Brooks & Dunn - "Red Dirt Road"

[StevePulaski]

Red Dirt Road (2003)
By: Brooks & Dunn

Rating: ★★★

Nearly every country artist caters to nostalgia at one point in their career - Kenny Chesney and Colt Ford, for instance, have built their very careers off of the fabled golden age of America. While the idea of fawning over days gone past isn't an inherently bad idea, it often provides for some contrivances or missteps along the way, especially with what we have before us with Brooks & Dunn's eighth album Red Dirt Road. There's a perfunctory element that we hope the album doesn't bear, and there's a certain quality standard from this duo, at least at this given time in their career, that we hope they uphold.

Thankfully, all preconceived notions of Red Dirt Road being a sleepy stroll through the good ol' days are discarded after the title track plays and the album has proved to us that it's not another pandering effort. It's hard to say why Brooks & Dunn succeed so well, whilst essentially operating on a minefield of pitfalls, but the album at hand bears so many great visualizations within its songs, great storytelling frames that excite rather than remind of other, better songs, and the continued chemistry of two fun-loving and extremely talented southern boys that continues with Red Dirt Road.

I remember "You Can't Take the Honkytonk Out of the Girl," the album's opening track and second single, taking over Country Music Television upon release, with its raucous depiction of a country girl refusing to be tamed thanks to her rowdy roots, accentuating the powerhouse vocals of Dunn and the smoother, more laidback personality toted by Brooks. "Red Dirt Road," however, was always the more impressive song to me. It's a downhome romp about coming of age in that central location(s) many of us have in our mind when we think of youthful innocence, the puberty years, or the teenage years. Dunn's expressive vocals really shine here, getting even a bit raspy and high-pitched during parts of the song, as he exasperates all there is to love about those central years to growing up in a song with impeccable visualizations, starting with the title of the song itself.

Other songs like "Memory Town" slow the nostalgia down to a glacial pace, giving us time to recognize Brooks & Dunn as songwriters and not just lively performers. There's "That's What She Gets for Loving Me," a song with a questionable, self-deprecating title that goes precisely the way we didn't anticipate it to go with just the right amount of songwriting craft, "Good Cowboy," a song that continues to emphasize the personalities these two men bear, and the hidden, fifteenth track "Holy War," which has a pleasant upbeat quality to it whilst talking about something gravely serious.

The occasional misstep comes in the form of songs like "My Baby's Everything I Love," "Till My Dyin' Day," an in-and-out country cliche about what it means to a country boy, loving one's family and wife till the day they take their last breath. This kind of shameless pandering echoes the sentiments shown on Hard Workin' Man, the duo's sophomore effort, which paradoxically had more pandering to the safeness of nostalgia than this album, which is almost entirely predicated off of it.

Red Dirt Road also marks, at least to me, where Brooks & Dunn got progressively more studio-minded. The almost mixtape ruggedness (or at least pre-2000's sound, which still sounded as if it was mimicking the vinyl-age of country in some ways) in sound and presentation of previous albums like Brand New Man and Borderline is lost for a more glossy presentation. This isn't a criticism but a mere observation that, again, surprisingly works well as it functions to the backdrop the duo have painted for one of their most accomplished albums to date.

Recommended tracks (in order): "Red Dirt Road," "You Can't Take the Honkytonk Out of the Girl," "Memory Town," "That's What She Gets for Loving Me," and "Holy War."