Jo Dee Messina

One Liner: "I'm Alright is a really nice song."  I wish I had more to say about her?

Wikipedia Genre: Country

Home: Nashville (but originally from Holliston, Massachusetts)

Poster Position: Small Type 
Saturday.

Thoughts:  This one missed me entirely back in the day.  Now that I've listened to it, a few songs sound familiar, but this was definitely never something that I followed or bought.  

Her real name is even Jo Dee Marie Messina.  I like it.  She's currently 52, and popped in 1996 with a single from her self-titled debut album.  Since then, she's been nominated for Grammys, charted six number one singles on the Billboard country charts, and been certified gold and platinum multiple times.  At one time, she was the first female country artist with three multiple-week number-one songs from the same album.  That was probably her second album.  But that first single is still her most popular and most streamed, "Heads Carolina, Tails California."  66.1 million streams, and I don't remember it at all.

Very wholesome image there, the world switched things up later when the lady country singers were all sexy and shoved into skin-tight clothes.  And also, a pretty good song!  Nothing wrong with a good old "let's get outta here" tune.

By age 16, she was performing in clubs with her brother and sister playing in the band.  But after a while, she realized that Nashville was the place to make it, and moved down at age 19.  She won a talent show, which translated to a radio show gig, which caught the attention of a producer who helped her make a demo.  Through some contacts, Tim McGraw helped her get signed to his label.

Her second album from 1998 appears to be the big one, with four songs on there among her most streamed tunes.  The title song, "I'm Alright," definitely sounded familiar, that chorus is pretty memorable and so I know I've heard it before.  50.8 million streams.

There are those tight leather pants and form fitting clothes I expected in the first video.  The sunglasses in that video are amazingly awful.  But again, a pretty good song!  Nothing wrong with a good old "life is good and I'm okay!" song.  "Bye-Bye" has a little N'Sync flavor to it.  Her cover of "Silver Thunderbird" is good.

After that, we've got a 2000 album with a popular Tim McGraw track on it, a 2002 Christmas album, a greatest hits, a 2005 album without any major hits (and a cover that is making me think of, like Jessica Simpson or some other mediocre pop starlet), a 2010 album without any stream counts over a million, another 2010 album with a 5.9 million streamer on it but nothing else, and then her most recent album.  I gave her most recent album, 2014's Me, a good shot here, and I can't say I much care for it.  She funded it through Kickstarter, of all things.  It is mostly fine, just generic stuff.  "Peace Sign" is a bad song with lyrics such as: "one finger shy of a peaace siiign!" and "you put the f u in fun."  That is jenky.

One other factoid, non-musical division, is that she was featured on the fourth season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

But, despite an apparent waning popularity in recent years, those old school songs are pure fun.  Feels like the kind of good times music to add to a playlist for exclusive use in a convertible on nice days.