Cover Story
by Geoffrey Himes
Miranda Lambert
Underwood, the 2005 American Idol winner, has won the commercial competition hands-down. Lambert, 2003’s third-place finisher on Nashville Star, has done well on the charts, but Underwood has emerged as one of the biggest moneymakers in American entertainment. In Billboard’s recent year-end issue, the Oklahoma crooner not only was listed as the top country artist (with the No. 1 and No. 9 albums of the year) but also the fifth-place pop artist (with the No. 5 pop album). By contrast, Lambert didn’t even dent the best-selling country performers list, much less the pop list.
Lambert, however, has won the artistic competition just as convincingly. In the eighth annual Country Music Critics’ Poll, 96 journalists from all over North America handed the Texas singer one of the most dominating victories in the poll’s history. Lambert won the critics’ vote for 2007’s best album (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), best single (“Famous in a Small Town”), best female vocalist, best songwriter and artist of the year. She became the first artist ever to place three different singles in the poll’s top 15 (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and “Gunpowder & Lead” joined “Famous in a Small Town”).
There were other winners: Emmylou Harris was voted best reissue, Brad Paisley best male vocalist, Keith Urban best live act, Sugarland best group and Taylor Swift best new act. Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, Lori McKenna, Patty Griffin, Porter Wagoner, Little Big Town, Steve Earle, Dierks Bentley and Sunny Sweeney all placed high in the voting as well. But the big story was the contrast between Lambert and Underwood, who could only manage the No. 21 album (Carnival Ride), the No. 13 single (“Before He Cheats”) and the No. 10 slot as artist of the year.
How can we account for this disparity? Why has Lambert done so much better with the critics than record buyers and Underwood the reverse? It’s not as if they have radically different sounds: They both employ the ’70s arena-rock template that rules Music Row these days—as if Journey could be considered a country act if they’d only put a fiddler and a steel guitarist back there by the drum riser. It’s not as if the two 25-year-olds attack different subject matter—most of their songs are about romantic relationships gone wrong.
No, the difference lies in the contrasting reasons we come to country music—or to any art form, whether it be genre fiction or museum painting. Do we want reassurance from art, a confirmation that everything they already believe is true? Or do we want to have our assumptions challenged, to hear something we don’t already know? Do we want virtuosic performances that meet a platonic ideal we can stand back and admire? Or do we want idiosyncratic delivery that marks an artist as one of a kind?
It’s no news that a majority of consumers prefer reassurance and virtuosity. That’s the way it’s always been and the way it always will. But there has also always been a sizeable minority that prefers new challenges to further confirmation. And if you’re going to listen to country music every day and write about it for a living, you’re more likely to be in the second camp than the first. Thus this poll’s critics have flocked to Lambert for the same reasons they flocked to the Dixie Chicks, Rodney Crowell, Alison Krauss, Steve Earle, Patty Loveless and the Soggy Mountain Boys in the past.
While Underwood reinforces the conventional ideal of the “sweet, little, beautiful, wonderful, perfect All-American girl,” as she sings in “All-American Girl,” Lambert counters that the girl next door might be “made of gunpowder and lead.” When Underwood describes her broken heart on “Flat on the Floor,” she channels Heart’s Ann Wilson as she wallows in self-pity: “You can’t knock me off my feet when I’m already on my knees.” Lambert refuses to give in to her broken heart on “Getting Ready.” Channeling Bonnie Raitt, she wrestles with her self-pity as if it were a worthy opponent: “I’m getting ready to let you go / My hands are shakin’ / My heart’s unsteady.”
Underwood believes she can revitalize clichés such as “Sometimes that mountain you’ve been climbing / Is just a grain of sand” through sheer lung power. By contrast, Lambert may claim that being “Famous in a Small Town” is preferable to being a Nashville star, but she then turns around and suggests—in a sly, conversational tone—that local celebrity can be as confining and corrupting as any other kind. When Lambert sings, “These pretty girls they’re all the same / But they’re damn well gonna know my name” on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” she probably doesn’t have Underwood in mind, but the couplet does sum up the voters’ sentiments.
The contrasts between Lambert and Underwood recall another pair of country singers born the same year. Bill Anderson and Merle Haggard were both born in 1937, but by the time Haggard released his first single in 1963, Anderson had already had two No. 1 hits and 10 singles in the Top 10. Like Underwood, Anderson was the soothing voice of reassurance and would go on to have a long, successful career. Haggard didn’t land his first No. 1 until 1967, as it took the public a while to adjust to his ornery attitude and barbed-wire music. Once Haggard established himself, however, there was no stopping him. When critics discuss the greatest country artists of all time, Haggard is at the heart of that conversation. Anderson is not.
It’s not that Lambert sounds like Hag, but she does share his confrontational approach, rough-edged arrangements and mixed-message lyrics. Haggard is still around, of course, and released two albums that tied for No. 23 (Last of the Breed and The Bluegrass Sessions) as well as the No. 4 reissue (Legends of American Music: The Original Outlaw). He also announced that he was working on a new album with Keith Richards and other veteran rockers. It’s likely to be a low-key rootsy affair, but if Haggard and Richards had collaborated in 1973, the results might have sounded very much like “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”
Traditionalists often complain that today’s country radio sounds like warmed-over ’70s rock. That’s accurate, but that’s not the problem. After all, Lynyrd Skynyrd was a ’70s rock band that created some of the greatest country songs of all time. Country radio’s problem is not that it sounds like ’70s rock but that it sounds like bad ’70s rock—more like Molly Hatchet than Lynyrd Skynyrd, more like Journey than Cheap Trick, more like Firefall than Fleetwood Mac, more like Kiss than Led Zeppelin, more like Pat Benatar than Bonnie Raitt, more like The Eagles than The Byrds.
The last comparison is especially apt inasmuch as The Eagles provided the model for so much mediocre country music over the past 20 years. The Eagles’ comeback disc, Long Road Out of Eden, was the seventh best-selling country album of 2007 according to Billboard, but finished at No. 66 in the critics’ voting.
By contrast, the critics’ affection for The Byrds is so strong that they voted Gram Parsons & the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Archives Volume One: Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1971 the year’s second-best reissue just because it included two ex-Byrds (Parsons and Chris Hillman)—even though it was virtually unlistenable. Lambert has consciously seized The Byrds’ mantle by including a song by Parsons’ other famous vocal partner, Emmylou Harris, on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
If Lambert’s triumph is the most notable result of this year’s poll, the most comical result is the vote that named Robert Plant as the No. 7 “Best New Country Act” of 2007. It’s hard to know what’s funnier—that Plant is the “best new” anything or that he’s a “country act.” But it makes a kind of twisted sense, for if country music in 2007 is warmed-over ’70s rock, why shouldn’t one of the biggest ’70s rockers of all become a country singer? The Led Zep screamer collaborated with longtime fan Alison Krauss on Raising Sand, the poll’s No. 2 album, and on “Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On),” the poll’s No. 7 single (and the only non-Music Row single in the poll’s top 30).
Surprisingly, Raising Sand resembled neither Led Zeppelin nor The Honeydrippers, neither Union Station’s bluegrass nor Krauss’s chamber-pop solo albums. What it resembled more than anything was the imaginary musical past that T-Bone Burnett conjured up for the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack in 2000. Not surprisingly, Burnett produced Raising Sand as well.
Except for the Dixie Chicks, Krauss has been the most popular act in the poll’s eight-year history. This year she finished No. 5 in reissues, No. 2 as female vocalist, No. 7 as a live act and No. 3 as artist of the year. She and Plant finished No. 3 among the best duos and groups, just behind Sugarland and Little Big Town.
Also in the top 10 duos and groups were three acoustic string bands: The Avett Brothers, Nickel Creek and Uncle Earl. Plant’s old bandmate, John Paul Jones, produced Uncle Earl’s new album, Waterloo, Tennessee, and The Avett Brothers scored the No. 12 album, Emotionalism, the best showing yet from the new wave of old-timey bands. This movement has been gathering steam for several years and seems on the verge of a breakthrough this year or next. As the Hackensaw Boys put it, “Look Out,” here they come.
We can’t end this discussion, though, without mentioning Brad Paisley, who was voted the No. 3 album (5th Gear), the No. 2 single (“Ticks”), the No. 11 single (“Online”), the No. 1 male vocalist, the No. 2 live act, the No. 4 songwriter and the No. 2 artist of the year. It was an achievement nearly equal to Lambert’s, yet there was a sense that Paisley was everyone’s compromise candidate—his album received fewer No. 1 votes than Porter Wagoner’s, for example, but more votes overall. Paisley combines elements of Underwood’s reassurance and Lambert’s challenge and thus demonstrates the appeal and limitations of bipartisanship.
No one is more versatile than Paisley. He can do funny novelty songs like Roger Miller (though not quite as funny). He can do personal confessionals like Rodney Crowell (though not quite as personal). He can play solos like Jerry Douglas (though shorter and simpler), and he can croon like Alan Jackson (though not with the same off-handed ease). Paisley may well be the most talented country artist of his generation, even if he hedges his bets too often to make music equal to that talent. He’s the new Vince Gill.
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