Luke Bryan's "Drink a Beer"

Wow, still watching CMT, and the next song's second line was "sit down and drink a few", (Eric Church's "Give Me Back My Hometown". Now I'm curious to just how many songs do the same thing..

It's like a shortcut to appeal to a crowd, kind of an "I'm one of us" thing. There's just so much chest thumping and bragging these days. I think that country is wide open for the same thing that happened in NYC in the mid-seventies, where punk annihilated the fakes. I'm hoping for new country, raw and real.

See I Think thats a great song. Not a fan of all the beer, truck blah blah blah. But in this song I sorta feel it can slide.
Think this song was written by Chris Stapleton

I came across this recently which kinda sums it up for me: 

Cheers,
Geoff

I think the song is very predictable, but much better than "That's my kinda night" by him. I think there's generally too much rock in the mainstream country, that's my beef..

I like the song. Although admittedly I'm a bit prejudice because of the writer. It's a story song. Tells about losing a good friend much too early. I can relate to that sentiment. I can think of hundreds of classic country songs that address drinking and drugs. It's acceptable for them I think because we all know they actually lived what they were writing about. I can vouch for Chris on this as well. He and I both went through an entire decade having a drinking contest. We both are off that poison now thankfully but I know that song was written from the heart. What sucks about the song is the "tweerker" who cut it. Even though it went to number one and will probably pay off Chris's house, it just doesn't have the same effect as it would if a serious artist had cut it. And THIS is the problem with country music. There's no lack of great material to cut, there is however a great lack of serious artist to cut the great stuff. Every popular artist on the radio is vanilla. Just like most folks are these days.

I love this thought process man. This is it, you hit the nail on the head here. I think the great songwriters are still writing the songs that they've always written, the issue here is the need to keep up with current status quo of the FLGL type of song style. It's trying to take a song that's meant to address one thing, and making into something else with the vibe and feeling. Every single one of my friends that are session pickers are so fed up with this, it's all I ever hear every time we talk. I mean it comes up in every conversation, doesn't matter what we were talking about before hand. Every one of these guys wants country to go back to country. My best friend plays banjo for a true country artist, I won't say his name because I don't want to be responsible if someone were to read this that's apart of that label, but he's one of the only fairly young artist that's keeping it country. They were at a label party, had to perform two songs at the event in a big big city. He was telling me they had some new guy there that was akin to a Jersey Shore type of guy who had turntables and all this crap, then a top rep of the label comes out afterwards and proceeds to tell everyone in the room "this is the future of our label". He told me the artist looked at the whole band with a face of WTH??? 

I'm not really sure what the reasoning is for all of this. Here's the deal for me, if they want to make this music, ok, I understand times change and all, but it's getting to a point where they are loosing the above 35 crowd because the waves are crowded with this new stuff. I mean I don't know Luke Bryan personally, I know people attached to him, and I can't imagine that he really enjoys some of the material he's pumping out. I can say this because I go back and listen to his early records, before the label started shoving things down his throat and it doesn't sound anything like what's being presented today. For me, my fear here is that the pickers that are responsible for a lot of the sound of country are just not feeling it anymore, what happens when these guys don't want to go in and play on this material? They'll do it because they need to feed their families, but the heart of the picker is what flows down to his instrument. If that's not flowing I don't see how we are going to be getting their best. What happens after this? Do they start getting people in other geographic's to do the cutting? Then they stamp it "Country". That's my issue. The consensus from all of my buddies is that they'd love to see another genre for this stuff to go into. But they are all just begging and hungry for someone to come along and make a solid Country album. 

Sorry for my rant. 

CMT is the MTV for Country music. Same songs over and over, same songs in THEIR top 20 over and over. They forced me out and I stopped playing Country because of the market they created. It's like the Rock cover bands all playing the same songs as each other, now it's happening with Country and if you don't conform you don't get many gigs. (in my area) I want to move to Austin where they have a real music scene.

I agree with cowboy, that it's artist dependent. Even if in Bryan's case, "drink a beer" was an appropriate metaphor, I find the incredible overuse of this kind of thing a sign of weakness in writing. It always smacks of an "I'm One of Us" thing to me. I enjoyed seeing Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard together on the Grammy's. In the oldie but goodie, "Okie from Muskogee", the first line is "we don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee", and what I'm doing is calling BULLSHIT on that statement and attitude. I can support and respect a person's belief in fundamental values, but for all the rhetoric, there's more serious drug use and addiction and poverty in southern states than anywhere else, and the never-ending connection of drinking with good times in every other country video sends a fake message to people.

Funny, I'm 180 degrees apart from the folks who take it upon themselves to be finger pointers, but I'd like to see more balance in the writing, something real. When Hank Williams sang of his personal issues, you felt it, and it was real. When Tom Waits sings, you feel the hardship and empathy. When Lou Reed sang "Heroin", it was from the street. When Johnny Cash sang, you felt the weight he carried.

To me, there's a fear of saying something that might offend people who aren't really thinking critically. Like the Dixie Chicks fiasco. I'm not saying anything about how I felt about that here. I'm saying look at that for a minute, and then tell me country artists aren't afraid to be honest, for fear of losing their support. I'm also saying this leads to mediocrity.

I hear that John. It wasn't only this song I was referring to, but the massive trend toward posturing in country music. It was just the title itself that set me off. Luke seems like a really decent fellow, and I would have bet he's earned his success.

Some personal advice, there's a way to be commercial and retain your integrity, and that's not a contradiction! Not long after my band was dropped from Mercury Records, due to the death of my drummer and my singer being in jail for heroin issues, my mother passed away. I was hurting, and disenchanted with the music business and a friend asked if I was interested in writing and producing a commercial, and I thought, why not, I'm not working and it would be good to see a studio again. I submitted a 4 song demo, and got the job. A week later I became a signatore with AFTRA, could hire union pros, was in a top studio, with guys from major bands like David Bowie, Robert Fripp and Cyndi Lauper doing tracks for me. 

I told myself I wasn't selling out, I was treating producing jingles as a stepping stone to producing records. The truth was, I felt like Bob Dylan singing about potato chips. Then I figured my way out of that dilemma. I realized I was a consumer too. I wore jeans and sunglasses, ate chips and drank some beer. So, my solution was to be honest about what I wrote about a product, whether I got the job or not. It worked, I survived, learned a little about production, more of the getting the music right, putting out fires and handling the moods and emotions of performers than the engineering side. It served me well, enabling me to do a decent job on my current demos, even though I'd left the business and hadn't recorded at home since we all pushed play on a tape recorder.

So, I guess I'm saying just be honest in what you write, and you'll be able to sleep at night, no matter how commercial the song is.

Sometimes I think about going back to Nashville for a month after writing and recording a bunch of songs about bad women, and watching the faces of the "just out of Belmont" kids that run the publisher pitch nights. It would be priceless to watch them process through their brains a bunch of songs that don't idealize women as these perfect creatures that deserve constant adoration. LOL

You know.... just listening to the song that started this thread, it's a damn good song. We used the thread to exert our frustrations to where the direction of "Country" music is going, but it's unfair to that song honestly. The songs I'm talking about are the ones that are about catfish, crickets, getting stuck in the mudd, knobby tires and how we love them, and how a truck shakes like a womans ass when the motor revs up. Those are examples of what someone has already sang about, or will eventually in this confused genre. But, the song "Drink a Beer" is about a fella that lost a good buddy, and he's going to sit down and drink a beer. It's not really in that sort of bro country cliche that most songs are going to.

I'm sitting here right now listening to Mark Wills greatest hits, buddy that's country, that's always been country. Country music has always adopted some of other genres themes and nuances, but the material has always been stories, stories about love, happiness, and bastards cheating on their spouses. That's the country I want, and that's the country that all my buddies that play on all this music want. I was in Nashville last weekend and I went and had lunch with a few of them on the last day I was in town, we were talking about life and nothing about music but somehow the conversation gravitates back to how sick and tired they are of playing on this type of music. Of course they'll do it, they've got to pay their mortgages. My sister was just recording her album up at Charlie Peacocks place the beginning of this week, she had some serious heavy hitters on her session, Mcphearson, Dugmore.... all of them were telling her how much of a relief it was to play on music that went back to country roots, and how much fun it was. Her album will kick ass because those guys were in it, and were having fun. At some point, I think the complacency is going to start coming through the finger tips of these players and that's going to be a damn shame.

Anyway, just more thoughts on the subject.