The honky-tonk two-stepper "All by My Lonesome" ("…heartbroke and then some," he continues) may seem like the eleventy bazillionth heartbreak song in the past decade, but it's amazingly tight and it sounds great, so there's certainly no reason to complain. Fiddle and steel carry over to "This Song Doesn't Rock," where the line "it doesn't rock 'cause it's country" is expressed in a slow shuffle in contrast to the far more uptempo verses.
In "The Best Thing in the World," various majestic and awe-inspiring works of wonder are considered nothing to his lover. Has this theme been done? Yes. ("Ain't Got Nothin' on Us" is but one example.) But Yates' take on the theme is sincere and unabashedly country. It's followed by another downbeat song, "What Are We Thinkin'." Instead of the love of a woman, this song talks about shunning drunk men on the street, gossiping about others, and so forth while asking if simple compassion and truth are gone. At times, no doubt many of us think about many of these same things.
The love of wordplay is a common trope in honky-tonk songs, and this album makes its entry on the Big List of Country Puns with "Blinded by the Bud Light." I didn't even need to hear the song to know that it was a "drowning my sorrows" type song, but I like its simplicity just the same. Next is "Roxanne's Bayou," which not unlike Chad Brock's "Evangeline," is a cute, charming, neo-trad look at a cute girl working the boat dock. Sounds like fun. And only a couple songs later you get "Alcohol Abuse" (later covered by Pete Schlegel), which goes for a rapid-fire list of many kinds of booze while saying that spilling it or breaking a bottle full of it is, well, alcohol abuse. There's also "I'm Just Drinkin," which flies in the face of the sorrows-drowning tropes; here, he's not depressed or anything, he's just drinking. He even has a designated driver.
"We can't make something happen / By hoping that it will" is a key observation from the acutely-written "Love Is Standing Still." Here, the topic is a romance that seems to have stagnated, and he's offering one more chance to see if that spark's still there. It's not often that songs address relationships in this manner (Rockie Lynne's "Do We Still"), so that makes this cut all the more interesting.
"Blue ain't just a mood, it's a color / That looks good on you" kicks off the sweetly shuffling "Blue Ain't Just a Mood," which explores two meanings of the word: he's gone from blue, as in down, to finding someone who looks good in blue. No doubt it's the same woman he sings about in the Haggardesque "Nothin' Bigger Than Our Love," where all the worries of the world fade away just because of the power of love. "My Infinite Love" carries a similar theme, but its comparatively downbeat nature (and slightly lower vocal) help make it feel more like a good sequel song rather than a rehash. Then there's "You're Why Made God Me," offers "My lips were made to whisper sweet nothings in your ear / My hands were made to wipe away every single tear" and other similar details to explain, well, why God made him for her. Yet again, this song has a clever concept that it executes well.
"American Voices" tells the story of a foreign immigrant, a descendant of a slave family, Chinese natives who own a restaurant, and an Indian on a reservation. It encourages every American resident, regardless of origin, to join and sing about freedom and justice. It's awfully hard to pull off this kind of song without sounding cloying and overdone, but Yates keeps it tasteful and restrained for the most part, although he probably could've cut off the last minute or so without any real ill effect.
By releasing his music entirely on his own, Yates found ways to improve on the fine neotraditionalist sound he'd already built up on his underrated debut. While it may be true that none of these songs made a big impact (or really, any impact at all) on radio, Yates at least managed to put together sixteen near-perfect songs, and I'm sure that the few people who happened upon this album liked it as much as I did.
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You may also purchase the album digitally from Billy's website.
This review is part in our new Album Archive: Billy Yates in-depth artist feature. click below to read about Billy Yates and the other albums in his catalog.
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