Music
If Sugarland’s new Enjoy the Ride conquers disillusion through the sheer avidity of its craft, Keith Urban’s latest, Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing, feeds off an awareness of failure that only the very successful are privy to. They’re both superbly conceived and performed records that make pop dreams sound more significant than they have any right to be. Urban and Sugarland don’t challenge their listeners in obvious ways, but that doesn’t mean they don’t address serious issues.
Enjoy the Ride catches Sugarland in the aftermath of success, and minus singer-songwriter Kristen Hall, who had a major part in writing the group’s 2004 debut, Twice the Speed of Life. Hall’s departure from Sugarland early this year might have subtly altered the group’s dynamic, but the sound is intact. (Hall co-wrote the new record’s “Sugarland,” while remaining members Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush continue to write or co-write the group’s material.)
Sugarland has enjoyed immense fame and recognition, including a celebrated turn by the group in a CMT Crossroads segment featuring rocker Jon Bon Jovi. Meanwhile, Keith Urban is known as much for his marriage to actress Nicole Kidman and his recent struggles with substance abuse as for his singing, songwriting and guitar playing. These artists make music that is unafraid to be mythic, and they play it smart by humanizing their success in ways that make all that adoration co-exist with self-doubt.
Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing is as ambitious as its title. A fine guitarist, Urban fills the record with power chords and solos that sometimes threaten to careen out of control. The opening track, “Once in a Lifetime,” starts with heartbeat drums and then establishes a classic two-chord pattern that becomes a restrained reverie in its middle section, all colored by hints of slide guitar. At 5:53, the song sets the stage for a record that crams in an enormous amount of detail: Love, Pain is almost too rich to absorb in one listening.
Urban and co-producer Dann Huff update classic-rock clichés so intelligently that it’s easy to miss how idiosyncratic some of these songs are. “Faster Car” is a version of skinny-tie power pop crammed with tambourines and horns. The rubbery and deliberately simplistic bass line gives way to a couple of power chords that open up the song, which recalls Rubber Soul or an obscure ’70s pop band like 20/20.
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What makes “Faster Car” work is the way it restates and twists commonplaces: when Urban sings, “I need a faster way to show you / How much I need you, baby,” you get the sense the car’s not exactly the problem. Similarly, “Can’t Stop Loving You,” written in the late ’70s by the underrated British power-pop artist Billy Nicholls, throws a descending guitar figure under the chorus and includes a typically uninhibited solo that’s nearly unhinged.
In other words, Urban is hip enough to cover something as arcane as “Can’t Stop Loving You,” distressed enough to convincingly deliver lines like, “I could say that’s the way it goes / I could pretend and you won’t know” and confident enough to make the whole thing sound big—even heroic. Love, Pain is a tense record, from the uneasily ascending chord changes of “I Told You So” to the slightly astringent strings that flesh out “Shine.” These songs exist almost as their own doubles: they comment on themselves, and the best of them pull off the neat trick of frantic rumination.
Urban works in the tradition of Anglo-American pop, so that his obsession with form sometimes makes the narrative arc of his performances irrelevant. When it’s most inspired, as on “Faster Car” or the brilliant “Won’t Let You Down,” Urban’s pop makes success and failure seem like a function of musical choices.
Coming from the tradition of folk-rock, Sugarland are far more concerned with narrative, so their music can seem less adventurous than Urban’s. The subject of “County Line,” like most of Enjoy the Ride, is the contrast between small towns and large dreams, and its fast tempo seems to imply that boredom can be avoided by moving quickly. Its opening guitar riff owes a debt to quintessential folk-rockers The Byrds, and from the handclaps to the touches of harmonica, “County Line” is a pure pop confection that doesn’t stint on the details of everyday life.
Still, the broad vowels and almost unnatural heat of Jennifer Nettles’ vocals are anything but commonplace, no matter if she’s singing about “kettle korn and 4H fairs.” The point of “County Line” is that isolation can provide security, but Nettles seems to have moved past provincial pleasures. The record’s opener, “Settlin’,” finds Nettles drinking wine in her living room. Her heart is “wide open,” and she wants to change the world, not merely settle for comfortable mediocrity.
Enjoy the Ride is pop that scratches at the edge of any number of itches but never breaks the skin. The guitar lick that powers “Everyday America” suggests funk music, and “Happy Ending” shimmers like good ’80s pop, with slide guitar providing texture. In its own way, this music is as tense as Urban’s, so the latter’s cross-rhythms keep the song unsettled, while a track like “One Blue Sky” features chord changes that subtly defy expectations.
Nettles is a marvelous singer whose eagerness to communicate big emotions can sometimes shade into something resembling panic. “Want To,” written by Nettles, Bush and Bobby Pinson, tells a coming-of-age story that is perfectly paced, closely observed and imbued with desperation. “Never waste another day,” Nettles sings, and she goes on to imagine a world full of indecision and longing: “We could keep things just the same / Leave here the way we came, with nothing to lose / But I want to / But I want you.”
“April Showers” and “Sugarland” sum up the concerns of Enjoy the Ride. These songs describe success in terms of staying true to yourself or a lover, not a dream or abstraction. “I was city bound,” Nettles sings in “Sugarland,” before describing how she decided to stay in that particular small town. In “April Showers,” Nettles sings, “Looking for a map to find / What we left behind / Knowing that we will / Always end up right where we start.” These lines suggest the ambivalence of dreamers who can’t let go of the past.
In the end, both Sugarland and Keith Urban seek refuge from the world in brightly colored pop dreams. The relationship of both artists to the country music of the past is tangential at best. In Urban’s case, “Raise the Barn,” a duet with Ronnie Dunn, is a goof, while Sugarland’s quasi-rockabilly “Mean Girls” describes small-town bitchiness turning into grown-up dysfunction.
At their best, Urban and Sugarland show that pop can be amorphous and still retain a sense of place. Both records traffic in nostalgia, yet they never seem retro. If true love stays tantalizingly out of reach in their music, it’s nonetheless omnipresent. Like success, it’s somehow everywhere and nowhere at once, and hard to grasp. In the end, the very act of conceiving and playing well-crafted pop songs compensates for the stability they’re looking for and not always finding, and the audience is richer for the experience.