
My last year of university I roomed with Melanie, an ardent country music fan. We came to an arrangement that she wouldn't play country music when I was home on the condition that on Sunday mornings she got to listen to both hours of American Country Countdown and I wasn't allowed to make a single peep, comment, or annoyed-sounding sigh. I listened and, grudgingly, by the end of the year agreed that not all country music was bad. My friend Bryan made me a CD of the handful of songs I actually started to like. He titled it The Only Good Country CD. It has a lot of Alabama and Colin Ray. I still have it in my car.
A couple of weeks ago I was listening to JRFM and was caught off guard by the haunting echos of "Better as a Memory". I was really surprised to hear that it was a Kenny Chesney song -- I thought he was all tailgating and beer. A little Googling later and I found that several other songs I liked were also his - "Don't Blink" and "The Good Stuff". Intrigued I headed over to iTunes and feel into a little song called "Old Blue Chair". It's unhurried and introspective and speaks of the need to look at life slowly. I particularly like the acoustic version. I was hooked.
It got me thinking about a conversation I had with a friend recently about how I buy almost all my music a la carte from iTunes now and rarely buy an album. My friend likened it to only ever reading a chapter out of a book and never sitting down to enjoy the whole thing the way the artist intended. Albums are whole entities my friend said, they lose something when you slice them up. I wondered if maybe this song would be from an album I should enjoy as a whole. With little research I found the CD -- Be As You Are: Songs from an old blue chair. I picked up a copy at Wal-Mart for $10.
It turns out this is the Kenny Chesney album no one likes. It's the one his management begged him not to make -- there's an apology to them in the liner notes. Yesterday it was my soundtrack for the drive home and I have to say my friend was right -- there is something about listening to an entire album. Old Blue Chair is full of quiet, lilting, ballads that taste of the islands and sound like the sea. I can see how this isn't perhaps the music that fills stadiums (Chesney, it turns out, has sold more concert tickets that anyone for the past 4 or 5 years) but it's lovely.
There's a line in one of the songs that says, "I don't remember what I think". Sounds like a pretty nice place to be. I don't have a ticket to the islands just yet, or an old, blue chair on the beach but this is definitely music to dream to. And if I can just find the place to put it, I do have a genuine Caribbean hammock, which I'm pretty sure is the next best thing.
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