Granted I am not a countryhead for one bit, but I feel like making an album this long in a style with so little harmonic and sonic variation was a mistake. If this were a 20-30min EP with tracks 1-6 this would easily be in lower 4.0 tier, I really dig his folk-country style with bare instrumentation. Would stay in my library for sure. 3 and especially 4 are fuller and more upbeat, and 5 is cheesy. But by 6 and especially 7 I knew fatigue would kill this. Variations in sound are very mild and usually not successful. The acapella intro on 8, harmonica on 11, or piano on the slower 15 are all examples of variations that simply either fail to save the song or make it worse. The additional guitars on 12 and 13 are quite cool though, and harmonica is better used on 14. Drums on 16 make it a fun song too. But the last track with drums, piano and backing vocals changes up the sound the most yet still feels like the same song over and over again because those melodies have been used dozens of time before in the album. Some of the guest voices are cool, and the second half does include some other kinda good songs like 10, but this album really did not hold the distance for me. Shame because for the first 20min maybe I really enjoyed it, maybe I'll have to jam it again when I'm more used to country. 3.1
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