After a long, dubious absence from blogging, I've decided to celebrate my return in honor of the long needed appearance of country music's outlaw savior, Jamey Johnson. I purchased Johnson's second album, "That Lonesome Song," a few months ago and I'm nothing short of blown away.
The second track on the album, "High Cost of Living," is an anthem for anyone who struggles with addiction and with the memory of what that addiction has cost them in life. The song begins, "I was just a normal guy," a lyric that speaks volumes, because we are all in fact normal at some point in our lives. It goes on to discuss smoking pot in a Southern Baptist parking lot while praying for guidance from God and finally swells to the final verse when the song's protagonist describes watching the cops kick in the door to a motel room and how he subsequently lost his wife and home to cocaine addiction. While this imagery may at first seem extreme to many country music fans, it's a simple fact that anyone can find themselves in the grip of alcohol and drug addiction by making a few wrong turns.
The first time I listened to the next track, "Angel," it immediately brought forth a flood of emotions in me as it touched on the timeless topic of divorce. It opens with a lonely steel guitar playing over a steady acoustic guitar rhythm and has a classic country sound that would've brought a tear to Hank Williams eyes the night he rolled out of Knoxville for the last time. "Am I right or is she right? Or are we both wrong? Or is it even about that at all? As heaven is fadin, we're fightin and fussin. And the devil's just havin a ball. And the line between evil and good disappears. And now it's so hard to tell. Am I shakin a demon that's after my soul or sendin an angel to hell?" The lyric and the haunting steel guitar capture everything that is painful, doubtful, and disappointing about divorce.
The next two tracks, "Place Out On The Ocean" and "Mowin Down The Roses," are solid if not particularly memorable songs for me. I feel compelled to offer a bit of clarification regarding my assessment of these songs. They're not bad songs, they're just the least traditional country songs on the album.
Johnson's cover of "The Door Is Always Open," a song penned by longtime songwriters Dickey Lee and Bob McDill and previously recorded most notably by Waylon Jennings, is next. Although I've always appreciated this song's lyrics, Johnson's voice brings it to a new level here. The song is a message from the singer to an old lover who is marrying another man. "I saw your picture in the paper. And I see you've married good. And I know that he can give you, all the things I never could. But I know that he can't give you, what you need most of all. So the door is always open, and the light's on in the hall."
"Mary Go Round" is a song that again addresses the pain and confusion of going through a divorce. The song discusses a man's perspective of his ex-wife turning her back on her morals in an attempt to find comfort in a bottle and in the arms of a stranger. The first verse is the man's indictment of himself for turning his back on his wife thereby causing her reckless behavior. "Mary and I were the perfect picture of love. But my world started spinning around, til it wasn't enough. I tried to hang on to the heaven she made just for me. But when I slipped and fell, it drove her to hell. And Lord knows that I hate to see, Mary go round." Nearly anyone who has experienced the emotional trauma of a failed marriage should find commonality in this song.
Everyone with a pulse and a radio or TV has heard "In Color," the first single from "That Lonesome Song." Among other awards, "In Color" won the coveted Song of the Year award at this year's Academy of Country Music Awards. The lyrics tell of a man who sits down with his grandfather while the older man recalls his life through black and white photographs. "This one here's taken overseas in the middle of hell in 1943, in the wintertime. You can almost see my breath. That was my tail gunner ol' Johnny McGhee, he was a high school teacher from New Orleans and he had my back right through the day we left." I can't listen to this song without thinking of my own grandfather and great uncle, who served in the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army respectively during World War II along with hundreds of thousands of other brave men and women. If you've never taken the time to sit down and talk with someone from "The Greatest Generation," do so.
"In Color" gives way to "The Last Cowboy," a sentimental look at the demise of the true cowboy. "An old pickup truck means your down on your luck anymore. And boots and straw hats are just a thing of the past anymore. And ever since Waylon, I can't find no one to buy into sad country songs. Tell me who's gonna ride us away, when the last cowboy's gone?" Around the 2:27 mark, the song eases into a guitar solo that evokes the Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson collaborations on which Johnson cut his teeth. The final verse laments, "If John Wayne, Gene and Roy, are now just some cowboys, yesterday stampeded on, tell me who's gonna ride us away? Who's gonna do it that way? Does everything good have to change, til the last cowboy's gone?" Let's hope not.
The title track to "That Lonesome Song" follows and is a perfect musical tribute to the "outlaw" country sound. The listener almost feels the brutal hangover while taking in the first verse, "That morning the sun made it's way, through the windshield of my Chevrolet. Whiskey eyes and ashtray breath, on a chert rock gravel road. What the hell did I do last night? That's the story of my life. Like tryin to remember words, to a song nobody wrote." A short time later, the song launches into a lyrically driven beat that proves once and for all that Johnson is as devout and accomplished a musical disciple of Waylon Jennings as has ever walked this earth.
The title track is followed by a solid cover of Waylon's classic, "Dreaming My Dreams With You" in which he considers just how much he'll miss dreaming dreams with a lost lover.
The rollicking, insightful, and frequently humorous "Women" is the next track on the album. Johnson discusses the wide variety of women who have passed through his life and muses with a palpable grin, "I just can't ever seem to make one stay."
The first time I heard "Stars In Alabama," I immediately thought, this sounds like a cross between Alabama and a Hank Williams Jr. I pulled out the liner notes and found that the song was co-written by Johnson and former Alabama member Teddy Gentry. When the second verse begins, "I hung up the phone and I could feel the emptiness at 80 miles and hour. And I listened close and I could hear my heart beatin louder than the tires, " I felt the creeping homesickness of a musician on the road caught somewhere between one show and the next.
The album closes with a tip of the hat to honky tonks, drunks, good ol' boys, Waylon Jennings, and George Jones. Johnson says that a college buddy of his went to buy his first album, "The Dollar" and found it in the record store alphabetically between Jennings and Jones. In a nod to his outlaw roots, one verse states, "Well some record executives found me one night. I was singin half lit, they said it sounded just right." Johnson's sarcastically and appropriately retorts, "Right."
Johnson is, in his own words, "right there between Jennings and Jones." His music and vocal styles evoke a wide range of artists including Vern Gosdin, Hank Williams Jr., Alabama, Waylon Jennings, and George Jones. But he's much more than just a sum of these parts. For me, Johnson is the most significant musician to come onto the country music scene in the last quarter century.
I'm hesitant to label anything as "the best of all-time," because placing that label on anything typically comes across as trite and lacking sufficient historical perspective. But I've been a fan of country music and a student of the history of country music since I was 5 years old. And I can say, without reservation, that I've never enjoyed an album as much as I've enjoyed "That Lonesome Song." From the opening solemn story of addiction to the last hymn like steel guitar note that brings each song to a close, this album delivers. So for those of us who've been wondering if the last cowboy was gone, "That Lonesome Song" proves that there's at least one who is alive and well.
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