“Fuse” by Keith Urban

Even though 2013 was a notoriously bad year for crossover Country, there were really a surprising number of great Country albums released that year, from Kacey Musgraves’ powerfully honest Same Trailer, Different Park to Ashley Monroe’s fiery Like a Rose, and from Jennifer Nettles’ twist on the classics That Girl to Brad Paisley’s wildly experimental Wheelhouse.

Now, Keith Urban has released many wonderful albums in his day, but I chose to spotlight this one because of the significant change it represented for his sound. This is an album that mixes conventional Country music with Pop and other influences into a kind of fusion genre. Granted, there was a lot of that around in 2013…far more than anyone wanted, actually…but most of these acts fell under the shadow of ‘Bro-Country’, and were mixing Country with other genres simply in order to cash in on the Pop market. Urban, on the other hand, seems to be doing it because he genuinely finds experimenting with blending different genres interesting, and seems to be trying to find the next stage in Country’s development as a genre. Granted, Brad Paisley did something similar with the Wheelhouse album the same year, but Urban’s attempts are far more accessible and Pop-friendly than Paisley’s, which helps explain why this was by far the more successful of the two albums.

For most of the album, the subject matter and lyrical content of this album are not really all that different from the Bro-Country acts, albeit thankfully without the sleaze that has become that genre’s primary calling card. With a couple of exceptions (like the strikingly dark “Shame”), the bulk of the album is devoted to what would seem from the lyrics alone to be very conventional Pop-Country ‘Good-Time’ songs from the tradition stretching back to Jimmy Buffett. Sometimes they are framed as melancholy reminiscences on good times that are now gone (“Somewhere In My Car”, “We Were Us”), but even then the vernacular used is basically the same. What makes these songs different from the others in that vein is the music, an exceptionally fresh and distinctive Country-Pop sound that had never been heard before, yet sounded far more natural and less bizarre than, say, Brad Paisley’s attempts at the same thing.

And it’s worth noting that while Urban’s de facto protege Sam Hunt has proven to be far more uneven when attempting this kind of thing on his own, Hunt’s songwriting contribution here, “Cop Car” (which was also cross-pollenated onto Hunt’s own album Montevallo) is one of the finest items here, featuring a much more vivid and detailed narrative than most of the album’s good-time reminiscences.

Then, on the last two tracks, the album takes a decided turn for the serious and substantial, with the inspirational anthem “Raise ‘Em Up” and the melancholy piano ballad “Heart Like Mine”. “Raise ‘Em Up” in particular is probably the album’s high point, an immensely stirring call to live life to the fullest that keeps changing the context and meaning of its title phrase throughout…there’s a reason it was the song from this album chosen to receive a Grammy nomination.

All in all, this is one of the most fascinating Country albums of our time, and I credit it with helping to inspire such later Country genre hybrids as Eric Church’s brilliant The Outsiders(Church was, after all, a featured vocalist on this album’s best song). Some have complained that Urban ‘doesn’t even sound like Country anymore’, but ultimately, Country has only two chances of survival after the backlash against Bro-Country nearly killed it: to go back to its roots (as acts like Chris Stapleton have attempted), or to go forward to a totally new sound. Frankly, I imagine it’ll wind up doing a little of both, and that doesn’t bother me at all, because both options seem to be inviting fascinating and talented artists like Urban (or Church, or Paisley, or Stapleton, or Musgraves, among many others) to create some of the most interesting and substantive Country music the genre has seen in many a year.

“1989” by Taylor Swift

The initial ‘buzz’ for this album was largely that it was going to represent Swift finishing the progression she had started in her previous album’s three big hits and finally selling out to generic formula-pop. And while, as a longtime dedicated fan, I couldn’t bring myself to write her off in advance, I will admit that even I had my worries, mostly due to its unfortunate lead single, a piece of calculated, soulless pop formula called “Shake It Off”. It was admittedly a better song than, say, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”…taken on its own it wasn’t terrible…but it sounded less like Taylor Swift than anything else she had done up to that point.

But the negative buzz mostly turned into wild anticipation once Swift released her second song from the album, “Out of the Woods”. This wasn’t the Taylor Swift sound that we were accustomed to, certainly, but it wasn’t anyone’s idea of a sellout either. This was a totally new sound, not just for Swift but for anyone else, too, influenced heavily by Eighties Synth-Pop yet somehow sounding nothing like it.

Moreover, this is actually a fully realized Concept Album in the tradition of the Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall…the kind that resemble cast albums for musicals that were never staged. The closest model in Musical Theater would probably be Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, as both are narrative song cycles delineating with almost brutal honesty a failed relationship from the songwriter’s actual life.

The album functions as a clearly narrated mini-musical in which Swift’s character and an unnamed guy meet, fall in love, break up, reconcile and then finally separate for good. The guy in question is pretty strongly implied to represent former One Direction member Harry Styles, although to what degree the story told here resembles the circumstances of their real-life relationship is hard to say and, frankly, none of our business. However, it is worth noting that Swift is harder on herself here than on any of her previous songs besides “Back To December”, placing at least as much of the blame for the couple’s dysfunctional relationship on herself as on the other party, which is part of why I compare this album to The Last Five Years…like Jason Robert Brown, she does not flinch from portraying her own faults with brutal honesty.

Between its daring new sound and its ambitious narrative concept, this album took considerable courage to release, and despite the pronouncements from critics who never bothered to listen to the whole album or just suffer from tin ears, it is the farthest thing from a sellout move. Yes, she made significant use of co-authors on this album, mostly longtime Katy Perry collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, but the thing is, Max Martin and Shellback usually make catchy but fairly generic music unless they’re working with a talented and distinctive songwriter (compare their work with early-career Katy Perry to their collaborations with Pink). Other songwriters on this album like Jack Antonoff and Ryan Tedder have more legit credentials, but Martin and Shellback could never have written something like “Style”, “Bad Blood” or even “Blank Space” if Swift wasn’t contributing heavily to the songwriting process.

Most of the album has a new and exciting musical sound, but the lyrics, for all their greater ambition as story-telling, are the same honest, sensitive odes to love and heartbreak she founded her career on. Even “Shake It Off” (which I strongly suspect was merely a bargaining chip, a guaranteed Number One hit in case the rest of this extremely daring and unconventional album hadn’t turned out to be the smash success it did) still works better in the context of the album’s narrative than it did as a standalone single. Its seemingly inane lyrics actually help to fill out the character’s mindset and philosophy when combined with the other songs, and its context suggests that its defiant indifference may have been intended as the posturing cover for insecurity that everyone accused it of being when it came out as a single…after all, one song later she’s pouring out her regret at letting this guy go in “I Wish You Would”.

Granted, a couple of the other songs, like “All You Had To Do Was Stay” or “How You Get the Girl”, do sound like fairly conventional Max Martin sugar-pop, albeit with significantly smarter lyrics (the latter is particularly interesting, presenting one of Swift’s typical romantic narratives as a kind of how-to manual). But the album opens with the latest of the great New York anthems, “Welcome To New York”, which perfectly captures the experience of coming to the city and feeling like you’ve come home for the first time (a feeling I know well).

“Out of the Woods”, “Wildest Dreams” and “This Love” are ravishing, with “Out of the Woods” in particular being almost bizarrely beautiful. The album’s biggest hit, “Blank Space”, has a lyric that offers a biting satire of Swift’s perceived public persona among her detractors (you know, the image of a clinging maneater who actually wants her relationships to fail so she can use them as songwriting material), presented as her kidding-on-the-square warning introduction to a new lover. “Style” is irresistible, a danceable ballad infused with a kind of strange, bittersweet ecstasy, with a lyric that serves as an ode to a dysfunctional but oddly rewarding relationship. “Bad Blood” was heavily watered-down on its single version, but on the album it ranks as Swift’s most ferocious expression of anger to date, a song that, whether you love it or hate it, undeniably rouses passions in its listeners. “I Know Places” is apparently supposed to be a metaphor about the media, but it actually sounds even more suitable to the tone of The Hunger Games than Swift’s actual contributions to the soundtrack. And the sweeping ballad “Clean” makes for a suitably epic album closer, providing a bittersweet conclusion to the album’s story arc (as Swift puts it in a plot summary for the album, “She lost him but found herself, and somehow that was everything”).

Also of note are the three bonus tracks that were included on an exclusive version of the CD and later released as promotional singles on Itunes. Bonus tracks on ‘deluxe editions’ of pop albums can be the apparent result of having recorded too many wonderful songs to fit on the standard edition, or they can be obviously hastily-written filler to cash in on the rerelease market. But Swift has a history of doing good work on her bonus tracks…indeed, some of her all-time classics, like “Untouchable” and “Ours”, were only released on deluxe editions. And these three tracks continue that trend…”Wonderland”, with its surprisingly literate Carrollian imagery, the softly rhapsodic beauty “You Are In Love”, and “New Romantics”, which has conceptual similarities to her earlier hit, “22”, but with vastly superior music and lyrics. Indeed, it appears the only reason they were cut is that, like most Broadway cut songs, they interfered with the flow and dramatic arc on the album proper.

This was Swift’s best album up to this point, even better than her previous masterpiece Speak Now, and now that she’s pulled off this near-impossible self-reinvention associated with the likes of David Bowie and Bob Dylan, I feel more assured than ever that history will remember her as one of the very greatest popular musicians of our time.

“My Kinda Party” by Jason Aldean

When Billboard magazine included this album on their list of the best albums of the first half of the 2010s, I was naturally somewhat incredulous, but I thought I’d at least listen to it to see what they were thinking, and it turns out that this album, while certainly not worthy of such a lofty claim, is actually much better than one would be inclined to assume.

The authenticity of Aldean’s Country influences could be debated, but he has a fairly legitimate Rock edge, and this album in particular has a very distinctive sound that immediately sets it apart from the homogenized sameness of most processed Country acts. Granted, the lyrics are mostly cliches, but they’re the tried-and-true cliches that have formed the backbone of the genre since long before the Pop-Country era, and you’re probably not going to be bothered by them if you like Country in the first place.

The high point of the album, of course, is the smash hit collaboration between Aldean and Kelly Clarkson, which finds the common ground between their sounds and is still probably the best song Aldean ever recorded. The other ballads, such as “Just Passing Through”, “Texas Was You”, “I Ain’t Ready To Quit”, and “Heartache That Don’t Stop Hurtin’” are more conventional, but they have charm, and their jangling guitar sound sets them apart from the typical Pop-Country ballads of the time.

Apart from “Don’t You Wanna Stay”, the big crossover hit was the Country-Rap hybrid “Dirt Road Anthem”; it sounded like a grotesque disaster at the time, but we’re more or less acclimated to that combination now, and while it still comes across as a really awkward and embarrassing attempt at the genre, I suppose it deserves a certain amount of respect for laying the groundwork for things like Eric Church’s The Outsiders.

“My Kinda Party” is a more successful example of Aldean’s party songs, with a genuine Rock edge that makes it far more rousing and less bland than most other ‘Bro-Country’ acts. “Tattoos On This Town” is a compelling rocker, and “Church Pews and Bar Stools” is a nice piece of quiet Country introspection, even if it doesn’t say anything particularly new.

Aldean even includes a quasi-political anthem about the importance of small towns and farms (“Fly Over States”) and a song extolling the virtues of simple ‘Country’ living (“Country Boy’s World”), and manages to do both right, making a genuinely valid point in the former and being smart enough to make the latter a sweet love song rather than a malicious taunt like Justin Moore’s “Bait a Hook”.

Apart from “Dirt Road Anthem” and the unpleasant “It Ain’t Easy” (which uses the same reprehensible template as Lee Brice’s “Hard To Love”), pretty much everything on this album works, and while I still certainly wouldn’t call it one of the best of the decade, I do think Aldean gets less credit than he deserves. He’s not on the level of the more legit modern Country acts (Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert, Keith Urban, the Zac Brown Band, Eric Church, etc.), but he is vastly more respectable than pretty much any of his Bro-Country peers, and I have to give him some respect for that.

“Emotion” by Carly Rae Jepsen

Before this album, Carly Rae Jepsen seemed like the quintessential one-hit wonder, even if she had technically had two hits. She was known primarily for a silly borderline-novelty song that was launched primarily by going viral on social media, and her actual album was a miniscule hit compared to that one individual single, and these are all generally signs that a performer is not going to have much of a shelf-life. On top of that, she appeared as a replacement lead in a Broadway show, and that is rarely a sign of career health for a mainstream pop singer (case in point: Clay Aiken in Spamalot).

So when this album was released, especially given an extremely poor choice of lead single, virtually everyone was expecting it to be a forgettable mediocrity after which she would probably disappear for good. So this album’s frankly stunning quality wound up surprising a lot of people, and I’m not ashamed to say I was one of them.

Everyone compares this album to 1989 by Taylor Swift, another album that silenced an uproar of preliminary skepticism, with some even suggesting that it is superior to that modern masterpiece. In reality, the album isn’t quite as good as 1989 (mostly because it lacks that album’s range and variety), but it does tap into that same shimmering, ravishing blend of retro influences and totally new sounds, and it still stands as one of the greatest albums of the 2015.

And like 1989, it decided to advertise itself with the worst song on the album, “I Really Like You”, a blatant retread of Carly Rae Jepsen’s first hit, “Call Me Maybe”, with an incredibly annoying repetitive hook that sounds more like a parody of her earlier work than anything else. At least with “Shake It Off”, one could see the commercial (if not artistic) justification for going with it as a lead single, but since there’s not really a conventional winning formula for a smash hit song anywhere on this album, they really should have taken a chance on one of the more rarefied tracks and hoped for lightning to strike, which it obviously has done repeatedly in a decade where “Somebody That I Used To Know” topped a Year-End Chart

But despite the poor choice of initial publicity, pretty much everything else here is lovely. The second single, “Run Away With Me”, which should have been released first to begin with, is a perfect example, a huge, sweeping love song at once ecstatic and desperate, and loaded with melody from the intro verse to the chorus. The title track has perky music that sounds like a cute love song, but the scorching, mocking lyrics make most of Kelly Clarkson’s output look tame by comparison (the opening line is ‘Be tormented by me, baby’). “Gimmie Love” makes far better use of a repeating hook than “I Really Like You”, creating one of the most haunting choruses I’ve ever heard in conventional uptempo pop.

The motor-mouthed Funk Jam “Making the Most of the Night” provides a burst of uptempo energy, sounding different enough from the songs it’s influenced by to qualify as a synthesis of new genres rather than a mere throwback. “All That” provides the album with a truly elegant slow ballad to provide contrast with all its up-tunes. And for those who still saw Carly Rae Jepsen as a squeaky-clean, sexless pop princess, we have one of the most erotic pop songs of the decade, “Warm Blood”, which sounds uncannily like actual love noises in both music and words.

Then there is the album’s high point, “Your Type”, a devastating, anguished love song featuring Jepsen’s rawest and most dramatic performance ever (apparently, she used an E-cigarette for days beforehand purely to get precisely the right broken, raw-throated sound for the song). I’ve heard people complain about Jepsen’s supposed lack of personality, but this is an effect created by her unwillingness to make an ass of herself in her public persona…she displays plenty of depth and, yes, emotion on her performances here, and her rendition of “Your Type” is revelatory. This album didn’t turn out to be the commercial juggernaut that 1989 did, partly because Jepsen did not receive nearly as much promotion, but the serious pop listeners are definitely realizing how brilliant it actually is, and it seems likely to live on in history as one of the truly great albums of the 2010s. Rolling Stone and Pitchfork gave it lukewarm reviews at the time, but don’t be surprised if it winds up on their ‘best of the decade’ lists five years after the fact.

“I Dreamed a Dream” by Susan Boyle

Susan Boyle doesn’t get the respect she deserves, partly because the field she chose to work in still sees her as a manufactured Simon Cowell product. In Pop music, there isn’t really much of a stigma anymore to have gotten your start in Reality TV, because so many widely respected stars like Kelly Clarkson, Girls Aloud and Miranda Lambert have come out of that system, but among fans of Showtunes and Traditional Pop, there’s still a widespread mindset that anything that came out of a Reality TV talent show must be lowbrow trash.

The most common argument put forward by these people is that her voice isn’t technically perfect. This is actually true, but indicting her for it is missing one of the key points about interpretive singing. In this genre, technical skill doesn’t matter as much as putting your own distinctive stamp on a song…after all, Pat Boone was a far better technical vocalist than Billie Holliday, but which one would you rather listen to?

And Boyle’s persona has always been built around the fact that she’s a phenomenally talented natural voice with little technical training. And given that she combines that voice and persona with a staggering gift for emoting and ‘acting’ the songs she sings, there seems little reason to complain when many far less gifted singers with a strong acting range are considered performing giants in musical theater. Think of her as the opposite of Michael Buble: technically unpolished but with a distinct style and strong emotional presence, while he has a near-flawless voice but uses it to peddle a tired shtick that was old when Harry Connick, Jr. did it.

Most of the complaints about her center around her famous performance of “I Dreamed a Dream”, since it’s all her detractors have generally heard of her work, but while the studio version of that song is, at least in theory, the centerpiece of this album, it is by no means the best thing on it. The real highlights include a strange, haunting, eerily intense performance of the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” that showcases Boyle’s real range as a performer; a heartbreaking rendition of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”, reconceived here as a tear-stained ballad; and quietly intense, deeply angry versions of the classic standard “Cry Me a River” and Madonna’s “You’ll See”.

She also offers a characterful performance in what would become her other signature song, the deeply personal “Who I Was Born To Be”, and gives an intensely soulful performance of the Spiritual-esque “Up the Mountain”. The hymns, including “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art”, are mostly treated as pure vocal showcases, but they serve nicely for that purpose, and she manages to bring the hushed feel that is so essential to the album-closing “Silent Night”.

Even on the conventional Easy Listening anthem “Proud”, taken from the British Glee equivalent Britannia High, Boyle manages to find something genuine and touching. The only song on the album that manages to defeat her is the maudlin Country ballad “The End of the World”, and to be fair, that glaze-eyed, unintentionally creepy horror kind of resists a decent performance from anybody.

This album is a testament to Boyle’s genuine credibility as an interpreter of classic songs, and if all you’re familiar with is her iconic rendition of the title track, you really should hear the rest of the album to experience all the other shades and nuances of Susan Boyle as a performer.

“The Outsiders” by Eric Church

Eric Church’s credo concerning this album was ‘genres are dead’, and these twelve songs certainly seem to support that point. Normally these days, when a Country musician blurs genre barriers it results in the dilution of musical integrity, but Church makes the technique work for him far better than the various ‘Bro-Country’ acts, and this album is a bright spot in a country scene that was then dominated by shallow party songs and warmed-over tropes appropriated from Hip-Hop.

Church blends Outlaw Country, Southern Rock, Indie Folk and Contemporary R&B into an amazingly unique and distinctive sound that is the album’s primary appeal. Many of the songs feature a kind of murmured half-rapped delivery, including the title track, an ode to defiant nonconformism, and “That’s Damn Rock & Roll”, which is both an ode to and a deconstruction of Rock culture. But Church has the charisma to make these passages quietly intense and genuinely threatening in a Clint Eastwood sort of way, rather than the kind of embarrassing desperation you get when Jason Aldean tries to do this.

“Give Me Back My Hometown” and “Talladega” are the hits, and they are the only places on the album where Church makes enough of a concession to pop conventions to offer radio-friendly take-home tunes, but they’re hardly the bland schlock-pop most crossover Country consisted of at the time, and it’s actually kind of surprising how successful they became in that era. “A Man Who Was Gonna Die Young” is a beautiful ballad with a particularly touching final verse, and “Dark Side” might just be the scariest Country song of the decade so far, all the more because it never rises above a whisper. And “The Joint”, with its mildly clever double-meaning title and quietly simmering delivery, makes for a satisfying album closer.

Granted, not every track is perfect. “Like a Wrecking Ball”, as enjoyable as it is, is built around a fairly heavy-handed sex joke, and the comic breakup song “A Cold One” skirts dangerously close to Bro-Country territory. And he does use several sexist terms that are no longer considered appropriate on the track “Devil, Devil”, although since he’s singing about Nashville rather than a literal woman, it’s not nearly as offensive as those lines might sound out of context.

Still, there wasn’t a single track on this album that I found hard to listen to, and the fascinating new musical sounds found on it are just too interesting for me to dismiss. If all you’ve heard from this album is “Give Me Back My Hometown” and “Talladega”, I highly recommend you check out the other tracks, which are more innovative, less conventional, and frankly, more interesting than the album’s more pop-friendly crossover hits.