Mike Ireland & Holler – Try Again
No matter how we try, it is becoming increasingly hard to disagree with Jon Langford when he sings of the death of country music. Again and again we are reminded that it is hip-hop which now speaks to the poor, the working, and the middle classes — country’s traditional audience — that maybe Kid Rock really is a brilliant synthesist, that the implacable forces of commerce have finally removed the heart and soul from country music. For ever and ever, amen.
Perhaps this should not be a surprise. We the people of the United States have migrated far from our rural roots, if not physically, online. Country radio has learned how to live with its conscious, calculated choice to — for the first time in its history — sever itself from the long, rich tradition of the music it purports to play.
Then came O Brother, unaccountably a hit, and country radio still found it easy not to care. Well, what if they’re right? What if, rather than serving as the opening salvo in the reinvigoration of classic country music, O Brother signals the last gasp of country’s traditional audience? What if the pattern that has served since the Bristol sessions 75 summers back has finally been broken, if the natural swing from pop to hard country and back to pop has been held up like a metal bat resisting an inside pitch?
Maybe country has a new audience, on its way to the museum. It has been suggested that O Brother fans listen to NPR, not country radio. This new (still theoretical) audience, then, is upscale and affluent, and spent a season listening to Buena Vista Social Club before Dan Tyminski/George Clooney darkened their door. They are heirs not to the rural, working-class traditions of country music (though their grandparents, like mine, may have farmed), but, rather, to the same curious confluence of events that led liberal, white America to embrace folk music at the edge of the McCarthy era.
Perhaps O Brother signals not a return to classic country, but the dawning of a new audience — drawn to its real and imagined authenticity, just as the folk boom drew the middle class to Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson. And perhaps, for just those reasons, Mike Ireland’s long-awaited second album is as well-timed as it is written (and played).
Though Ireland’s frame of reference is the easy-listening countrypolitan stylings of Charlie Rich, Glen Campbell, and Conway Twitty (or Marty Robbins, or Ray Price, or even Mickey Newbury), his songs are filled with the heartache of classic country, sung with unmistakable emotional honesty, and played with a gentle, swinging twang. For generations, twang (meant as a symbol, here) has seemed an all but impenetrable barrier between country music and the educated urban class. But if, post O Brother, those sounds and accents no longer signify the old negative connotations of the South, or the largely forgotten lifestyle of the rural working class, what exactly does the music mean — and for whom?
Rather a long route to reach Ireland, who makes very smart records, records that are unmistakably country, records that in conception and execution aspire far more sophistication than what now plays on commercial radio.
Two such records, to date. His 1998 debut, Learning How To Live (Sub Pop), was largely written around the aftermath of his wife’s decision to leave him for the lead singer of his band, the Starkweathers. It was (and is) a beautiful and profoundly moving record; it became a critic’s favorite, landed him a few spots on the Grand Ole Opry, and sold poorly.
Which will explain the time between releases, but the recorded evidence suggests Ireland spent it wisely. If (in reduction) Learning How To Live was an extended meditation on heartbreak and anger, Try Again (due May 21 on Ashmont) might well have been titled Learning How To Love (Again), for it is a suite of songs building to tenuous, tentative hope, tempered by wise resignation.