Marty Brown – Here’s to the Honky Tonks

It seemed logical for Marty Brown to surface on HighTone after a two-album stint at MCA that failed to translate into the kind of commercial success the majors demand. A Kentucky native with a hard-core honky-tonk voice whose music seemed a bit too left-of-center for Nashville (read: too country for country), Brown seemed perhaps well-suited to follow the path of redirection HighTone paved for Johnny Rodriguez earlier this year.

But where Rodriguez’s You Can Say That Again succeeded largely because of some intriguing and creative song selections (tracks by Robert Earl Keen, Dave Alvin and Lucinda Williams), Brown’s Here’s to the Honky Tonks is full of the kind of cliche-ridden co-writes for which Nashville is infamous, and that Brown should be trying to escape. “Love Comes Easy”, with its chorus of “Love comes easy/But it goes down hard,” is perhaps the most egregious offender, but there’s plenty more where that lack of inspiration comes from.

The problem becomes clearer on “The Day The Bootlegger Died”, which is the one track Brown didn’t have a hand in writing and is clearly the most soul-stirring song on the disc. Whether it’s Brown himself who’s still pushing himself in the direction of the empty-headed and syrupy lyrical fodder Nashville would have wanted him to churn out, or whether he buckles to the whims of the various writers with whom he collaborated on these songs, the end result is the same: A disappointing album from an artist who clearly has the voice and the spirit to make a good country record.