An apology and a promise

This blog certainly didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped – once I’d started it, I realized I didn’t have the time nor energy to run it properly, so I simply stopped updating and writing new posts – very sorry for that. I will try to get back to this blog sometime in June, and start writing regularly and frequently. That I promise.

In the meantime, you may enjoy this Faith Hill performance from the Brooks & Dunn tribute The Last Rodeo of “The Long Goodbye”:

Video worth watching: “And It Feels Like” by LeAnn Rimes

The first single from her non-U.S. album Whatever We Wanna, “And It Feels Like” is truly the best of what good pop music has to offer, and is proof of LeAnn’s diversity as an artist – She can do pop without it coming off as contrived and trite.

Review: “Starting Over” by Reba McEntire

Marketed as a “tribute to her influences”, you would think that this 1995 album would be a tribute to traditional artists and traditional songs, because that’s the way Reba marketed “her kind of country” in the mid-eighties. Alas, no, and the traditionalists hoping that Reba would return to the style of neo-traditionalism that had brought her so much success from 1984 to 1987, would again be disappointed. This was McEntire’s most pop-sounding album yet, and if it weren’t for the select covers of “Talking In Your Sleep” by Crystal Gayle, “I Won’t Mention It Again” by Ray Price, and “Starting Over Again” by Dolly Parton (all of which are among those artists’ most pop-leaning songs), you probably wouldn’t have guessed it was a country album at all. While most of her previous post-1988 material had shown a steady drift towards mainstream pop, it was with this album Reba left the country genre all together. Thankfully, she were to return a year later with the countrier What If It’s You that featured a more stripped-down production, and a much fresher song selection.

Starting Over was also to be her least successful album with country radio in over a decade, and her first album since 1989 that wasn’t to be certified multi-platinum by the RIAA. The highest peaking single on the country charts was the #9 hit “Ring On Her Finger, Time On Her Hands”; a previous top five hit for Lee Greenwood. The other singles were “On My Own” with Trisha Yearwood, Linda Davis and Martina McBride, and “Starting Over Again”, which peaked at #20 and #19 respectively. There was a fourth single released, but this one to the Hot Dance Club Songs chart, and this one was more successful than all of the country singles with its peak position of #2 on that chart; a record for a country female until LeAnn Rimes broke that record when “What I Cannot Change” became a #1 hit in 2009.

Welcome!

Hi everybody!
This is the new blog from previous My Kind Of Country writer Erik, and I hope it’ll be a good one in time. At the moment I’m kind of new to the editing themes and stuff in WordPress, so it’ll take some time before the blog starts looking nice and neat. Do stay tuned though; I promise lots of reviews and discussions in the near future!