Gretchen Wilson – One Of The Boys

In many ways different from each other, these two new albums also have explicit connections between them, including a hand in production by John Rich of Big & Rich. Relative newcomer Gretchen Wilson and seasoned veteran John Anderson, though decades apart in performing experience, are two of the strongest contemporary vocal interpreters of hard honky-tonk and other country tones, harder and softer — and they’ve each come up with very strong new recordings, under interesting circumstances.

Wilson’s is that crucial third record which tends to tell you if an artist is going to be around for a long, long time. In her case, the question is whether the extraordinary noise and response that greeted her debut, and the predictably weaker reception of her somewhat hurried second release, means she’s on the downward path to footnotehood. The answer: Gretchen is going to be around. And she’s taken pains, with this intelligent, confessional, touching and often sonically restrained album, to ensure her long ride won’t be as a “redneck” cartoon.

One Of The Boys is, against all likelihood in 2007, a theme album — the theme being that there’s an adult, well-rounded, usually very smart, down-home woman here, with specific troubles and triumphs and vulnerabilities of her own, inside the celebrity best-known for working her “grab a longneck and par-tay” side.

University psych majors may not approve of the palliative tactics described in songs such as “Pain Killer” (written by Wilson with Dean Hall) and “Come To Bed” (written by John Rich and Vicky McGehee), which are more about getting through the night than confronting the issues raised. But Wilson’s tendency to pin the details of these situations and stories — as much by vocal nuance as by the words — is firmly in the hard country tradition. And it’s dubious that the best songs and performances of Loretta Lynn, whose niche in country music geography Wilson now seems destined to inherit, would get a thumbs-up from the rehabilitationally correct, either.

Wilson’s fine ballad singing seems to improve with each record. The stunning “I Don’t Feel Like Loving You Today” was easily the standout on the last one; that level of vocal truth is sought, and found, much more consistently here. For those who disdain the production of Rich and his MuzikMafia gang as a simple pop mix of sledgehammering and transparently “rollicking” clowning (which they occasionally are), this estimable, ambitious record would be a good place to find the locked preconception wrong.

John Anderson, a recent inductee into the MuzikMafia camp, has been occupying an enviable vocal territory somewhere between Lefty Frizzell and Levon Helm for decades now but has fallen off the charts, admittedly unsure where he fits in the current scene. Rich and company have encouraged Anderson to be Anderson again, and not by simply tossing out virtual do-overs of classics like “Wild And Blue”, “Seminole Wind” and “I’m Just An Old Chunk Of Coal”, for instance.

Instead, the pumping “If The Lovin’ Don’t Kill Me” and the wily “cheating, no doubt” song “A Woman Knows” portray him as an experienced, down-home guy who’s maybe a little gray around the edges, but is reinvigorated and ready for anything. And it sounds like he actually is.

A highlight is the striking southern home ballad “Bonnie Blue”, which references the Confederate flag many take as a southern but non-racial alternative to the Stars & Bars; it was co-written by Anderson and hick-hop rapper Cowboy Troy Coleman. A memorable uptempo track is the very Anderson-esque and very MuzikMafia-styled “Funky Country”, which treads that R&B/twang line, even welcoming in folks from up north.

The essentially good-natured “music without prejudice” Mafia ethos is at work in both of these releases. Part of the philosophy is that the artists get to make their own sounds and sense.