DAVE'S DIARY - 11 JUNE 2016 - CHRIS YOUNG CD REVIEW
2016 CD FEATURE
CHRIS YOUNG
I'M COMING OVER (RCA-SONY)
CHRIS YOUNG - SOBER SATURDAY NIGHT WITH VINCE GILL
“No, I'm not hung over it's true, but I'm still not over you/ all messed up. All strung out. I was sitting at home breaking down/ Not out there getting high underneath some neon lights/ ain't no whiskey strong enough to make things right/ I'm just getting over another sober Saturday night.” - Sober Saturday Night - Chris Young-Brett and Brad Warren.
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When Tennessean singer-songwriter Chris Young wrote Sober Saturday Night with Floridian brothers Brett and Brad Warren he needed a revered vocalist on one of the highlights of his fifth album.
Former Pure Prairie League singer Vince Gill, who toured here in the eighties with Albert Lee long before the Warrens played the long defunct Continental Café , nee ID 's, was first cab of the rank.
“I'm such a fan of his, just asking him, I was like ‘He'll probably say no,'” Young, now 30, revealed as he promoted his new album that also features a duet with a Pope - not one from the Vatican.
“It was one of those songs where it was good before he played on it, but it's great now that he's on it.”
Oklahoma born chart-topper Gill, whose late Appellate Court judge sire Stan played in bluegrass bands and often played his banjo in chambers during adjournments, was a perfect choice.
Young is a long time Gill fan.
“I grew up loving Vince Gill. That was the first concert I ever went to - and when I asked him if he would want to sing or play on it, he asked if I wanted to come over and do it in his studio, and I was like, ‘Yes, I do!'”
“So we get over there, and after he sang a bunch of harmonies, he asked if I wanted him to play guitar. He thought maybe our styles didn't match up, and I just remember turning to the right and seeing his wall of Grammys and going, ‘Yes, I want you to play.' And he killed it. He sounds live just like his records or even better.”
Young liked the duet so much he released it as the third single from the album in May.
YOUNG AND THAT OTHER POPE
“We used to be the life of the party/ we used to be the ones that they wished they were/ but now it's like they don't know how to act/ maybe they're like me and they want us back/ it's like there's always an empty space/ those memories that nobody can erase/ of how bright we burned/ well now it hurts, but it's true/ when they think of me, they think of you.” - Think Of You - Chris Young-Cory Crowder-Josh Hoge.
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Chris signed to RCA in 2006 after being winner of TV program Nashville Star - a singing competition on the USA Network.
He teamed with 2012 The Voice talent show winner Cassadee Pope as duet partner on another of the album's singles Think Of You , replete with video on Nu Country TV Series #30 on Wednesday June 15.
Pope, just 26, released her second album Summer - follow-up to debut 2013 disc Frame By Frame - also in June.
Summer was produced by Young's prolific Georgian born song-writing partner Corey Crowder and features three songs co-written by Pope.
Young described Pope as a “phenomenal singer” after catching her live in concert before their duet.
“I'd heard she was a great singer, and I was like, ‘Good Lord!” Young said.
“And then she said yes, which was awesome. She came in the studio, she sang it three times and could have stopped with two. She's that good. She made me step up my game.”
Pope shot the music video for Summer on May 6 and tours the U.S. with Young in our spring.
Young, who played the Billboard Club in Russell St in the Melbourne CBD with Big & Rich in March, 2015, wrote all 13 songs on this disc with diverse partners in rhyme.
It debuted at #1 on Billboard with 57,147 sales in its first week.
The laid back baritone penned Think Of You with co-producer Crowder and Josh Hoge.
“I'm going in and producing this record with Corey Crowder and just really taking a lot more control and ownership in parts of the recording process,” Young revealed.
“I'm also doing the biggest tour I've ever done and moving into arenas and amphitheatres; playing places now where I opened for other people. It's busy, but busy is good.”
COMING OVER TO A BAR NEAR YOU
“So I'm coming over, runnin' every red light/ to Hell with the closure, save it for another time/ try not to think about you/But it ain't working/ why put out a fire when it's still burning/ just when I think moving on is getting closer/ I'm coming over.” - I'm Coming Over - Chris Young-Cory Crowder-Josh Hoge
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Young also wrote the album title track, I'm Coming Over , with Crowder and Hoge. The up-tempo ballad sees Young's character pleading to fix the latest fight with his belle, and deciding to head over and patch it up. It all happens after a coffee break in the video for I'm Coming Over screened on Nu Country TV Series #27 on August 15, 2015. The single, a simple relationship song, was certified Gold and also scored 12 million video views. “There's just so much going on that seems to be going in the right direction,” Young says of the single's success. |
“It's very validating knowing this time we put in the writing rooms and in the studio is working.”
Young, Crowder and Hoge wrote nine of the album's 12 tracks.
“Our work together was the nucleus of this record and where everything started,” Young says.
“The stuff that we were writing I loved sonically, I loved the direction, I loved the instrumentation of what we were doing, and I was like ‘This is really what I want my entire record to sound like.'”
Songs like Alone Tonight and entrée Heartbeat set the tone for this radio friendly disc.
“The fun part about writing a song with other people is that one story becomes three stories, and hopefully when you add them all together are more than the sum of their parts,” Young explained.
“This isn't just about one thing; this is all of our input into this idea. This is how people have felt when they've been in this situation. Hopefully, you leave the writing room with something that, when people hear it, they connect to it and put themselves in the song.
“I was just trying to make a record that was more progressive, but in my own way. Topically, we really managed to stay in its own space. There's love songs, there's fun songs, there's songs about pain. I think we managed to keep it its own thing; keep it something special.”
NO LONGER ONE OF THE UNDERDOGS
“Granddad's farm, handed down/ everybody said he'd run it in the ground/ spent four long years bailing that hay/ little by little got the whole loan paid/ hard work's paying off, you wouldn't believe/ he's making small town history/ here's one for the underdogs/ let 'em hear you y'all.” - Underdogs - Chris Young-Cory Crowder-Josh Hoge
Young also included one cover - I Know A Guy.
“I found that song, both of the writers are friends of mine,” Young explained.
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“They told me one day, "Man, we just wrote this killer song." I asked them to play it for me, and I ended up listening to a bad guitar vocal of the song. I fell in love with it immediately and told them "I'm cutting this. It's on hold. I'm putting it on hold myself." As it turned out, it was the very last thing we cut for the record. I couldn't be prouder to have that song. With it being a waltz, it was something we didn't have on the record, and it really helped to round it out. I'm a sucker for a sad song. That's one of the great things about the genre. You can get away with that in country music.” Don't get the impression that Young relies just on love for his song sources. The singer uses sport and farming metaphors to embroider the triumph of a small town character who rises above expectation of defeat in the anthemic Underdogs that follows Sober Saturday Night. The song sequencing seems well planned and maybe a fitting comment on the singer's early career struggles depicted below in our Truck Note. |
Young finished his album with contrasting precipitation and desert metaphors in another positive love song Calling My Name and sun drenched romantic tender finale What If I Stay .
It was less painful than two recent tours.
On August 13, 2013, Young was en route to a Montana gig when he suffered septic shock from a bacterial infection as a result of a small cut in his leg and taken by ambulance to a Denver, Colorado, hospital.
Young's mobility was impacted by the surgery and he resumed touring on August 22.
Then in June 2014, Young cancelled a CMA Music Festival gig after accidentally cutting his left hand with a kitchen knife and had surgery to reconnect tendons in that hand.
Truck Note
On Wednesday August 28, 2013, Young completed restoration of the 1996 Ford 150 pick-up truck - his demo studio en route to gigs in his pre-fame era.
It boomeranged him back from Tennessee to Texas when he was struggling to make it and has 100,000 plus miles on it.
That was when a non-skip Sony Discman rode on the dash, CDs floated on the front seat and a long cord stretched from the cassette adapter in the tape deck in Young's truck.
The 1996 hand-me-down Ford F150 wasn't fancy but it functioned.
He sweated all summer repairing busted HVAC units to get it, and in 2005, just before he moved to Texas for a regular gig at Cowboys in Arlington , he buckled his seat belt and prepared for the ride of his life.
He performed Texas honky tonks waiting for his big break.
At least once a month, he would hop in the truck after a Saturday night show and drive overnight to Music City - just miles from where the Murfreesboro native was born and raised and took part in writers' nights.
His truck was not only his transportation but also his makeshift music room.
It was where he learned cover songs for his set, write new material and sing along to Texan Mark Chesnutt's Greatest Hits or the late Keith Whitley's L.A. to Miami on long drives across the country.
“I drove around listening to a lot of music and trying to figure out who I was as an artist,” said Young.
Seventeen years into the truck's life - 240,000 miles, five No. 1 songs and five RCA albums later - including I'm Coming Over Young revamped the vehicle that drove his dreams when he started out.