Now listen here, Jon Pardi me and you have got to fall out. You might have as many Platinum Discs as the Rolling Stones, you might have had millions of sales, billions of streams, but you’ve made me blush.
I’ll explain:
The PR people that sent “Mr Saturday Night” – his fourth record – do it on an App and the song titles don’t come up on your car’s screen when the song plays. And the last song on the album was the last one that played before I got to work this morning, and I was merrily singing its chorus to myself (like all Jon Pardi’s tunes it sticks in your head) when someone says to me “what the hell did you just say!?”
Now, at this point I’ll declare I have led a sheltered life, some might say I was a prude, and I might not have known what I’d said. The song is about getting his missus to turn her car around and come back home. I didn’t know what a “Reverse Cowgirl” was. I do now, Christ!
So yeah. Cheers, Jon.
The rest of it, mind you, I can get through without problems, I think. Because the rest of “….Saturday Night” is the type of thing I’ve been listening to since I was 16 years old and was handed a tape called “Some Gave All” by Billy Ray Cyrus (I wonder if he’s got any children?). While the kids at school were laughing their socks off at “Achy Breaky Heart”, me? Me, I was off on a voyage. Garth Brooks, he was next, the Elvis Country album, that was in the mix too.
Pardi’s 10 years younger than me but he simply must know the same stuff, because these 14 songs are littered with it. There’s always a bar, a girl, a whiskey, a Marlboro Red (sometimes all three) but my, there’s always a chorus.
The whole of the album is built on them. The title track, “Fill ‘Er Up” and the quite brilliant blue collar chugger “Last Time Lonely”, don’t stray from the path. Why should they? The formula works. Brilliantly.
The best thing about it, is simply that it doesn’t have any truck with modernity. No one has written a number on a napkin for years, it doesn’t matter. They do here. Indeed, the sound of the tracks, the violins on “Neon Light Speed” or the fact that George Strait might love “New Place To Drink”, it is irresistible.
It even gets bluesy on “Your Heart Or Mine” or Latin flavoured on the shimmering pop of “Santa Cruz” but the neo-traditional thing seems to suit him so much better. “Longneck Way To Go” being a case in point.
He does ballad’s as well as anyone too. “Raincheck” is timeless, but the good time fun of “Working On A New One” will surely raise a smile. Indeed, the record feels a little like “one from column A, a little from column B”. One a ballad, a rocker to follow. “Hung The Moon” is the former, “Smoking A Doobie” the latter (and by the way it has one of the great rhyming couplets in its chorus too), while “The Day I Stop Dancing” is like a mix of the two.
“Mr Saturday Night” is going to do what it is supposed to do. It is going to sell in the millions, its going to count it’s streams in the billions and no doubt will see him play to sold-out stadiums. It does just leave one question, though. Did she come back?
Never mind, let me know, I’ve got some googling to do……
Rating 8/10
