With “Redneck Woman” Gretchen Wilson became an instant star. She sold millions of “Here For The Party” albums and even won multiple awards as she worked to record her follow-up album “All Jacked Up.” That album hoped to maintain the rockin’ redneck woman vibe of the debut record but, while it featured a couple of hits and went platinum, the hits started to dry up. Gretchen then released “One of the Boys” and while it too scored some sales success, and even charted @ #1, the album largely was DOA at radio as the singles from it were basically rehashes of “Redneck Woman,” “All Jacked Up” and “When I Think About Cheatin’.”
With radio having moved on to label mate Miranda Lambert as the ‘go-to’ rockergrrl, Gretchen Wilson really needed to come back to radio with something that showed her to be more than a one trick pony and with “If I Could Do It All Again,” (Listen Here) she seems to have found something to do just that. While the lyrics of the song have been rehashed on radio time and time again, Gretchen sounds refreshed and in all honesty, the lyrics suit her and her career to a t. It’s almost as if she’s singing this Rivers Rutherford/George Teren song to radio programmers to say to them that she’s still here and is regretful of singing songs that were maybe a little to same-songy and brash. After all, radio already had “Redneck Women” and knew she said “Hey Y’all and Yee haw” so they didn’t need to be reminded that she was “one of the boys” and “all jacked up” since the first single said basically the same thing.
Gretchen Wilson is a strong vocalist and here’s hoping that she CAN do it all again, that is to get radio interested in her music again as radio could really use a Gretchen Wilson who isn’t so brash but is still undeniably country, even if this song’s melody borders on country-rock, that voice can’t be anything but country.
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