Rucker will make you look forward to ‘The Last Time’
Darius Rucker’s latest album, When Was the Last Time (out Friday), reaffirms two points made on all the albums he has released since launching his postHootie & the Blowfish solo career. Let’s start with the more fundamental and important one: Rucker is a seriously underrated singer. Blessed with a rugged but warm timbre, he has a rare ability to invite listeners into a song rather than keep them at a distance through extraneous, showoffy display. He knows what each word, each rise and fall in a tune, is intended to express. He draws consistently on that insight, espe- cially when given material he can interact with creatively.
This leads to the second point: That kind of material is more the exception than the rule in modern country music. Forged in Nashville’s songwriting shops, where fabricating hits is the raison d’être, most of it sticks to formula, which generally involves listing accou- terments of a particular lifestyle — trucks, girls, etc. — and, as if to accommodate that process, avoids longer melodies in favor of more digestible fragments.
There’s plenty of this on When Was the Last Time ( eeeE out of four), his fifth solo album. Almost every track begins with a four-bar instrumental intro, per Music Row practice. Several draw from the country tradition of building lyrics on an initial brief phrase. The opening number does so successfully, using its title, For the First Time, to weave a pattern of playful questions that return to the come-on: “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
Sometimes, though, the predictability of the writing poses too formidable an interpretive challenge. The clichés on Life’s Too Short — back porches, ice- cold beer, “feet up on the cooler” — parade through a simple repetition that ultimately constitutes a call to inaction. Similarly, She unleashes a flood of familiar images right at the top: a “doublewide or a little white house her daddy built,” “green grass growing up around that Oldsmobile in the yard.” All of this paradoxically turns whoever “she” is into an archetype, seemingly the opposite intent of an ostensible love song.
It bears mention that Hands on Me tries a little too hard to make a forced metaphor work. The music has a toned-down gospel feel, which is mirrored in lyrics that include “born again,” “soul revival,” “lead me to salvation” and “I’m down on my knees.” But in the chorus, where one might expect a call to the altar, Rucker suggests that the object of his attraction “turn the lights off, slide your jeans off and put your hands on me,” perhaps not the most elegant way to tie the pieces together.
Rucker handles all of this well, far better than many of his peers might. But on more substantial songs we hear more clearly what he can accomplish. Another Night With You and the excellent Twenty Something give him more to work with and he responds with compelling performances, altering their more extended melodies and connecting us to their stories.
Somewhere between these approaches are the songs written and sung purely for fun. The saloon shuffle Straight to Hell, featuring brief appearances by Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan and Charles Kelley, and the amiable Story to Tell go down easy and complete the picture of Rucker as a singer who can do well with any song that comes his way.