Music
Gretchen Wilson
All Jacked Up (Sony)Gretchen Wilson could have called her second album Redneck Woman Squared. More than a sequel, it’s a magnification of the hard-drinking, tough-talking, working-class persona she introduced on her 4 million-selling debut.
This time, Wilson drinks more. She calls more people out. She gives shout-outs to bartenders and guys who chew tobacco. And she makes it clear she’s opinionated and proud of her blue-collar upbringing, and she doesn’t give a damn if that bothers anyone.
In other words, wealth and success haven’t changed her—she’s still redneck as hell. If anything, she goes to greater lengths to define what that means, moving past broad-brush generalities to specifics about what she looks for in a man (a Skoal ring on the back pocket) and what she despises in women (Hollywood phoniness as typified by Paris Hilton). She also underscores that staying home and raising a family is hard work.
Wilson’s gritty, entertaining way of representing working-class women on her 2004 debut, Redneck Woman, turned her into country music’s biggest sensation since the Dixie Chicks. Like that trio of Texans, Wilson has a loud and proud personality, but she eschews the Chicks’ flirtation with fashion designers and the liberal intelligentsia. Instead, she puts all her chips in with the NASCAR-loving, Hank Jr.-worshipping, Kid Rock-cranking kegger crowd.
On All Jacked Up, Wilson’s still here for the party, too, as liquor flows through the album’s songs as if she yearns for the heyday of George Jones, who recorded a famous bartender song himself. Wilson’s voice remains big and aggressive, full of spit and whiskey as it scales high notes with an in-your-face power that easily does whatever she asks of it. She’s cited Patsy Cline and Heart’s Ann Wilson as influences, but the latter seems more present in her style. Unlike Cline, who occasionally sang behind the beat and let the golden tone of her voice linger like smoke rings, Wilson pushes in front of the rhythm and rarely allows much ache to creep in. She sings sad songs as if staring a hole in her male subjects, as if challenging them to talk back. She doesn’t want any man’s sympathy, or anyone else’s for that matter.
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This edge is what sets Wilson apart from the other female singers working on Music Row today. Shania Twain, for instance, doesn’t have time for heartache, either, but even when she’s dressing down a guy, she does it with a sexy wink and a coy smile. She’s playful where Wilson is willful.
The much missed Natalie Maines has all of Wilson’s spitfire, and she can handle rockers and country ballads with the same convincing passion. But Maines shows her wounds, as ballads like “Tonight the Heartache’s on Me” attest. Wilson might sing about hurting—not very often, but it’s there on new songs like “Raining on Me” and “I Don’t Feel Like Loving You Today”; she just expresses more anger than pain.
Her only cover is an update of a cabaret jazz standard, “Good Morning Heartache,” and it’s the one place where she has to stretch beyond her comfort zone. Still, it’s more homage than a show of artistic range. Wilson’s phrasing closely mimics that of Billie Holiday, who famously cut the standard in 1944; she even lets her tone grow more fragile than on the album’s other tracks, getting close to Holiday’s style. Still, it’s an effective take, better in its way than paler translations by Diana Ross, Natalie Cole or even the great Johnny Adams.
Everywhere else, Wilson sticks with the sound that worked so well for her on Here for the Party. When she rocks, it’s always in Southern boogie, with the title cut (and the album’s first hit) sounding like Charlie Daniels sitting in with George Thorogood. When she slows things down, she takes it back to classic honky-tonk, with the slip-note piano set against keening steel guitar and fiddle accents.
Yet as hard as Wilson thrusts herself out there when rocking through “Rebel Child,” cracking jokes on “Skoal Ring” and “One Bud Wiser,” or dissing other women in “He Ain’t Even Cold Yet” and “California Girls,” it’s the straightforward country side of All Jacked Up that holds up best. With so many songs bordering on novelty numbers, the serious songs give the album some needed heft.
“Full Time Job,” a shuffle that sets twin fiddles against a resonant slide guitar, takes the first-person view of a stay-at-home mom, saying she’s part doctor, part teacher, part chef, part chauffeur and part referee. “It’s the hardest gig I’ve ever known,” Wilson belts to start the chorus. “I work my fingers to the bone.”
On Wilson’s autobiographical “Not Bad for a Bartender,” she pats herself on the back for how far she’s come in life, and the song likely will become a rallying point in concert. So will her duet with Merle Haggard, “Politically Uncorrect,” a song written by Leslie Satcher that doesn’t draw party lines, but instead stands up for those Wilson believes in: underdogs, third-shift workers, single mothers, farmers, soldiers, preachers and sinners.
The album’s two most striking songs, though, move away from Wilson’s image to deal with universal themes that would fit any singer from any background—only, it’s how she sings them that makes them so good. The soul-influenced “Raining on Me,” a ballad that Wilson wrote with co-producer John Rich and Vicky McGehee, is that rare song that allows her to show how subtle her voice can be. The same is true of “I Don’t Feel Like Loving You Today,” a post-argument conversation in which a woman begins patching things up with her man while still making clear she’s not ready to let things pass completely yet. Written by Jim Collins and Matraca Berg, the song captures a been-there moment with the kind of concise, honest directness that marks the best country songs.
Wilson needs the autobiographical and the universal. By telling us who she is, she establishes that her point of view comes from someplace real. By exploring broader issues, she establishes just how much she has in common with all of us, no matter where we’re from or what we believe.