You can’t accuse Kip Moore of letting the grass grow. Barely a year after the double album Solitary Tracks, here he is again with another 13 songs, and Reason To Believe is the sound of an artist who seems incapable of phoning it in.
“Levee” opens things with more than a touch of Creedence Clearwater Revival about it. There’s grit under the fingernails, sweat on the shirt, and Moore sounds ready. Ready for a battle, ready for whatever comes next. That’s always been one of his great strengths: he makes struggle sound like propulsion.
“Get What You Give” underlines something that has long been true, too. Is he country? Not really. Not in the modern sense, anyway. If anything, Moore feels like the natural heir to Tom Petty, a songwriter with a foot in heartland rock, a foot in Americana, and both eyes fixed firmly on the horizon.
“The Darkness” is sensational, not least because Moore and his writing team have a knack for wrapping whole lives, whole breakdowns, whole reckonings, into songs that rarely trouble the four-minute mark. Here, the discussion around mental health is raw and unvarnished, but never exploitative. It just sounds lived-in.
“Heartbreaker” is so classic in its rock shape, so blue collar in its bones, that resistance is futile. “Headlights” has scope, and that is true of so much of this record. These are songs that feel widescreen without ever losing the human detail. “You & Me” is a piece of storytelling that feels uniquely American: Tommy and Gina taking on the world again, because someone always has to.
“Faith In The Wind” finds Moore sounding world-weary, beat down and still somehow standing. That is perhaps the real heart of Reason To Believe. It is not blind optimism. It is not pretending the bruises are not there. It is knowing they are and carrying on regardless.
The title track itself is one of those songs you can imagine playing over the closing scene of an HBO show, all cracked roads, bad decisions and people staring out of windows wondering how it all got this far. Moore has that cinematic quality in abundance. He doesn’t just write songs; he builds lives inside them.
“Lonely Tonight” suggests he has dusted off his AOR collection, and it suits him brilliantly. The keys drive it, the chorus lifts, and there is a polish here that never feels plastic. “Long Time Coming” changes the vibe completely, an acoustic strum that feels as wide as the prairies and as vast as the sky. Moore’s voice has a real Springsteen thing going on here, that same sense of someone singing from the middle of the wreckage and making it sound like redemption might still be possible.
“Wild Things Like You” knows the oldest truth of all: there’s always a girl. And just because you’re old enough to know better, it doesn’t mean you do. “Sober” adds a power-pop riff, a chorus that digs in deep, and another reminder that Moore can write hooks with the very best of them.
Then there is “Josephine”, and it feels like the perfect reflection. “We’re a long way gone, we ain’t dead yet” might as well be carved into the whole album. Moore co-writes everything here, and this one seems to sum up the blue-collar struggle better than most. We didn’t do much, but we did our best. Surely that is the heart of his writing.
If Reason To Believe sounds a little more downbeat than usual, there is reason for that. During the making of the record, Moore lost his mentor, champion, first producer and songwriter Brett James. He even named the album after a song James loved, one Moore had written years ago. That knowledge hangs over the record, but it does not crush it. Instead, it gives the whole thing extra weight.
Whatever Moore does is always superb, but this feels special. No one walks the line between Springsteen, Fogerty, Petty and country music better than this, and maybe no one has done since Steve Earle. Reason To Believe is all of that and more: bruised, defiant, melodic, honest and full of heart.
Rating: 9/10
