Quick Hits, Vol. 354 (Petty Country, Jon Muq, Luke Combs, NxWorries)

Various Artists - Petty Country (A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty).  For people of a certain vintage - i.e. old dudes like me - this was a fantastic, time-honored tradition, to make an awesome tribute album to a top-tier artist that reinvigorated the songs with a new verve.  The best examples I can think of right this second, and maybe there are better, are Deadicated and Common Thread.  Deadicated was a rad collection of weird artists covering the Grateful Dead - imagine Jane's Addiction, Midnight Oil, Lyle Lovett, Indigo Girls, and Burning Spear all hanging out and remaking the Dead into their own image.  I loved it.  Common Thread had more in common with this instant album though, in that it was all country stars hammering out covers of the Eagles.  Clint Black, Alan Jackson, Tanya Tucker, etc. doing all the classics that the Dude would have hated.  I got that disc about the time that I arrived in college and I really loved it.  I used the pacing and style that Clint Black did for his version of "Desperado" when I used that song to try out for Little Shop of Horrors later in school.

Anyway, this is an overly long, bloated, buggy whip to the dead corpse of some of my favorite songs around.  I love Tom Petty.  I enjoyed hearing his music used in that Apple TV show Bad Monkey.  I liked hearing some of his tunes used this season for NFL games.  But the majority of this is like that garbage Twisters soundtrack where they took no name people to give them a shot at fame, or let bigger names come in and massacre what should have been held holy.  An hour and sixteen minutes of the bad kind of trouble.  It's not all horrible.  Chris Stapleton does a good job.  Steve Earle's mushmouthed pillow fight version of "Yer So Bad" made me smile.  Jamey Johnson sounds amazing.  Rhiannon Giddens sounds lovely.  Willie sounds fine.  But the Dierks Bentley version of "American Girl," the Wynonna & Lainey Wilson version of "Refugee," Justin Moore's "Here Comes My Girl," and Luke Comb's version of "Runnin' Down a Dream" are just painful.  The Lady A song sucks, the Brothers Osborne one is bad, and Dolly sounds run down.  A lot of these are very faithful to the original, they're just set up with lesser vocals and lesser instrumentation so that you just end up with a karaoke ass version of the song.  Like Midland doing "Mary Jane's Last Dance" and making it hollowed out and boring, but with more rad-itude.  Sadly for the world, the Dierks Bentley song is the top streamer, so here you go.  I have no clue how the Stapleton tune didn't do better than this.  2.1 million streams.

Mainly true to form, just feels like a plastic version that happens to include mandolin and banjo as this Nashville creature power-belts the lyrics with too much sheen and precision.  I hate it.  And if you read me frequently, you know how rare it is for me to straight up hate something.  More than happy to delete this disc from my queue.

Jon Muq - Flying Away.  This, on the other hand, brings me pure and unadulterated joy.  Dude was on the ACL poster last year (sadly, I was not able to see the show because he was weekend two only) but I kept the album to keep listening to it.  Every time the opening track starts to unfold in my ears, I feel so much peace and pleasure.  Fucking magical.  "Runaway" also happens to be his most streamed tune.  468k streams.

Luxurious beauty.  He is originally from Uganda, and his backstory is sort of fascinating, but the current chapter of the story is that he ended up in Austin, working with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, to make this album.  It is wonderful.  I hope that he gets all of the fame and fortune that should be coming his way.

Luke Combs - Fathers & Sons.  Combs is not someone who is on my radar in the slightest, so I'm not sure how this album came to be in my New Stuff list, but I'm honestly glad it was.  Cheesy as shit - just absolutely dripping in gooey American, plasticky cheese like a soggy nacho at the bottom of a paper bowl at a little league game - but also endearing to me in an unexpected way.  These songs are all, or at least mostly all, about fathers and sons.  And being that my son is now away at college for his Freshman year, hearing songs like "The Man He Sees in Me" or "Huntin' By Yourself" brings a different level of poignance that I never would have given them the time for ten years ago.  For example, the chorus to "Huntin' By Yourself," with these lines: "I already knew he wouldn't see a thing / Been three more times and it's always the same / 'Cause he moves too much and he talks too loud / But I don't mind 'cause I'm finding out / That even if it's just time we're killin', it's never felt more like livin' / They'll make you cuss and wear your patience thin / But next thing you know, they're all grown up and then / You're huntin' by yourself again."  All too damn true.  Like I said, sappy and cheesy, but also a well-crafted encapsulation of an emotion that I am living in today.  "The Man He Sees in Me" is the top track so far, with 53.3 million streams.

I also have to note that the backing band on that song is excellent.  Sounds like the folks who back up Allison Krauss.  "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" also rings very true to me, except for the divorce angle to it, but the idea of a song wishing his dad would take him out to the ballgame just to hang out.  A friend gave me tickets to go see a Texas basketball game with the boy before he went back to school, and it was a very fun evening.  The album is pleasing to me - very basic arrangements, kind of a slow burn of pleasant country tunes about young fatherhood.  I guess I don't hate all Nashville country as much as I thought.

NxWorries - Why Lawd?  This feels like a group especially created to get on a bunch of festival lineups this year.  Anderson.Paak with something called KNXwledge (and other guests here and there, like Dave Chapelle or H.E.R.), but it really just sounds to me like an Anderson.Paak album.  Unfortunately, that doesn't get me much, as my experience with Paak is that he'll have one banger per album (give or take), and it usually involves someone else elevating that track (like Mac Miller - RIP - or Bruno Mars).  The track with H.E.R. is the top track by a ton - 40.1 million streams for "Where I Go," while the next-closest streamer has 9 million for a Snoop cameo.

Total vibe track.  Laid back and smooth as hell.  Also, unfortunately for my tortured brain matter, pretty darned boring.  But as I have chronicled for years, I am just a bad student of the R&B/neo-soul world, so of course this misses my pleasure centers.  I'm okay without this.