Sugarland’s 2010 Incredible Machine is an album I never got around to ranking or reviewing, primarily because I never got around to listening to it more than twice.
The band’s 2008 album, Love On the Inside, was a breath of fresh air that really made an impact. This was one of the rare country albums that I took to before I drank the Brad Paisley Kool-Aid a year or so later.
Love On the Inside is full of charm, wit and spirit. Kristian Bush, half of the under-appreciated Billy Pilgrim, brought some of that band’s sound to his work with Jennifer Nettles, and Nettles’ brassy twang suited the collection splendidly. The album deservedly put Sugarland on a superstar pedestal.
This song doesn’t have any particular meaning for Alex and me — in fact, today is probably the first time she’s ever heard it. But I find it to be such an effective expression of romantic longing that I felt it would fit in nicely this week.
I always rejected the sterotypical country music genre, the crying-in-my-boots Garth Brooks and Toby Keith kind of thing. But I’ve realized over the past ten years or so that it really is just a stereotype, and there’s a wide variety of country music as good as anything else I listen to.