{"id":19035,"date":"2013-06-05T08:08:25","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T12:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=19035"},"modified":"2013-06-05T08:08:25","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T12:08:25","slug":"stop-making-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/stop-making-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop Making Country"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Transcendental.\"<\/a>

Transcendental.<\/p><\/div>\n

The following song by Kelly Hogan<\/strong>, “Strayed,” always seems to come up on my iPod at just the right moment while I’m running it on shuffle during a long car ride. It sounds especially good late at night, while I’m driving the family through Connecticut en route to Maine.<\/p>\n

Kelly Hogan, “Strayed”<\/a><\/p>\n

The boys are asleep. They don’t have the patience for this slow-burning, atmospheric song. My wife is usually half asleep, keep herself just conscious enough to confirm which way I’m supposed to go at a certain fork in the journey. The first few times she heard “Strayed” she stirred more than usual at 3:00 am and asked, “Who’s this?”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I gave her my stock answer: “It’s a woman named Kelly Hogan. I like her. She sings back-up for Neko Case<\/strong>, but I like her records better than Case’s. I wish she would get more attention.”<\/p>\n

We don’t listen to a lot of Neko Case in Chez Mod. My wife and I both agree that she buries herself in too much reverb. Hogan’s voice is\u00a0ensconced\u00a0in a good deal of reverb on “Strayed,” but it’s appropriate to the mood of the song.<\/p>\n

My wife appreciates country music. She grew up in the country. That sound and those values are not foreign to her as they are to me. She often gets bugged that I don’t love Patsy Cline<\/strong>. “She’s good,” I’ll say, “but she’d have been better if she used her voice for rock ‘n roll.”<\/p>\n

The rare times I stumble across a country-tinged artist that I can dig, I run that artist by my wife, thinking she’ll dig the music too and be impressed by my ever-broadening tastes. After years of dismissing him, for instance, I got real excited when Steve Earle<\/strong> put out the song “Transcendental Blues.” Granted, the song isn’t remotely “country,” but I’d long rejected Earle for sounding like a country version of Bruce Springsteen. This song, I thought, may be my gateway to Earle. Around the same time I saw him perform with that old bluegrass group, with everyone standing around a single microphone. I quickly bought the Transcendental Blues<\/em> album and rushed home to listen to it with my wife.<\/p>\n

She loved the title track as much as I did. The rest of the album? Not so much. Not at all. After multiple spins through that year, I don’t think we’ve ever listened to a single track again beside the title track. She appreciated that I tried and still hits REPLAY whenever “Transcendental Blues” comes on.<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago, during one of our long, late-night drives, Kelly Hogan’s “Strayed” came on the car stereo, magically appearing on the shuffle. My wife stirred from her semi-slumber and turned up the volume, paying no mind to our sleeping boys in the back seat. When the song ended, she hit REPLAY.<\/p>\n

“You really like this song, don’t you?” I asked, my What an Injustice That Neko Case Gets All the Attention rant cued.<\/p>\n

“I do,” she murmured, “it’s transcendantal.” She added, “I don’t like her other songs nearly as much. I wish she’d stop making country music. I feel the same way about that Steve Earle.”<\/p>\n

When “Strayed” played a second time through she sought out “Transcendental Blues” and listened to that a couple of times in a row. Then she started playing other songs that put her in that state, starting with The Kinks<\/strong>‘ “Big Sky.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following song by Kelly Hogan, “Strayed,” always seems to come up on my iPod at just the right moment while I’m running it on shuffle during a long car ride. It sounds especially good late at night, while I’m driving the family through Connecticut en route to Maine. Kelly Hogan, “Strayed” The boys are […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[224,822],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19035"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}