, that’s where he’d live.”

Church’s music, on the other hand, could easily have been considered rock in the Eighties and Nineties… “True red-white-blue American rock & roll fans have gone more toward country. Hip-hop has gone down. Rocks’ down. People are kidding themselves if they think there’s a bigger format than country.”

“What kind of music does Springsteen do”? What a stupid question! ROCK! The answer is ROCK! Right in the middle of his own show, he’ll proclaim the concert “a rock and roll exorcism!”

Then Church says that “country” is now the biggest genre. Well, yeah, and if you want to change Alaska’s name to “Alabama,” then we could call Alabama the biggest state in the country. Which is exactly what Church is doing when he says “Born to Run” is rock if it’s the ’80s but country if its the 2010s. NO! It’s the same recording in any time, so it’s the same genre in any time! Nor is the country audience truly growing – the labels and radio conglomerates are just appealing to various portions of the pop, rock, rap, and country lite crowds all at once. It’s a bigger audience than country has, sure – the same way New York has a bigger population than Chicago. Moving from one to the other didn’t mean the city grew; you changed cities!

This “country” format Church says is so big is NOT country. It’s rap, pop, and rock thrown into a blender with a dash of banjo to mask the lack of twang and story. Simply calling it “country” is not enough to make it country.

But Church disagrees – he seems pretty adamant that rock and country are now the same thing. Last year, he told ABC, “Genres are dead. There’s good music. There’s bad music. And I think the cool thing about Nashville is it is at the epicenter of that kind of thinking.” An odd quote for a guy who says Brandy Clark should be the face of the “genre” – and complete horse hockey. To say there’s nothing more to it than bad vs. good music is to demand that we all have the same taste, to declare that if you like country then you’d damn well better like pop and rap, too, because you’re not allowed to have one without the other anymore.

This homogenization is a terrible thing. It is the true straitjacket on country innovation, and it is an attack on the diversity of fans’ tastes.

I know that a lot of people hate “labels.” They feel like you’re putting them in a box and taking away their individuality, especially in music – plenty of artists claim their music transcends genres and labels.

I understand and respect genre hopping. I do. But I also think labels can be a good thing. If I ask for chicken for dinner, don’t tell me, “There’s good food and there’s bad food, pull something out of the good bad!” No, dammit, this bag is labeled “Cheetos” and that bag “chicken” for a reason. Neither iTunes nor the last few record stores actually remaining are going to merge everything into two sections called “Good Music” and “Bad Music,” and it would be too overwhelming to have just one section alphabetizing EVERYthing. Broad labels are not a bad thing – they help us narrow things down, and give our searches somewhere to start.

Switching gears just a little bit, the RS article goes on to quote publisher Arthur Buenahora saying, “With Eric, we don’t need fuckin’ twin fiddles” – as if fiddles are a bad thing! Sure, you don’t NEED them to do country, but why is that supposed to be a laudatory goal rather than just something different?

The same giant, fiddle-appreciating audience that existed for George Strait in the ’80s, Alan Jackson in the ’90s, and Brad Paisley in the ’00s still exists today. It was only four years ago that Easton Corbin had back-to-back #1 hits! No, that audience’s taste hasn’t changed; it’s just that the music industry is ignoring that audience for a new one. It’s not about the music — it’s about the greed, the money, the bigger and bigger profits. So the next time Church defends homogenization, he should think about where that homogenization is coming from, and remember his own quote, “Once your career becomes about something other than the music, then that’s what it is. I’ll never make that mistake.”

‘Rolling Stone’ launches new country music website with greatest songs list

Well now this is interesting – Rolling Stone magazine launched a new venture today, “RS Country.” It’s a new Nashville office for the new rollingstonecountry.com, and the next print edition will be a special issue focused on country. According to editor Gus Wenner,

Now more than ever, music is all mixed up again. Listen to country radio today, and you’ll hear heavy-metal guitar solos, hip-hop rhythms and EDM flourishes alongside pedal steel and twang: Country now encompasses all of American pop, decked out in cowboy boots and filtered through Music Row. Listen to pop radio, in turn, and you might hear [Taylor] Swift, Carrie Underwood, Lady Antebellum or Florida Georgia Line.

Rolling Stone has always been about storytelling, as has country music – and we’re excited to have a new world of stories to tell. We will treat country the way we treat every other subject we cover: We will take it seriously, we will look beneath the surface, and we will always focus on what brought us here in the first place – the music.

The new website launches with a diverse set of articles covering all aspects of country – an interview with Keith Urban, reviews of the new albums from Sturgill Simpson and Nikki Lane (look for mine later this month or even week), and in true Rolling Stone fashion, their 100 Greatest Country Songs of All Time and a 10 New Artists You Need to Know: Summer 2014 that’s thankfully much heavier on the Americana than the hick-hop.

Both lists bode well for RS’s expanded country coverage. Unfortunately, the only way to read them is as a slideshow, and that’s just stupid. But I did the clicking for you, and here are their top 10 songs:

10. Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, ‘Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys’ (1978)
9. Dolly Parton, ‘Jolene’ (1973)
8. Merle Haggard, ‘Mama Tried’ (1968)
7. Ray Charles, ‘You Don’t Know Me’ (1962)
6. Tammy Wynette, ‘Stand By Your Man’ (1968)
5. Jimmie Rodgers, ‘Standing on the Corner (Blue Yodel #9)’ (1930)
4. George Jones, ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ (1980)
3. Hank Williams, ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ (1949)
2. Patsy Cline, ‘Crazy’ (1961)
1. Johnny Cash, ‘I Walk the Line’ (1956)

Looking through the full 100, the ’90s are a little underrepresented – no “Check Yes or No” or “Should’ve Been a Cowboy”??? – but thank Heavens there’s absolutely no Luke Bryan in sight. In fact, after Taylor Swift’s “Mean” from 2010 clocks in at #24 (the hell?), there’s absolutely nothing from after 1987. I also love that Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow” from just last year is #39.

What do you think of Rolling Stone‘s list? Don’t see your favorite? Disagree that “All My Exes Live In Texas” is George Strait’s best? Upset he didn’t have anything higher than #18? Outraged “Goodbye Earl” beat “Golden Ring” or “Pancho and Lefty”? Let’s discuss in the comments below!