Following a string of older albums, I’m now featuring the second most recent record on this list. And it’s the newest to me, as I discovered it only a little more than a year ago.
Miranda Lambert’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was released in 2007, two years after her debut album, Kerosene. It received universal critical acclaim of the sort that would have caught my attention but for the fact that it was about a country album. In 2007, that was a non-starter for me.
But as I’ve thoroughly documented on this blog, I started coming around to country music over the past couple of years and at the end of 2009, my conversion was complete thanks to Brad Paisley’s American Saturday Night and this album.
I still roll my eyes and shudder when confronted with the worst country music has to offer, but that goes for every genre. Basically, country is now on the same level playing field as every other sort of music. Except heavy metal… I continue to hate heavy metal without exception.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a superbly crafted album. Lambert navigates its many moods flawlessly, from the angry ex with a shotgun in ‘Gunpowder and Lead’ to the wounded lover in ‘More Like Her.’ She has a set of pipes that earned her third place on Nashville Star and writing chops on a par with the genre’s best talents.
Critic Jonathan Keefe, writing for Slant magazine, described the album like this: “Brash, insightful, wry, and, above all else, smart, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend confirms that Miranda Lambert is far more than just the latest in a long line of bad girls: She’s a country music legend in the making, and the most vital artist Music Row has produced in a generation.”
That’s from a guy who knows country music. I don’t… but I know what I like.
I’ve already featured about half of this album, including some of Lambert’s own wonderful compositions. But today I’m offering up one of the record’s three covers. Written by David Rawlings and Gillian Welch (of O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack fame), ‘Dry Town’ is a hilarious story song about a beer drinker’s worst nightmare. This song became an early favorite of my daughter Fiona’s, and it remains a favorite of mine.
Good hundred miles between me and Missoula
That vinyl top wasn’t gettin’ no cooler
So I stopped at a quickie sack
I figured I’d need about a six of miller
And one of them things so I wouldn’t spill her
And I asked the girl if the beer was in the back
She said “it’s a dry town
No beer no liquor for miles around
I’d give a nickel for a sip or two
To wash me down out of this dry town”
So I turned right around no hesitation
Cursed the laws ruinin’ the nation
Waved goodbye to the boy at the station
But she wouldn’t go into gear
He said “it sounds like your transmission
You need Bob but he’s gone fishing
On his day off he gets a long way from here”
‘Cause it’s a dry town
No beer no liquor for miles around
I’d give a nickel for a sip or two
To wash me down out of this dry town
Well back home friends you can get a dose of
Something strong from your local grocer
So I walked down ’til I came a little closer
To a place called Happy John’s
He said “I keep some here for colds and fevers
Down underneath’s where I usually leave her
But just last night I felt a cold a comin’ on”
Now it’s a dry town
No beer no liquor for miles around
I’d give a nickel for a sip or two
To wash me down out of this dry town
I need a sip or two
To wash me down out of this dry town
Meet Me In Montauk 
This is exactly the type of country music for which i have very little use.
By the way, I question whether an album you have owned for only a year should even make it into the pantheon of the greatest. To me, that’s a bit like putting a football player into the hall of fame after just one season, or even after only a few seasons. Obviously, infatuation with the new is a powerful thing and, while I’m not suggesting this album would fall out of favor after five or ten years, who knows if it will really have the staying power to remain in your top 20 or make it to that proverbial island.
Fair question, and the list kind of bears it out. Only two of the 20 albums I’m featuring are from the past five years and only a couple more are from the past 10 years. But I’m not grading on a curve… that’s just how things stacked up.
But I do think a great album strikes you as great immediately. I knew after two listens that the Ben Folds Five debut was one of my favorite albums. No amount of time was going to change that.
I think that is true, but whether it remains great enough to remain in top 20 land is another question. For example, I’m inlcined to say that Lonely Avenue from Folds is a great album, perhaps as good or beter than almost anything he has ever done. But would I rank it in top 20 of all time? Maybe, but I would be reluctant to do that until a few more years have passed.
I think another element on the flip side is the ‘discovery’ factor. I love Lonely Avenue as well, but I wouldn’t consider ranking it above the debut BFF album. That album sits on a pedestal not just because it has great music but because it introduced me to the talents of Folds and Co.
That discovery doesn’t always have to be tied to an artist’s first album, or the first album of theirs that you hear… it’s tied to the first album that completely blew you away. I don’t know if any R.E.M. album ever had a chance to unseat Fables of the Reconstruction of if any Elvis Costello album could take the place of Imperial Bedroom, no matter how good.
While I’m not a fan of country music, I find myself bouncing around listening to this song; I can understand why Fiona likes it 🙂
I suppose the question, though, is whether there is an album that blew you away 10 or 20 years ago that isn’t on your top 20 list. And, while I’m sure you consider Lambert’s album to be great, did it really blow you away in the way that BFF’s debut did or EC’s Imperial Bedroom? It’s hard for me to fathom that, but if you say so, how can I really disagree:)
To the same degree as those two? No.
I’m with Peg and Fiona – very bouncy and fun song 🙂
You’re both discussing/debating the whole “entry point” theory that we’ve explored on this blog in a good number of the 972 posts (are you going to throw yourself a party for #1000?!)
I have to “side” with Clay on this one. An astounding album, like a book or a film, grabs you immediately. You don’t have to wait a certain number of years to know the staying power it will have.
To use your Hall of Fame analogy, Dana, it might be the system that requires certain players to wait their allotted time before they take their rightful place in the Hall of Fame, but it’s a foregone conclusion while they are STILL playing the game that they will, of course, end up there. In some ways, it’s almost silly that a Joe Montana, a Dan Marino, or a Lawrence Taylor has to wait some designated amount of time.
To provide another analogy, it would be like saying that Natalie Portman shouldn’t have won the Oscar over Annette Bening because she hasn’t acted for enough years. Or maybe it’s more like saying that we shouldn’t award the Oscars at all until a decade after the performance have been delivered? 😉
Either way, this album wouldn’t be on my list, but neither would many (any?) albums from the past 5 or even 10 years. I’m going to have to put that list together, I think…
Surely at sone point it was evident that Dan Marino would be a Hall of Famer. But to put him in (or say he would be in) after only his first or second season (even though they were great seasons) would have been premature.
The Oscar analogy doesn’t really work because everything up for an award is current.
The question isn’t whether Portman deserves the award for best picture. The question is whether, if one were assembling the 20 greastes acting performances of all time, it would be fair to place Portman (or Firth or any recent winner) into that list without the benefit of some distance. This doesn’t suggest that the performance would go from great to just good or bad with the passage of time, but rather, it would be whether it stands the proverbial test of time.
The Hall of Fame analogy isn’t a good one because it’s an institution that has protocols and aspires to an objective assessment of each player, and because it is by definition a measure of accomplishment over an entire career.
This is more like somebody saying, after the 1984 season,”that was one of the single best quarterbacking performances I’ve ever seen.” I don’t think you need to wait until 1990 to have that opinion of Marino’s performance in 1984.
As for your acting analogy, I do think it’s fair to make that claim if you feel that way. I believed after watching Mulholland Drive that Naomi Watts has delivered a performance for the ages. I still feel that way ten years later.
I suppose your argument is that some albums/performances/whatever will strike you as great in the moment but fade over time. I think that’s true, to some degree, but I think the truly excellent ones are identifiable as such right off the bat.
No, I’m not really saying that the album will fade so much over time—it’s just that, when one is compiling a top 10 (or 20) list of anything, it is generally true that there will be a fair number of albums/athletes/performances, whatever….that you will consider great as well, but they will not make it on the list.
If you take an album like The Stranger, that is 35 years old and has been familiar to you for nearly that long, it is easy to say that it has held up as a top 10/20 selection over time. It is less certain, at least in my mind, whether an album released a year ago or only discovered by you a few years ago would still remain top 10/20 material, though it would likely remain a great album in your view, given another five, ten, twenty or thirty years of familiarity.
So let’s check back on this in 2030 to see if Miranda Lambert’s album remains in your top 20, shall we?
But isn’t the reason a newer album might drop out of the top 20 that an even newer album would have replaced it? And wouldn’t those newer albums be subject to the same things we’re discussing here?
Certainly this list is a snapshot in time. Five years from now I might have discovered albums that push the lower albums on this list onto that second tier. Maybe The Stranger won’t survive another five years, though it has survived 30 already (which I understand is part of your point).
But I don’t think five years from now I’d bump any of these albums for an album that has already been released in 2011, which seems to be what you’re suggesting.
I’m just saying that there is always a love affair with the new and, as I have pointed out before when it comes to your favorites( in directors for example), you have that bias for the new more than others. Amy, for example, would probably be content if the music industry ceased to exist at this point as she is generally extremely content with the artists and albums she fell in love with twenty or thirty years ago.:) (I know, that’s not entirely fair as she has recently embraced a number of AI artists and also someone like Taylor Swift through our kids)
Anyway, as I think you would admit, your passion for country music is new and so, like any love affair, the bloom is still very much on the rose. And since this album, and apparently Paisley’s, are leading the charge, it is understandable that you have poll vaulted them onto your list. And it may well be the case that 10 or 20 years from now, when these artists and albums are like an old comfortable shoe for you, that you will still think so highly of them as to place them in your top tier. I’m just saying that it is, in my view, possible that they may slip a bit–not necessarily because they have been replaced by a new fashion (though that too is possible), but just because the passion fades a bit over time.
Yes, I understand that point. Although, to be honest, it was harder to compile this list than I thought it would be. I didn’t have a bunch of albums just miss the cut. I was pretty much tapped out at 20. (I did limit myself to one per artist, which made it easier)