Apr 19, 2017
Album Review: Charlie Worsham - Beginning of Things
by Jonny Brick
Hi, my name is Jonny and I love country music. Nice to be here. I think it best that I start my first piece on Farce The Music by acknowledging my forebears.
Here is what FTM thought of Rubberband, Charlie’s debut from way back in 2013, when number one songs included the gruesome twosome "Cruise" and "That’s My Kind of Night" (I am contractually obliged to call both those songs rubbish):
‘Rubberband is mainstream country music as it probably should be in 2013. It's not rock masquerading as country, or country wishing it were pop, or (thank God) hick-hop.
‘Charlie's music is organic, honest and warm…It's accessible but not pandering. It's catchy but not built solely around hooks. It goes down easy, but requires repeated listens to get a full appreciation.’
If that’s your bag, or if you enjoyed Rubberband like I did – I was briefly addicted to "Want You Too" – then Beginning of Things is the album for you.
Here in the UK (I’m writing from London), we have adopted Charlie because you in the US didn’t want him, like a sort of Bush (the band) in reverse. (Gavin Rossdale is our version of Blake Shelton here, so go fig.)
As a nice gift to his fans over here in the UK, Charlie accidentally left copies of Beginning of Things in the hands of his fans at his gig in November 2016. When he returned in March 2017, playing Country2Country (C2C) in London and at small venues across the country, some fans knew every word to songs that had not yet been released.
To promote the album, Charlie released a wave of five songs (John Mayer-style) in January 2017, which all appear on the LP. "Southern by the Grace of God" is co-written with Luke Dick and the modern-day Tom T Hall, Shane McAnally. The harmonies in the chorus are awesome, as is the way Charlie tags the end of the chorus with a reference to the bluegrass style of singing like a hillbilly. It’s authentic and fun, and proves Charlie knows his heritage.
Daniel Tashian and Abe Stoklasa wrote "Call You Up," which has hints of the former’s work with the band formerly known as The Bees, now called The Silver Seas. The latter has played keyboards on Lady A’s tours, and wrote with Charles Kelley, who I am sure would leave Lady A to pursue his more interesting solo career…if only his mortgage would pay itself.
Charlie has told the story of headlining a gig above Sam Hunt and Kip Moore; the lineup was booked well before Hunty became a big star. Whereas Sam only played a few songs, the crowd grew restless when Charlie was up there trying to do his job. He should have been rubbing his sexy body like Shmuel, but must have been too busy playing chords and riffs on his guitar.
Charlie suffered a crisis of confidence after the tour, and is still too polite to blame old Hunty for this. I wonder if Sam’s expected second album will be musically better than Charlie’s, and about the Pope’s religious preference. I know whose album Nashville is betting their horses on selling a million copies. And it ain’t Chuck’s.
All this despite the fact that Vince Gill is his guiding light, that Marty Stuart played on Rubberband and that, in "Could It Be," Charlie has released one of the finest love songs in country music this decade.
(It’s better than "Need You Now," which I think is also an obvious easy target on this site; Lady A’s album will come close, in its best moments, to Beginning of Things, but will probably be weighed down by AOR. I am willing to be proven wrong.)
Consistency between Charlie’s two albums is maintained with having Ryan Tyndell on board once again. He wrote nine of the eleven tracks on the debut, and writes five here, including "Please People Please" (‘you can’t please people, please people, please’), a live favourite which really needs some airplay on country radio. Bobby Bones is a huge fan, and the Bobbycast with Charlie is a really brilliant hour of conversation.
Charlie uses his talents as a picker – he went to Berklee College of Music thanks to his brilliant pickin’ – to good effect as and when he needs to, sounding like Daryl Hall on the track’s solo passage. Hunter Hayes brought him onto the stage of the Greenwich Arena at C2C, so there is mutual respect from another act who deserved more appreciation.
Charlie can do throwaway pop songs (I’ll say it) like Paul McCartney or (I’ll say it) like Brad Paisley. There are a couple of them on Beginning of Things: "Take Me Drunk" has the great line, ‘What’s a drink got to do to get a guy in this bar?’ which is a song title on its own!
"Lawn Chair Don’t Care," with which he delighted Country2Country fans back in 2016, sounds like the theme tune to the Nickelodeon show Doug: ‘Boo-ba boo boo, boo-ba boo boo!’ Charlie sings. The chorus is a ‘sitting in a chair drinking a beer’, but with strong melodic heft.
It’s a co-write with Tyndell and Brent Cobb, and that trio also wrote "Only Way to Fly," a brilliant piece of music with a soaring chorus that demands to be sung at CMA Fest. Though, as I am contractually told to write, it’ll be drowned out by those darned FGL/Kane Brown fans, right?!
(Am I doing the right thing here by hating on T-Hub, The Other One and Kane Brown?)
Brent Cobb co-wrote "Old Time’s Sake" with Charlie and Jeremy Spillman, who also wrote "How I Learned to Pray," one of the softer songs on Rubberband. "Old Time’s Sake" is the equivalent song on this album, a magnificent ballad in 12/8 time. I love the line in verse one:
‘I love this song too. Can I dance with you? Let’s try something new, for old time’s sake.’ A killer.
The title track is a story in a song (duh, it’s country). Co-written by Stoklasa (who wrote "The Driver" with Charles Kelley), it’s a love story set to a lovely beat. The pace quickens with "Birthday Suit," whose chorus of ‘TAKE IT OFF, TAKE IT OFF!!’ must bring back awful memories of that Sam Hunt tour for Charlie. The song actually recalls the music of Beck, which isn’t bad musical company to be in.
Ben Hayslip, who is partly responsible for bro-country (he co-wrote "It Goes Like This," "Mind Reader," and "Honey Bee," as well as "Touchdown Jesus"), helped Charlie write "I-55," which sounds like its title, ‘a familiar stretch of interstate’. Fans of American rock music (which, from what I know, seems to be making a big impact on country sounds) will dig it, as there’s a lot of space between the notes on Charlie’s guitar part.
I am not surprised if Luke Bryan options this for his next record, as he’d kill for it and also deliver a great vocal. (I like Luke, get over it.)
"I Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere" shares a poppy sound with the likes of John Mayer – again, a guitarist-songwriter unafraid to go his own way, industry be damned – and is a big live favourite. It also stands as a sort of missing statement. Meanwhile, Charlie calls "Cut Your Groove" his ‘theme song’, and it’s the best thing he’s done and may well ever do.
Farce The Music readers will love how the three-chord marvel uses the physical object of the record to stand as a metonym for one’s life: ‘You got a melody, make ’em hear it!’ is a great affirmation from a guy who admitted to seeing a therapist to get his career back on track. "Cut Your Groove" is such a brilliant song that on any other act’s album it would relegate the rest to filler. Here it is just the best of a starry bunch.
It makes me wonder who else Britain can adopt because America are too stupid to make stars of proper stars like Charlie Worsham. We’ll make Charlie a huge star here of Sam Hunt proportions.
I know he won’t sell a million copies like Lady A, Sam Hunt or Luke will, but even if Charlie sells half a million (and gets people streaming too), at least that’ll ensure he can make another album and force these top acts to raise their game.
Just don’t make us wait four more years, Charlie!
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Beginning of Things is out this Friday and will be available on iTunes, Amazon, etc.
Please welcome Jonny Brick, who runs this fine site, to Farce the Music as our newest contributor. His tastes skew toward the mainstream it seems, but more often the good stuff than not, so we're looking forward to his perspective. He's also from across the pond, so that'll add some different spice to our formerly all American presentation. -Trailer
Apr 18, 2017
Lillie Mae Performs "Over the Hill and Through the Woods" on Conan
From the excellent Forever and Then Some. RIYL: Jason Isbell, Jack White, Dixie Chicks, Lydia Loveless.
Why S-Town Just Changed Everything We Know About What a Podcast Is
Why S-Town Just Changed Everything We Know
About What a Podcast Is
by Robert Dean
DISCLAIMER: Spoilers within – DO NOT READ IF YOU’RE NOT FINISHED LISTENING
If there’s anything the S-Town podcast teaches us, it’s that we’ll never truly KNOW someone, ever. We may feel bonded by personal experience, stories, and communication with friends and loved ones, but all of the connections in the world only go so far. People will always remain a mystery.
Shit Town, as it’s called once you get past the milquetoast censoring for the Middle America set, is as disruptive to the head and heart as humanly possible. It’s a masterpiece inside the duality of lives we offer publicly and what we do behind closed doors. It aches with personality, but challenges the listener to accept that tragedy comes in many forms.
Shit Town is the latest audio masterpiece from the perennially fantastic crew behind This American Life and last year’s foray into deep journalistic podcasting, Serial. The only thing is, while both of those products are genre-defying monoliths that deserve every ounce of praise – they’re not Shit Town. Shit Town is different. It’s bigger – it’s something that breaks your fucking heart.
The life lived by John McLemore
As I’m sure you’ve heard from Twitter and Facebook, Shit Town starts with twisted genius John B. McLemore. John B, as everyone in Woodstock, his shit town outside Birmingham, Alabama knows him calls This American Life.
John B claims he knows of a murder covered up thanks to extensive wealth and small town politics. Shit Town producer Brian Reed bites. He and John B begin a series of hours-long phone conversations and eventually leading Reed to visit rural Alabama in the name of a second-hand murder story. Sounds cliché enough, but that’s exactly where the normalcy of everyday crime ends, and the tragic narrative of John B. McLemore begins.
Instead of leading us down a whodunit path that Serial had last year, Shit Town wipes the dirt off the underbelly of southern life that so many people are too scared to come near thanks to layers upon layers of unchecked hyper-masculinity percolating in the backwoods and on the main drag of small town America. John B is everything but. He’s a complicated loner with a mind that never stops ticking, as he’s a clock maker – one of the best in the world. He’s a closeted homosexual, a liberal, an ardent challenger of social rights and nuance, but he’s trapped in a locality that will never understand him.
John B lives in the woods with his mother, but not in some serial killer shack, but a house that’s been in his family for generations. He takes in strays, just as he does people – often finding himself in social relationships with a variety of folks down on their luck. He keeps a rose garden that’s built into an honest to god maze straight out of a Guillermo Del Toro flick. He doesn’t watch movies or television, but can quote passages from books, or do complex mathematical equations that would make a tenured physics professor blush. (The guy built an astrolabe in college.)
His level of mastery with clockwork is unchallenged, having people from all over the world seek him out to fix their broken timepieces. John B. McLemore isn’t a regular dude from Alabama.
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| John B. McLemore |
John B’s rapid-fire knowledge of chemicals, sciences, social issues, mathematics done on the fly is almost too much. The guy can break down, within a casual conversation about why a penny exists in the greater scheme of American currency, and further yet, explain the exact chemical breakdown of what said penny is made of – all of the top his head, at about 85mph. McLemore demonstrated such savant-like abilities in his filthy workshop out behind his house. Drunk, McLemore asks for a dime out of Brian Reed’s pocket. McLemore gold plated the dime using a bucket, some dangerous chemicals, and two electrical wires hooked up to a car battery.
How does a man, who’s staggeringly brilliant allow his mind to rot away in these backwoods? Shouldn’t he be standing in an auditorium somewhere, giving point by point breakdowns of carbon footprints or why we need to rely less on X infinitive?
Despite having every opportunity to leave, McLemore chooses to stay, to wallow in the murk of the town he loathes so much and is proclaims at every chance. John B. McLemore is an enigma who at one moment can talk about his closeted sexuality, but then drop “fag” in a demeaning way. To say the man is layered would be an extreme understatement. Escaping his hometown, the polar opposite of everything he loves just isn’t possible. Shit Town grounded him in ways no one could quite figure out. Genius runs with strange bedfellows and John B. McLemore is no different. He was just too smart for his own good.
And that’s when the show shifts into a past tense.
Shit Town isn’t driven by the murder. We find out pretty quick that the death talk of Woodstock is nothing more than just that: talk. No one died, just a little banged up, but that’s how life in small towns go: a small story turns into headline news over night.
John McLemore kills himself by episode three, and for the next four episodes, we travel down this rabbit hole what it’s like to be a genius stuck in a small town, but also what it’s like to be a small town who’s got an eccentric asshole who won’t stop prattling on about climate change. Like as in life, John B. McLemore never did anything easy. Instead of putting a pistol in his mouth and swallowing the night, he swallows cyanide.
The color of money
There are rumors of John B being loaded, that he’d “unbanked” himself and has gold hidden on his property – but, one aspect of John’s life he neglected was leaving assets and a will. Despite being a meticulous bookkeeper and someone who notated almost every transaction in life, John couldn’t commit to keeping a detailed breakdown of what should happen should he die. Even weirder still is that John B talked openly about killing himself, which as everyone agreed, wasn’t an idle threat, it was a fact they’d all expected at some point.
Then, there’s Tyler. Tyler is John B’s de facto best friend. Tyler is a complicated dude himself, but he’s more or less just chasing ghosts and trying not to be his piece of shit father. As much as you want to be like, blah – Tyler. You can’t. The guy doesn’t affect you that way. Instead, you see the complicated love between Tyler and John B. Although it’s apparent in the subtext that John feels something deeper for Tyler, the friendship is natural and emotional, with both men learning from one another on a variety levels. When they leave one another, they always depart with an “I love you.” – something you’re not supposed to do in the south.
We meet a friend of John B’s who describes their relationship in such a clinical, old school southern way, it’s like a harken back to the Faulkner-era, except the guy is an open gay man who loves Broke Back Mountain, and tells a vivid recollection of wanting to kiss John’s nipples. But, John was a complicated man who, despite his outward sexuality in certain circles, could never be totally out in his environment due to the obvious. He was a man without a country. The inability to find another man to satiate that fast working, mechanical mind is honestly, sad. John was a lone wolf by a complicated life, not by his chaotic nature.
But, while he was a lone wolf, he was also the king of the black sheep, too. Because of his love of Tyler, John supported his friend in ways no one else could. He gave Tyler work around the house, constantly constructing things for him. He supported Tyler in his quest to tattoo, even allowing Tyler to tattoo countless portions of his body – despite having an open, visceral hatred of all things tattoo-related. He gave in and let his friend stay financially afloat at the cost of his own body.
“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” – Franz Kafka
But, with John killing himself, that leads to a messy digression that has town clerks getting late night phone calls and a pair of cousins who claim to be doing right, but at times, you just can’t say what their intentions are. Just as everything appears to unravel at a car crash speed, it all moves right back into place, sort of. The house and the property gets sold to the family of the original murder in question, which feels disgusting.
The emotional knot Shit Town leaves you is too real: especially if you live in the south. There are so many misnomers about southern life, and thanks to the past election and its finger on the pulse of white, working class men, this examination into the mindset of middle and low-brow America shows as that, not all things are what they are perceived to be. Despite him being long dead, as a listener, you yearn to hear John B’s thoughts on a guy like Trump, or some of our social issues today. (The podcast was taped over the course of years, with McLemore killing himself in 2015.)
The cost of brilliance
But, what the podcast does is examine our true selves and what we perceive our world to be. What we atone to when the lights are out, and what we desire out of life. The movements of Shit Town move like a best-selling nonfiction book in the vein of The Devil In The White City, or hell at times, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – a text that moves at it’s own pace, but keeps you moving along, inch by inch.
The ultimate arbiter of why we’re so drawn to Shit Town is there are so many elements we see in ourselves, yes – but, we’re ultimately driven to love John B. McLemore. We want to experience his insanity live and in person, we imagine him going crazy on chat shows, offering up worldviews that are staggering, to be a voice amidst the insanity plaguing news cycles. John B. McLemore should be ours to enjoy, but instead, thanks to Brian Reed, millions now mourn a small town madman. He should have made it out of that place alive.
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Editor's note: We know this isn't music related, but it's relevant to the discussion of southern culture, from which much of the music we enjoy was birthed. And Robert wanted to write it, so so be it.
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