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Roll with it country song8/21/2023 ![]() “Once I realized what I was accidentally doing, then I homed in on being more conscious of writing a rock song one day, a country song the next,” he said. HARDY was sitting in his tour bus in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when I spoke to him a few weeks ago, and he explained that the album was halfway finished before he saw that it had a split personality. It turns out that “the mockingbird & THE CROW” is a concept album, built around a generic divide: the first eight songs, with lowercase titles, lean country the latter eight, with capitalized titles, lean grunge, or hard rock the title track, in the middle, functions as a musical ampersand. The mood shifts, and so does the key, from friendly C-major to mistrustful C-minor:ĭo this, do that: that shirt, this hat Don’t forget to smile, kiss the ring once in a while Don’t say those words, put down your finger Throw in a slow love song or two-well, fuck that! And fuck you!īy the time he shouts those last words, HARDY no longer sounds recognizably “country.” Much of the rest of the album is given over to minor chords, rhythmic riffs, and occasional bouts of screaming. Nearly halfway through the “mockingbird” song, HARDY rebels against the demands of Nashville craftsmanship. “The Devil went down to Georgia, but he didn’t stick around-this is God’s country,” Shelton snarled. 1 country hit “God’s Country,” which converted the treacly term into a truculent declaration of regional pride. His breakthrough single, “ ONE BEER,” from 2019, began with a startling evocation of kids worrying about an unexpected pregnancy (“Seventeen in a small town, weak knees in a CVS”), but it turned out to be both a drinking song and an ode to settling down: “Ain’t it funny what one beer can turn into?” And he helped write Blake Shelton’s No. ![]() HARDY made his mark as a high-concept craftsman, finding new ways to give country listeners what they wanted. The song starts, as so many country songs do, by conjuring small-town life, and it culminates, at first, in a wry chorus that’s surprisingly forthright about the nature of country stardom: “I’m a mockingbird / Singin’ songs that sound like other songs you’ve heard.” The song, if you would like to encounter it unspoiled, is called “the mockingbird & THE CROW,” and it appears at the midpoint of an album with the same title, which was recently released by a singer and songwriter from Philadelphia, Mississippi, named Michael Hardy, who has dropped his first name and capitalized all the letters in his last one. But it is unusual to encounter one that requires a spoiler alert. It is no longer unusual to encounter a song by a mainstream country star that requires an “explicit lyrics” tag.
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