Albums of the year 2010

# 3. Jamey Johnson - The Guitar Song
(Mercury Nashville, September 14th 2010)



The Guitar Song is a real ambitious album from Jamey Johnson with almost as much as two hours of music. The album starts of in the darkness and gradualy goes into some lighter territory. Very nicely done on the triple vinyl edition of the album where the first vinyl is black, the second half black and half white and the third is white. A perfect combination of new songs and some old classics from writers like Kris Kristofferson, Hank Cochran, Vern Gosdin and Mel Tillis.

Jamey Johnson travels in classic outlaw territory of Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. I'm a sucker for the moody ballads that are all over this album, but that the more uptempo booze-fueled songs are also classics. Johnson has done the amazing achievement it is to actually have made a classic country album that also has gotten a warm welcome in the modern Nashville-scene. There's still a lot of really great counry music out there, but more often than not it is drowned under a lot of crap that get called country these days.

The length of the album makes it quite hard to sit through it all in one sitting, but even if you do there are almost no weak spots in there, and that's saying something when you count as many as 25 songs and only three or four cover songs. Johnson is at his very best in the slower songs and that makes this more of a late night record than a record that you would put on for a night of drinking. That said, I for one would gladly just sit and have a couple of beers and some drinks listening to this album. Better yet, to sit at the bar while Johnson and his band were playing them live in the bar. Man, that would have been something. We don't really have any bars like that here in Norway.

My favourites on the album are "Cover Your Eyes", "Playing the Part", the epic "Can't Cash My Checks" and the always classic "Mental Revenge" from the first half of the album. From the second half of the album I would pick "That's Why I Write Songs", "I Remember You" and a great version of "For The Good Times". Still, there are so many more that I could have mentioned.

Hats off to Jamey Johnson, a truly great achievement.



Jamey Johnson - Cover Your Eyes

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