Great album title, first of all. Great album, second of all.
Drew Parker co-wrote several of Luke Combs’ blue-collar hits, including Forever After All, 1-2 Many and Doin’ This. He also wrote the smooth Homemade for Jake Owen and had a minor hit of his own with the title track to his debut EP While You’re Gone. As with Hardy or Ernest, writing hit songs allows you the chance to go out front with songs of your own.
Album opener The Truck has a chorus which seems to rewrite loads of bumper stickers or office motivational posters (‘some days you’re the dog, some days you’re the bone’) with added fiddle, and the track sets the tone for 14 tunes packed full of rural signposts and sung by Parker with a Combs-like throatiness.
Opry members The Isaacs join him on the closing track What A Day That Will Be, a traditional gospel number which reflects how Parker sung a lot of gospel music as a teenager. Running on the Wildside sets Parker’s love of whiskey alongside his Christian faith. He resolves that ‘still he loves me just the same’, making peace with how he is forever tempted to run red lights and jump barbed wire fences.
He reminds me of a young Blake Shelton, as he does on the magnificent title track which is a 100%-er with words and music by Parker. Pedal steel guitar and fiddle are perfect accompaniments to a portrayal of a modern man, on which our narrator tries to ‘cover up the scars’ and wears a hat to ‘keep the sun off of the pain’. It will comfort many listeners and make them cue up all those neo-traditional stars like Randy Travis or George Strait.
In concert Parker covers Church on Cumberland Road by Shenandoah and Boot Scootin Boogie by Brooks & Dunn, so he is working in that lineage. Elsewhere we get none more country songs that lament how the narrator is drinking away the memory of an ex rather than Fishin’ on a River, and try to convince ladies to not just enjoy a one-night fling with him as he tries to Love The Leavin’ off their mind.
Combs could have had a hit with the euphoric Better On A Boat, which inevitably hymns the ‘chug-u-lug’ of a cold beer and ‘a bass on a fishing pole’. Hillbilly Billionaires (what a title!) is a honky-tonk tale of making hay from all that hay; owning ‘trucks and tractors’ has never sounded so fun, and it’s no wonder that after a fake ending the song is extended with a wigout from various guitars and fiddles in the band.
The experienced hitmaker Jon Nite was in the room for Tomorrow and Whiskey Proof: the former is a list song in the form of a country boy’s bedtime prayer, the latter a tear-in-beer power ballad where our narrator yells his lungs out at how he can’t drink enough to eradicate the taste of his ex’s lips.
There are, in the old Nashville major label style, plenty of outside writes on the album: Luck Don’t Live Around Here, where ‘long hard days…blood, sweat and tears’ are the backbone of country living; The Time We Had, a reminiscin’ song full of regret for loving too fast and not savouring the past; and Clearly Confused, where our vacillating narrator can’t decide if he’s done with his lady or not. The chord progression is left unfinished at the end of the song, so there is not even a resolution to his dilemma.
I am not surprised Parker wears a cowboy hat onstage and in his publicity photos, and it’s not for marketing reasons either; like Cody Johnson, Drew Parker is the real deal. At a time where country music is appealing more than ever to folk around the world, not just to the big cities outside the South, it is essential to protect the old style which celebrates God, fishing and wide open fields.
Parker’s believable voice sells the songs brilliantly with its Georgia twang and I think a lot of people who see him open for Combs or Jon Pardi this year will become Buckadrews, which is an awful name for a fan group but is probably a more formal one than the Drew Crew.
A Country Way of Life 