Josh Turner's Your Man: Where's a Blunt A&R Guy When You Need One?

Josh Turner released one of my favorite country singles from last year, the lovely, mandolin soaked "Would You Go With Me" (one of the rare songs in regular rotation at *gulp* CMT to catch my attention.) As for Your Man, the 2006 album it comes from...yeesh. Let's just say I'm glad that I checked this out from the library as opposed to paying for it. And it's a shame, really. Here we have a handsome guy with a distinctive, resonant bass baritone, and a nice neo-traditional sound...who unfortunately was given free rein to pad roughly half this album with a batch of his own (frankly awful) compositions.

Josh's suave, uniquely deep voice is immediately arresting, and the album starts out promisingly enough--with a handful of tunes ranging from great (well okay, only one is great) to inoffensive. The Celtic flavored ballad "Would You Go With Me" is by far the best track here, buoyed by some ace mandolin and dobro playing, lyrics that are sweet but not sappy, and a melody that lilts on the verses and soars on the chorus. The playful "Baby's Gone Home to Mama" is awfully corny but ultimately sorta cute, and the instrumentation curiously has a bit of a rootsy 70's R&B vibe (is that a clavinet?)

I can take or leave "No Rush," a lazy Sunday ballad with some pretty gospel chords and one of those loverman spoken word intros that became Barry White's stock in trade. The breezy, debonair title track is the album's only other true keeper, while "Loretta Lynn's Lincoln" is its first real clunker--an odd, melody deprived tune that stands out mostly just for being weird. Quirky does not suit the square, straightedge Turner.

But the second half is where the wheels really fall off, and not coincidentally, it's where all of Josh's self penned stuff was permitted to reside. Why his handlers didn't find a nice way to break it to him that he can't write songs yet, I have no idea. Where's a smart, no-nonsense A&R guy when you need him?

He certainly would have told Josh bluntly that the embarrassing "White Noise" (which has a chorus of, honest to God, "white noise/comin' from the white boys/take me where the honkies are a tonkin'" and then...again, honest to God...gives a clumsy shout out to Charley Pride in its final verse as an attempt to show how notracist it is) is head slappingly stupid as opposed to cheekily un-PC, and advised him that he is about 500x more appealing crooning to the ladies than he is pandering to the good ol' boys. And he may have more politely suggested that perhaps a song ("Me and God," featuring a slumming Ralph Stanley) that contains lines like "You could say we're like two peas in a pod/Me and God" needs more work, and hey Josh, maybe we can record [insert well written traditional gospel or contemporary Christian tune here] in the meantime instead? And so on and so forth with his other self penned tunes--two completely banal, cookie cutter ballads ("Angels Fall Sometimes," "Gravity") and a fluffy, throwaway uptempo ("Way Down South.")

I see that Turner released another album this year, and I've been told it's an improvement over this mostly pedestrian effort. Here's hoping the guy either magically developed some chops (and a better sense of what's funny and what's simply moronic), or has made the wise decision to let other people handle the bulk of the songwriting.