"...Another Way To Tell Is Any Time They Rhyme Roots With Boots..."

Let's get one thing out of the way at the outset.

Nashville is now, and has always been, a factory town.

They manufacture country music.

And that's not meant as a shot, slam or any other salaciousness.

It is what it is.

And they do what they do.

For a number of years, I did a little of it myself.

And while I can offer up plenty of demos of tunes that could rightly be described as "outside the box", I do hereby fess that I did my share of cranking out the kind of product that I hoped would find its way to the mastering sessions of any number of A, B, C, even D, list country music singers.

I hit a lick every now and then.

Nothing major, composition or chart activity wise, of course.

Or I'd be writing this piece from my home office/studio overlooking the Pacific Ocean instead of my home office/studio overlooking my Coastal Georgia duplex driveway.

Que sera and all that.

My own fair to middlin fortune aside, I do, to this day, possess what I think is a pretty good sense of what constitutes ordinary top forty fodder and what can deservedly be called extraordinary.

In the former category, we have any, and every, thing that finds its way on to your country radio station with a lyric including, or alluding to, trucks, back porches, fried chicken, Sundays after church, tractors, honky tonks (with or without accompanying badonkadonks) or what I've always referred to as "punny business".

As in, of late, Chris Cagle's latest single "Got My Country On".

Or, even more insidious, the "if at first you succeed, re-write the title as many times as humanly possible".

As in Danny Gokey's latest, "Second Hand Heart" and Sara Evans' latest, "My Heart Can't Tell You No."

For the love of Hank, even I wrote songs called Second Hand Heart and My Heart Can't Tell You No.

And the ideas sucked then.

In 1987.

My penchant for holier than ya'll notwithstanding, I do recognize refreshing arrivals in the latter category.

Lately, I discovered twelve, as a matter of fact.

On one CD.

"Own The Night" by Lady Antebellum.

Songs are, of course, purely subjective, third only to politics and religion when it comes to what's good, bad, right, wrong, lame, lovely, ad nauseum.

In other words, to each his, or her, own.

All I can offer you is after forty five years of listening to popular music and thirty plus years of writing it, good, bad, right, wrong, lame, lovely, etc, I have developed a pretty reliable method of determining the difference between songs that that are just alright and songs that get it right.

I call it the cringe test.

Cagle, Gokey, Evans, et al evoked a little cringe.

Charles, Dave and Hillary didn't give me a ripple.

Just a lot of quiet smiles and smug nodding.

Thanks, kids...