February 7, 1999 Tricia Yearwood and Alan Jackson: Country Twang With an Edge By JAMES HUNTER Until recently, country music has happily honored tradition, making do with only slight stylistic adjustments. With hummable barroom melodies, in fairly simple arrangements, country songs usually concerned themselves with cheating, drinking or loyalty. But these days, all bets are off. In the early 1990s, Garth Brooks arrived on the scene, bristling with the energy of the 70s rock on which he grew up, while at the same time acknowledging his indebtedness to the country stalwarts George Jones and George Strait. No one ever mistook him for anything but a country boy. Then along came Shania Twain. She guessed correctly that the country audience was more than ready for pop sophistication. Her music resonated with the rhythms of contemporary dance pop, and she made videos that were as slick as anyone else's on MTV. As a result, listeners could hear one of her pop ballads or dance tunes with twangs and reasonably wonder, "This is country?" It's a concern that has been heard since the 1960s, when the producer and arranger Owen Bradley recorded Patsy Cline singing in front of orchestras. Purists were no less dumbfounded by Cline's music than they are by that of many of today's country artists. But the country boom of the early 90s has leveled off, and now, to regain the momentum, country has to figure out -- again -- what it is. Recent albums by Trisha Yearwood and Alan Jackson point in a promising direction. The two singers grew up within 100 miles of each other in Georgia, and their careers have spanned the ups and downs of country this decade. Perhaps that's why Ms. Yearwood's "Where Your Road Leads" (MCA 70023) and Jackson's "High Mileage" (Arista 07822-18864-Z) sidestep the confusion. They rely on an almost classical sense of country form that still leaves room for innovation. And the tack has proved successful: Ms. Yearwood's album has sold nearly a million copies and Jackson's twice that since they were released late last fall. Ms. Yearwood, named the Country Music Association's female vocalist of the year for the last two years, has always craved adventurousness in her music as much as Ms. Twain has in hers. On "Never Let You Go Again" and "Love Wouldn't Lie to Me," Ms. Yearwood sings these ballads in her lush yet minimally ornamented style. They might be taken for pop, given arrangements that mix two staples of country -- mandolins and steel guitars -- with dreamy synthesizer lines and piano accents that could have come from London pop sessions. "Baby, I'm just heart and soul and flesh and bone," Ms. Yearwood confesses on "Wouldn't Any Woman," an uptempo country-rocker. Throughout her career, Ms. Yearwood, 34, has demonstrated a marked contrast in her music: straight-out gutsiness on one hand and a sophisticated technique on the other. On "Where Your Road Leads," she balances immediacy and refinement. She has eliminated much of the regionalism that characterized earlier country, paving the way for the fast-paced styles of today's pop-conscious female country artists like Ms. Twain, Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks. Yet no one would confuse Ms. Yearwood's singing with Celine Dion's. Ms. Yearwood's unswerving concentration on words and melodies communicates an intensity that might only be called country. Invariably, she builds intricate moods of romantic regret and disappointment that reflect country singers' tradition of a nearly religious communion with their material. While she manages to pay respects to the past, her singing is never a slave to it. "There Goes My Baby," which opens the album, may have a 60s pop drift to its melody, but Ms. Yearwood delivers the song with a clean, up-to-the-minute terseness. Nowhere in Ms. Yearwood's album is this balance better showcased than on a song called "Bring Me All Your Loving," a finely wrought ballad that keeps turning into a rock-blues belt. "There's nothing at the five and dime that I really need," Ms. Yearwood sings, finally advising the man in the song to "throw your present in the creek." On "High Mileage," Jackson, 40, hews more closely to country convention than Ms. Yearwood does. For him, a large part of country's appeal involves its canny accumulation of catchy melodies and rhythms to convey plain emotions. Like most male country singers, he yearns for another country verity, stability, although for Jackson the present is equally hard to ignore. On the album's first track, a swinging stroll entitled "Right on the Money," he strikes an entertaining balance between old and new, likening a woman to "my favorite song on a new set of speakers." A country minimalist, Jackson prefers spare acoustic guitar to the studio bluster of much of contemporary country and pop. His stripped-down approach allows him to arrive at the emotional core of his romantic strivings. In an outstanding ballad like "Gone Crazy" or the chipper-sounding mid-tempo "A Woman's Love," he goes full tilt, in his cool way, at subjects like loneliness and contentment. "I know I'll never understand," Jackson observes in the latter, "all the little things that make it grand." Jackson, as much of a country classicist as anyone in the field, has an amazing ability to connect with the concerns of a contemporary audience that expects something new. His riskiest effort on the album is "I'll Go on Loving You," a celebration of the redemptive qualities of sex in the aftermath of a romantic disaster. For starters, he resurrects a recitative style often used during the 60s by singers like Conway Twitty and George Jones. In addition, the producer Keith Stegall orchestrates the song with sensuous strings and acoustic guitar work that sounds vaguely South American. This preoccupation with the past and present is made clear in his song entitled "Little Man," in which the singer laments the usurpation of mom-and-pop businesses by corporate culture. "Now the court square's just a set of streets that people go round, but they seldom think," Jackson sings in his straightforward tenor. In a time when too much country music is either pop coinage or tried-and-true formula, Jackson and Ms. Yearwood may be just what Nashville needs right right now: thoughtful classicists with fresh ideas. James Hunter writes frequently about music and books.
