Sunday, November 13, 2011

The Triumphant Return of Sunday Song!

(AKA: Sunday Song #10, since I somehow skipped straight to #11 earlier...)

In so many ways, this is easier than an actual, well-thought-out post, and it gets something new up.

Now, I've never made any secret of the fact that when it comes to country music, I prefer my songs sad.  There's a simple reason for this: no other genre does it better these days.

This week's song is from an artist I've been really hard on in the past--Charla Corn.  Her '09 album More Than I Should had one questionable song after another on it, especially "She Ain't Always Been an Angel" and "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?"  It was vapid pop country, undeserving of the Red Dirt label, and I frankly dismissed her as another candidate for Nashville's Interchangeable Blondes stable.

What made it bad for me was that she did release a couple of pretty good songs from that first album--"Lie A Little" and "Break My Heart Tonight" were both enjoyable, and a sign to me that she could do so much better than songs about drunken coeds and male grooming habits.

Fast forward to late 2011, and it's like I've stepped through the looking glass musically.  Miranda Lambert is singing dreck like "Baggage Claim" and (with her girl group) "Hell on Heels", slipping down Nashville's primrose path of vacuousness even quicker than I ever thought she could.  Charla Corn, on the other hand, is proving to be the anti-Sunny Sweeney.

She's got a new album or EP or something, I am sure, although the only mention of it I can find online is from Farce the Music, a parody cover which hopefully has zero to do with whatever the actual cover is.  Anyway, there have been a couple of new songs from Ms Corn on the radio lately (by radio, I of course mean KFWR's live stream), and strangely enough, not only have I not wanted to punch her in the throat when listening to them, I actually kind of like them.

Especially this one.  It's a life on the road song, and although she looks too perfect in the video for it to be wholly believable, it's still a great, sad, bluesy country song:

2 comments:

BobG said...

For sad songs, it is still hard to beat old Hank Williams. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" is one of my all-time favorites.

Sabra said...

Yeah, that song--and that version of that song--is probably the gold standard for sad country songs.