The Tennessean reports:

One of country music’s biggest touring bills just got even better. George Strait has invited Lee Ann Womack to join him and Reba McEntire on their 2010 tour, which will make its way through the U.S. from January to April.

“I can’t imagine a better tour to be on than George Strait and Reba McEntire — and now I’m not imagining,” Womack said in a release.

“I’m trying to figure out what to wear, ’cause you can’t out-starch George and you sure can’t out-spangle Reba!”

The tour kicks off on January 22 in Baltimore and ends its sporadic run on April 10 in Des Moines.

If you could play matchmaker, who would be on the bill of your dream tour? Dead or alive, young or old, regardless of genre – which groups or artists would you choose and why? Are there particular songs by one of the artists you’d be interested in hearing them sing together?

• 5. “Brand New Heartache” – The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

  Jeff Hanna sings “I swore that the last time/I’d learned from my mistakes/But I think I’m headed for a brand new heartache.” Perhaps he should form a support group with the other artists on this list, as they all appear to have the same learning disability.

• 4. “This New Heartache” – Vince Gill

  There’s no better soundtrack to a new heartache than an old country song, says Gill on this classic sounding track from These Days. Listening while curled in the fetal position, a bottle of Evan Williams cradled against your chest is purely optional.

• 3. “Brand New Heartache” – Cherryholmes

  According to Cherryholmes patriarch Jere, banjo-pickin’ daughter Cia “never had a boyfriend or been on a date or anything,” yet was still able to write this excellent bluegrass song about being done wrong by a fella. (Link)

• 2. “I’ve Got A New Heartache” – Ray Price

  The smooth-voiced Price has a new heartache over an old sweetheart who’s back in town. The version below is a duet between Gene Pitney and George Jones, no slouches in the vocal department either.

• 1. “Brand New Heartache” – Gram Parsons

  This “Brand New Heartache,” written by husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant (”Rocky Top,” “Sleepless Nights,”), takes the Number One spot on today’s list thanks to the magical combination of Gram and Emmylou. A new guy moves into town and your gal is three hours late for your date? And the same thing happened last time a dude moved in next door? Sounds like a brand new heartache to me.

Thankfully, though, some artists are still recording good country songs, and good country drinking songs. The superb “An Old Friend of Mine” was a highlight of Joe Nichols’ recent album. The 9513 columnist Miss Leslie independently released “Drunk Dialer” just a few months back. Even Brady Seals’ “Been There, Drunk That” and Rodney Atkins’ “Fifteen Minutes” (both from 2009 releases) were a fair bit of fun.

Yes, good country drinking songs are still being recorded. This just doesn’t happen to be one of them, probably because it never aspires to anything more than competence. It’s template traditional country designed to go down easy, but in striving to make no negative impression, it doesn’t make much of an impression at all. The singalong tempo and Niemann’s affable baritone will have you humming while you listen, but you’ll be hard-pressed to remember any of the details minutes later. Because they don’t matter, possibly not even to Niemann himself. This isn’t a song for a lasting career; it’s just something else to sing, another track to fill an album.

Points have also been deducted for the cutesy sound effect over a not-so-racy line about getting laid and the barroom singalong at the end, both standard ingredients of this song type that appear all-too-predictably and bespeak a general lack of innovation.

In response to the song’s own question – “Hey hey hey, what’s so wrong/With one more drinking song?” – nothing, nothing at all. But if it doesn’t distinguish itself through an especially clever turn of phrase, a fresh musical take, an outstanding vocal performance, something on which to pin an identity – if it even seems to delight in its own nondescriptness – I’m left wondering why anyone would choose to listen to this particular drinking song in the first place. Especially given all the fine alternatives.

Listen: Jerrod Niemann – “One More Drinking Song”

For the first time, it’s hat’s off: Clark’s ready to let her roots (a dark-auburn color, by the way) show on the album cover, and the contents here are just as revealing. Clark’s seventh studio album shows a newfound wisdom and focus as the singer enters her 40s with new challenges in her career and home life. Musically, the album isn’t far removed from Nashville product; it’s the weighty material that lifts it a cut above Clark’s major label albums. As the sole producer, Clark laces these ten tuneful tracks with mournful moments of fiddle and steel that echo her recent turmoil. The corny novelty of “What Happens in Vegas (Follows You Home)” is the one weak link on a disc that deliberates her major-label departure, her mother’s battle with cancer and a recent divorce; these songs ring with a pure, vulnerable heartache.

Clark’s singing is stout, cocksure and, when necessary, it shines with a poignant intimacy that adds gravity even to lighter fare such as the gently-chugging “If You Want Fire” and the groovy “Poor Girl’s Dream.”

From a girl dropping her hard-earned cash on laundry detergent (“Poor Girl’s Dream”) to an older woman at the bedside of her dying best friend (“If I Could Be You”), Clark instills her characters with the understanding and compassion that come from her own experience. The most telling ballad is “A Million Ways to Run,” with a woman recounting days “at the bottom of a bottle, getting numb with every swallow.” Perennial harmony partner Vince Gill lends his sweet tenor on the stripped-down “The One You Love,” where Clark admits “When someone’s slippin’ away right before your eyes/How useless we are is a painful surprise,” seemingly haunted by her own helplessness.

She’s still got her feisty, fearless spirit, though, steering her twangy alto towards hope and even humor when the blues arrive. That winsome wit’s most evident on first single “Gypsy Boots,” a sultry, playful midtempo that shows she’s built of restless stuff. “I’m a country song, the kind that makes you cry,” she admits to a would-be mate. After all these years, she knows those are the ones you remember long after the last note. Likewise, The Long Way Home, the album of Clark’s career, is one for the memory banks.

The acronym stands for “certified guitar player,” a designation given by Atkins to a select few musicians who he felt made significant contributions to the world of guitar–Wariner was one of only four to receive this honor (the others were Jerry Reed, Tommy Emmanuel, and John Knowles).

Atkins, who died in 2001, is one of music’s most important figures. He worked with Red Foley, toured with Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, released over 100 albums, influenced countless guitar pickers with his unique style, and, of course, spearheaded the Nashville Sound movement. He was also the man who signed Steve Wariner to his first recording contract at RCA in 1977 (Wariner was still a teenager when he got his start playing bass for Dottie West and Bob Luman, and was barely in his 20s when he signed with RCA) then subsequently “fired” Wariner as his bass player when Steve’s solo song “Your Memory” cracked the Top 10 a few short years later. The two men were dear friends, and this friendship/mutual admiration is tenderly displayed in the music and liner notes, which feature pictures of the two as well as the revelation that they called each other “Big Hero” and “Little Hero.”

My Tribute to Chet Atkins is generally arranged in chronological order, interspersing biographical Wariner-penned originals with songs that Atkins recorded during his six decades in the music business; the album is bookended by “Leavin’ Luttrell,” a song representing the start of Atkins’ musical career and “Silent Strings,” a moving eulogy in which Wariner pays tribute not only to his dear friend, but the guitar he left behind. As Wariner makes very clear in the liner notes, “You can’t out-Chet Chet.” He doesn’t try to, eschewing Atkins’ arguably best known singles “Yakety Axe” and “Mr. Sandman” in favor of songs that hold personal meaning, such as “(Back Home Again in) Indiana,” (recorded for the 1954 album A Session with Chet Atkins.) a song that Wariner, an Indiana boy, listened to religiously.

A highlight of the album is “Producer’s Medley,” a compilation of eight songs that Atkins produced, including “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “End of the World,” and “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.” According to the liner notes, Atkins used to play “Producer’s Medley” on the road, but never recorded it. Here, Wariner reconstructs the medley, making it all sound incredibly effortless, as though certified guitar playing is no more difficult than a marathon session of Guitar Hero.

For the most part, My Tribute to Chet Atkins is an instrumental album, letting the masterful fingerstyle guitar work–often supported by fiddle and piano–speak for itself. However, “Chet’s Guitar” features Wariner singing his lifelong admiration of Atkins, beginning with a childhood spent listening to “the touch and the tone and the twang of Chet’s guitar” on his father’s 45s, playing dive bars as a young man, and eventually making the Opry stage, “fingers all flying up and down the frets/Playing every lick that [he] stole from Chet.”

Clocking in at approximately 35 minutes long, My Tribute to Chet Atkins, may run a little short for some listeners’ tastes, but it’s a masterful tribute to a great friend and a legendary figure in American music that simultaneously showcases Wariner’s c.g.p. skill. He doesn’t deliver a carbon copy of Chet’s musical style, but instead pays homage to the man and the artist with a sense of understated grace that makes each song a joy to hear.

Will guitar-loving kids pick along to this just like Steve Wariner did to Atkins’ records so many years ago? It wouldn’t be surprising.

After having the song “Angels In Waiting” land in the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart back in 2001, Tammy Cochran could easily be included as one of the many in Nashville who have used tragedy and heartbreak as the motivation for a hit song. Describing her experience watching her two older brothers, Shawn and Alan, live and eventually pass on from Cystic Fibrosis, the track was a personal and strangely inspirational snapshot of Cochran’s life. It would be one of six songs that Cochran would place on the charts between 2000 and 2002.

Fast forward seven years: With her brand new album 30 Something And Single, Cochran has again used a difficult story in her life–albeit this one with a happier ending–as inspiration in her songwriting. Several of the years between her hit singles and this new album were spent in a tumultuous and grueling adoption process that eventually ended up with the arrest and conviction of a Florida-based adoption facilitator who was assigned to handle Tammy’s case.

“I was just one of several victims of this facilitator. Unknown to me, she used an attorney that was banned by the U.S. Embassy. I sent my money to who I thought was a lawyer. Instead, it ended up being the housekeeper of the lawyer.” In an effort to contain the situation, Tammy recalls, “Just weeks away from bringing Shawn home, I was threatened that my adoption would stop if I went public with my story.”

Cochran never gave up and after a second push for adoption, she brought home a healthy baby boy. What resulted is a tune called “Half The World Away (Shawn’s Song),” a story written during the time in which she wasn’t sure that her adoption would ever go through.

She has written all but one of the songs on the new album and has included many additional stories drawn directly from her life. The one exception is her favorite classic, Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” It takes her back to childhood when she and her brothers would sit around the record player listening to her parents play old country records. Now she plays the same music for her own son, named after those same brothers. It’s comforting to know that music remains the ties that bind for families like the Cochrans.

KEN MORTON, JR.: Before we touch upon the new album, tell me all about your high school band TC Country. Was that “big time” back in the day?

TAMMY COCHRAN: (Laughing) Oh boy. That was a band that did bars, Elks clubs, local fairs and stuff like that. It was a just your basic run-of-the-mill country band that would play anything that was on the charts at the time. It was fun, though!

KMJ: Let’s jump ahead to the brand new album. How would you describe 30 Something and Single?

TC: I describe it as something that is who I am and shows all aspects of my personality. It has some serious songs and some songs that are funny and tongue in cheek–which I haven’t been able to do thus far in my career. I’m really excited about folks hearing this side of me–the side that can make light of situations and look at things more fun.

KMJ: Who or what were some of your influences on this album’s sound?

TC: Greg Cole produced the project for me and I’ve known Greg for years. He’s done a ton of great work. He’s worked on projects for Darryl Singletary and a bunch of different acts. I met Greg when I first came to town and he knew my style and how I wanted this album to sound. So we sat down and talked about it making an amazing album of songs that are totally me. I wanted songs that were a sound that would represent me, production that would represent me. I wanted bouncy fun songs and serious songs, all that are pretty country. There’s a couple songs that are more on the contemporary country side, but for the most part, they’re all on the other side. A song like “30 Something And Single” is a traditional country ballad.

(more…)