Remember when crying steel guitar solos were all the rage? When songs about relationships dealt with something more mature than a teenager's point of view (not to knock Taylor)? Mark Chesnutt does. Even though his biggest hit was a cover of the Aerosmith power ballad "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" (yeah, yeah, I know; I hated typing that, too), Chesnutt has always been one of the torch-bearers for unabashedly neo-trad country. Like so many before him, though, he was dropped like a hot potato come the 2000s.
The fifth (!) single from "Rollin' with the Flow," "She Never Got Me Over You" was also the last song Keith Whitley ever wrote, doing so with Hank Cochran and Dean Dillon. The sound is definitely reminiscent of Keith Whitley's best, featuring plenty of fiddle and steel; in fact, Paul Franklin's solo brings to mind John Hughey's classic "crying steel." It has a fairly simple, yet effective storyline: he's with somebody new, and although this somebody new has cleaned him up, she just can't shake away the memory of that former lover. Despite having only one verse and a chorus, it wastes no words to get its point across; in true Dean Dillon fashion, the hook is simple without being mundane. It's really, really hard to believe that this isn't actually a recording from circa 1989, although one could easily imagine it being a #1 smash back then.
Lofton Creek Records seems to have a pattern of always releasing five or six singles off an album; for instance, Doug Stone's 2004 album In a Different Light had six, none of which charted. In fact, Mark was one of the only Lofton Creek artists to manage two chart singles off the same album (his decent cover of "Rollin' with the Flow" being the first). Although it only got to #47 on Billboard, it sure got a lot of play in my neck of the woods. Just the fact that it got any airplay at all still has me hopeful that neotraditional country has not gone by the wayside. Heck, just the fact that Mark Chesnutt is still singing good ol' country songs is comforting enough.
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