Country Music Of A Different Color

I'm sure we've all experienced it, some perhaps later than others. It could have been a gradual change, like riding your bike and realizing the seeming flat road you're on is inconspicuously going uphill (I hate that!), or it could have been a sudden abrupt change that made you recklessly abandon the road you'd been cruising down and blaze a new path. Somewhere you'd never gone before, but realized soon enough, it was where you belonged all the while.

So...have any idea of what I'm talking about yet? Well I'll help you out! I'm talking about one's gradual change in music over their lifetime. The different styles, sounds, genres and bands we've all loved and lost over the years. In this blog post I'll be talking about my own "music journey," and a particularly obvious one I've found residing on right on my iPod!

Before I had any idea of what type of music I truly loved I listened to pop music and more specifically whatever was at the top of the charts. Looking back I can't believe I could have never liked any of that stuff. There's a local pop radio station in Sheboygan called The Point and at one time it was all I used to listen to. In hindsight I would have called myself lost but at the time? I thought it was the greatest music out there! I even had a running list of songs I wanted to download once I purchased an iPod. Which thank God, by the time I did get one I was far beyond the deceitful clutches of pop music.

But before I completely moved on I came to fall in love with a Christian pop group called Jump5. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd never heard of them because they weren't all wide-known and after '05 had fallen into somewhat of an obscurity with a label change and a group member dropping out. But for all of the six years they were a group I was as obsessed with him as one of my Pandora friends is with a Finnish rock band! A lot of their music was as substance-less as today's chart-topping pop, but I ate it in handfuls like the sugar-loaded bubblegum candy it was. Which isn't to say that all of their songs were like that, because they weren't. It was more like their songs were always generally geared towards young high school students and middle schooler's. It wasn't long before I realized I'd outgrown them, and soon had sold all of their CD's.

Even still, they'll always hold a special place in my "music journey" because of their significance in it and how, ironically enough, when I stopped listening to them, doing so helped open me up to other artists...and even different genres!

Which, for anyone who knows me and has read the beginning of my bio on my Pandora profile page was country music! Like I said in my bio my passion for country music started roughly in '04 or '05 when a friend of mine played the song Any Man Of Mine by Shania Twain and Holy Water by Big & Rich. I loved the songs so much I went out and bought the albums, and thus my curiosity was quenched like a desert-stranded man getting his first taste of water, and I found...I couldn't get enough!

Here's where the explanation comes in when I mentioned a few paragraphs up, when I talked about a rather obvious "music journey" residing right on my iPod. It involves my first tentative steps into country music, as well my rather naive journey. You see, it's obvious country music has changed drastically over the years and there was a time when...it didn't really matter to me. I liked the new country-pop sound, in fact it was blatantly reminiscent of the pop music I'd recently left behind! And when Taylor Swift hit the scene in '07? I instantly fell in love with her music, never realizing how far she'd thrown the apple from traditional country music until I'd looked back, only to realize that, to no surprise, I had traveled far away as well. It was time to get back to basics.

But not before I'd won an iPod Shuffle and had downloaded more than a handful of these country-pop songs, two of which - and I cringe while writing this! - were by Taylor Swift. The first, regretably, being fearless and the second, albeit I still kinda-sorta-like it, is Should've Said No. I've learned over the years, thanks to a couple of my other Pandora friends, that just because a song is played on country music and had as a convenient sprinkling of fiddles, steel guitars and fiddles...doesn't necessarily make it a country song. Ironic isn't it? Looking back I wish I would have came to my senses quicker, or at the least had someone step in front of me and holler stop! So I wouldn't have an iPod scattered with artists such as SheDaisy, LeAnn Womack, Sugarland, Miranda Lambert and the like. Although, truth be told? I still do listen to these country-pop songs, and not just because I have the mentally that just because I paid for them, I should therefore listen to them. It's because I still like them, although admittedly not as much as my other country music.

Which is where the title of this first blog post for 2010 comes in! When I say "country music of a different color" I'm not just deriving it from the title of Big & Rich's debut album, which was horse of a different color, but because when I came to my senses and looked upon this new movement of country-pop with the disdain it deserves - most of it anyway - I realized my true love was there along, fighting for my acknowledgement against media-indulged artists such as Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood. So, you ask, what was my true love in country music? Well, it was 90's country music!

That too is declared on my Pandora profile, and it's undeniably where I find my passion lies in greater density than anywhere else in the genre. Why do I like it? Because back then country music was true. Sure artists like Shania Twain and others were already paving a yellow brick road for country-pop but, honestly? I like a lot of her songs! Which I'm not sure what it says about me, but you can come up with your own conclusion. In the 90's country music just had an inimitable sound that has been all but abandoned nowadays, in favor of media-flavored, mass-marketable music that feeds the hungry youth of America.

Some artists who's 90's music I love are: Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Patty Loveless, Brooks & Dunn, Alan Jackson, Big & Rich, Jo Dee Messina. In the case of Tim McGraw I strongly believe his 90's stuff was world's better than what he's putting out today. Which isn't to say I hate it all, because I don't. But now he's catering more and more to the mass-market, and falling in right behind all the others who seem hellbent on melding country music with pop. His '95 album, All I Want, as well as his '01 album Set This Circus Down are by far my favorites of his.

My shift towards 90's country music, and even older, can be accredited more to Pandora than anything. After all, if it wasn't for that site, I might still not have stumbled upon the amazing, tried-and-true country artist Patty Loveless. I can honestly say that all of her albums I've listened to I've liked almost every single song with the except of one or two. With so many other albums I've listened to, there seems to be a few hit songs here and there with the rest taking on the role of "fillers." Patty Loveless consistently puts out well-rounded albums were every song is a hit, and just as strong as the former. Patty Loveless sort of embodies my two loves in the genre. While admittedly I still have a soft spot for that country-pop sound - although nothing like Taylor Swift mind you! - I've come to understand that I can appreciate, and find my true love in music when Patty sings songs like those off of her latest CD, Mountain Soul II. The album was a tribute to her Kentucky, blue grass roots, and a sequel to the first Mountain Soul CD she put out in roughly 2001. The first Mountain Soul was a tribute to her coal mining father, who died in '77 of black lung disease. At first I was doubtful when learning that Patty had modeled the album after her native blue grass music, as well as mountain music but after listening to it? I wasn't surprised to find out I loved every song, just like all the rest of her albums!

Listening to Patty Loveless has really opened up my mind to a bunch of other artists I knew I would have never run into without the exposure to her. Which is sad when you think about it because, if all of this great music was just sitting out there, waiting for me to discover it...and it took years for me to stumble upon it, and an online radio station not an actual radio station, what does that say about modern country radio? I don't even want to go there. Honestly. Because while blindsided DJ's are busy wearing over the top-of-the-charts artists with the hottest songs and the most popular status, amazing artists like Patty Loveless and others like her are falling through the cracks, lost behind the glossy veneer of media-touted artists.

I've truly found myself in artists like Patty Loveless, as well as Lorrie Morgan, Tanya Tucker, Emmylou Harris, Suzy Bogguss, Kathy Mattea and 90's country. I'm eternally grateful to many people, and Pandora as well, for turning me away from the stuff country radio plays today.

As for a more recent music journey I'm taking is my rediscovery of my love for 90's, 80's and 70's rock music. I've already downloaded a few songs by Bryan Adams and am looking to score a few Def Leppard and Journey songs off my brother. The only problem is, upon purchasing my iPod Nano I had the phrase all country engraved on the back! How could I have been so foolish? :)

In closing, the next time you listen to your own iPod, perhaps you'll find yourself thinking...what is my music journey? Take a few seconds to think about it. Like me, you might find it noteworthy! Happy listening!