Comments:

2007 was awash with artistic lightweights—Carrie Underwood, Sugarland or Taylor Swift. The core of what has enabled country music to endure, decade after decade, is now threatened by these glammed-out and puffed-up personalities. Rather than dig deep and find something worth saying, most of Nashville’s current crop of superstars would rather stitch together an album overseen by a committee of songwriters. It’s a trend that made the discs from Miranda Lambert and Josh Turner all the more welcome: youthful performers who can write their own tunes and deliver a sound rooted in the venerable past and the Facebook’d future. —Preston Jones

Underwood’s incisor-sharp bite on “Before He Cheats” helped this tune become the anthem for every female ever done wrong by a no-good, low-down, cheatin’ dog. —Lorie Hollabaugh

Miranda Lambert’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend passed for the cause célèbre country record of the year, at least with critics. Plenty good, plenty vengeful in all the right places. But I don’t think it married bad old Nashville to good old alt-country in any meaningful way. Perfectly serviceable mainstream country, complete with sound effects. I voted for its single. —Edd Hurt

In the Artist of the Year category, give Miranda Lambert every point you can and nothing to anyone else—conceptually, she ruled. —Robert Christgau

ROBERT AND ALISON:

In the spring of 1995, I was editor of New Country magazine and we did the first national cover story on Alison Krauss. In the story, written by Jim Macnie, Krauss sang the praises of the Cox Family and Dolly Parton. Less predictably, she gushed about bumping into Lou Gramm, lead singer for Foreigner, in an airport. Anyone who remembers that story probably wasn’t surprised to hear that Krauss and Robert Plant were collaborating in 2007. That Raising Sand turned out to be one of the year’s musical highlights is a fitting tribute, not only to its visionary principals, but to country music’s unpredictable boundaries. —David Sokol

It feels absurd to be typing Robert Plant’s name on top of a country music poll. But there it is. And I sure played this record more than I watched the YouTube videos from the London Led Zep reunion. For a dude never renowned for his subtlety, Plant has become quite an artist. And Alison Krauss remains my biggest country music hero. —Will Hermes

MAINSTREAM:

Country radio in 2007 was too often like listening to a high school motivational speaker expounding upon America’s two most pervasive and pernicious slogans. First, you can be and do anything if only you want it badly enough, and second, there’s nothing worth wanting that you don’t already have. There’s not one thing wrong with songs of uplift—we should all be more grateful than we are for friends and family. And I know that both “You can be anything” and “You should treasure what you have” are meant to be life-affirming. My concern is that if the bulk of mainstream country can only tell us that our problems may be remedied by a shot of positive attitude or that our problems aren’t really problems at all—well, then we aren’t affirming life, we’re denying its built-in complexity. We can’t do anything we want, after all, and sometimes all the precious things we have may still be fatally insufficient. Country music used to know these realities by heart. They were part of what made country country. But in ’07, a lot of big-time country was living in a fantasy world. Call it Sugarland. —David Cantwell

Today I’m in the diner, finally getting what I’m always being served, which is the nasality-as-gentle-astringency, the everywhere-at-once yet tastefully compressed hard-shell hard sell: the tirelessly, carefully flattened hills of Sugarland. Can’t remember the name of the song, which is one of the ways I know I’m in Sugarland, served up just right, by the shining morning face of Jennifer Nettles, although that smiling busboy’s hat has something to do with it too, and today I’m glad to see them both. —Don Allred

Sonically, country lets me down a lot. On the other hand, one of the weirdest and most gratifyingly overproduced records of the year was Big & Rich’s Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace. It had a kitchen-sink aesthetic I found energizing in small doses—bizarre retro-camp, anonymous and annoying country-pop at a whole new level of achievement. Anyway, the record had great arrangements, lots of variety and the worst wedding song in history—precisely because they wrote it to be a wedding song. —Edd Hurt

Paisley’s 5th Gear was commercial country at its best, witty without pandering, corn-fed without being corny. You sensed even the punch lines were heartfelt—especially those in “Online.” For a genre that dwells more on the timeless than the timely, that one hit the zeitgeist right between the eyes. —Will Hermes