Billy Currington - Little Bit of Everything

It's been three years since the release of his last album.  In that time, Billy  scored a pair of #1 singles.  "Little Bit of Everything" is a perfect tilte for the songs held within but is the album any good?

The title “Little Bit of Everything” describes Billy Currington’s latest album perfectly.  Picking up on the mostly sunny optimism found on “Doin’ Something Right,” Currington leads off the record with “Swimming In Sunshine,” a song that, just by it’s title, sounds like something you might find on a Kenny Chesney album.  After listening to the track, it does sound like a Chesney song, only it feels more young, fun, and party-ready.  There is a strong undercurrent of steel guitar (instead of steel drums) driving the melody so that we never forget that the song is a country song. 

“Life & Love and the Meaning Of,” with its waylon meets contemporary country melody, finds Currington singing a lyric, one of five songs he co-wrote, about taking time to enjoy living in the moment and ignoring why life may not have gone the way he hoped it would.  One thing Billy Currington’s always been able to do is to sing a true-blue country song with conviction.  While he’s able to mine other genres and mix them into country, the stone-country ballad “Every Reason Not To,” which he co-wrote with Tony Martin and Mark Nesler, places Currington’s silky voice right where it should be, in a country groove that would make George Strait proud. 

The 70’s R&B groove of lead single “Don’t” helps showcases Currington as a sultry, sexy singer, much like his #1 hit “Must Be Doing Something Right” did.  Bobby Braddock has written some legendary country songs (“He Stopped Loving Her Today” being one of them) and he co-wrote “People Are Crazy” with Troy Jones.  It’s another fine ballad that has one foot in tradition.  The bass line isn’t anything buy country and there is a lot of steel guitar weeping in the background.  It’s an interesting mid-tempo track that would’ve been a big hit 10 or 20 years ago but I don’t know if radio is willing to play tracks like it anymore. Still, it makes for a great album track and might just be one of the best songs Currington has recorded thus far into his still-growing career.  

With ‘redneck’ and ‘country boy’ songs all the rage nowadays, Currington was bound to try his hand at the tired cliché-ridden subset of contemporary country (even though “Good Directions” basically did in a novel way).  “That’s How Country Boy’s Roll” is the only true ‘rocker’ on the album (the rest of the record is gleefully mid-tempo), and it’s also a song that will probably, be a favorite of Radio programmers, even though it’s nothing better than a tired, Lynyrd Skynyrd rip-off.  Currington goes south of the border with “I Shall Return,” once again playing Kenny Chesney’s game better than the man himself. 

“Heal Me” is a romantic slice of pop that finds Currington singing passionately about the way he wants a woman to ‘heal me with your sweet and sexy ways…I’ve waited for so long for you to come along and heal me.”  As far as pick-up lines go it’s not too bad and it ends the album with a different part of Currington’s character.  After taking some time off last year to deal with personal problems related to the abuse he suffered at the hands of his step-father as a child, Billy Currington has confidently returned to country music with an album that, despite a couple of questionable tracks, is one of the best country-pop releases of 2008.

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