Keeping Up With The Curve

I was in Nashville last week pitching and recording. But I was also listening. I'd go out at night and listen to songwriters perform. It's the only way you can keep abreast of changes in country music. And it does change. Like pop music, country is always trying to find new sounds to perk the ears of listeners lest they turn off their radios and just listen to their old Garth Brooks or Johnny Cash CDs.

If you try to keep pace by listening to country radio, you're about one and a half years behind the curve, the time it takes for a song to be written, cut and sent to radio. You have to at least visit Nashville (better yet live there, but that's not for me) if you're going to stand a chance of pitching songs that record labels might be interested in. If they sense that a song is dated they get that look on their face, the why are you making me listen to this dated piece of junk look. Thirty seconds later, the song pops out of their CD player.

There are many people who lament these changes in country music. They want to go back to the times of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and George Jones. Give them a three minute, three chord song about drinking or cheating with a pedal steel or fiddle in the background and they are happy as clams. I happen to like those songs far better than what's on country radio now, too. But the public doesn't. If they played that stuff on the radio, country music would be limited to the South. And the market for country is much bigger than it once was.

It's a national market now. A major country act can sell out a stadium in a place like Philadelphia in a few hours. And like anything that aims for a large market share, it has to cater to a broad taste. What country music has become is music for middle-America Republicans. It's not just for Southerners anymore. It's Red State music.

Country managed to go national by borrowing heavily from 70s rock and pop. Searing rock guitar replaced the pedal steel and fiddle. The themes in the lyrics became a bit more youthful. The songs were still lyric heavy, but the words were designed to appeal to Red Staters with a longing for an idealized and romanticized rural life.

To some degree, the change was facilitated by the collapse of the pop/rock songwriters market in LA in the 1980s. Pop and rock record labels started to write almost all of their songs in house with their singers and producers about twenty years ago. Those LA songwriters no longer had a place for their tunes. Many of them moved to Nashville. And lo and behold, country radio loved the music they created.

Listening to Nashville songwriters last week, I could hear strains of 80s and 90s rock and pop bands. Gradually country music is leaving 70s music behind. And another thing it's gradually leaving behind is the heavy emphasis on lyrics. The words are becoming more and more generic. It used to be that country music was often about finding the simple truths of everyday life. But that type of song is going by the wayside. More and more, the emphasis is on simple words to describe love lost and gained. Some of it sounds an awful lot like the kiddie pop and rock of the 70s and 80s.

Joni Mitchell once said that there is a competition between melody and lyrics. If your lyrics are meaty, you have to give up a little in terms of melody. That's certainly been true traditionally for country music. But now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Nashville is slowly but surely becoming a melody and groove town. Lyrics are taking a back seat. For example here's a chorus from Pat Bunch - a wonderful country lyricist - written back in 1993.

No green eyes, no blue nights
No jealous heart and no little white lies
You showed me what love looks like
I had the colors all wrong, now they're right
No green eyes, no blue nights

There's a little bit of poetry in a nice simple song. In contrast, here's the chorus from a Pat Bunch song that I heard last week:

Ain't nobody ever loved nobody like I do
Ain't nobody ever loved nobody like I love you

It wouldn't work in 1993, but it works fine in today's market.

What makes country music unique? It's true that it's now mostly a rehash of 70s and increasingly 80s pop and rock. But it does differ in the way that early rock and roll differed from rhythm and blues. Elvis was essentially a translator of Sam Cooke. He made black music palatable to a racist audience.

Country today is essentially pop and rock translated. It makes drugs, sex and rock and roll palatable to those who are politically and socially conservative. Instead of some hippie singing, it's some big hunk in a cowboy hat who votes Republican. The song is more or less the same, but it's all about the messenger.