Today’s episode of “you learn something new every day” is this: you know that sound they get in Country? The one that is a steel guitar and Merle Haggard was ace at? The one they call The Bakersfield Sound?
Well that was largely crafted by Billy Mize.
I only found that out today when I looked up his great nephew, Logan, before reviewing “Still That Kid.”
I was aware of Logan Mize because his last album “Come Back Road” kept coming up as one of them “artists you might like” things every time I listened to Eric Church.
Top 20 on the Billboard, 200 million streams, he marked himself out as a serious talent, with a serious potential to do something huge.
With “Still That Kid” he might have come up with the songs to do just that.
The genius of it – and make no mistake about it – there’s a real skill to it in my book, is that he sells the dream to us. The dream of small town America – Mize himself is from Wichita, Kansas and you best believe I’ve been trying to work a “lineman” joke in here, with no success – but to everyone. Not just those who actually live there.
The key to “American Livin’” ( one of two here he co-writes) is in the chorus. “When life was a Mellencamp song” he sings, and to me that’s telling. Here, everyone is living the rock n roll fantasies, like some episode of “Friday Night Lights, and what’s wrong with that?
“I Ain’t Gotta Grow Up” (one of two that there are two versions of), is the Friday Night party one, “Who Didn’t” is the reflection one (key line: “not everybody lived in those city limits, but we didn’t know anybody who didn’t”, and lets be totally blunt here, you know what’s coming. Everybody here does, though and that’s why this is superb.
“Grew Apart” – a proper pop cut – features and is co-written Canadian singer Donovan Woods, will resonate with sad blokes everywhere, who think they can get their ex back, (the other version of it is even better as its sung from the girl’s perspective as the “wronged” party) and “Gone Goes On And On” ploughs the same furrow, but here’s the thing. I defy anyone not to have these choruses in their head second go around. I defy anyone not to be sucked in by the tales on “Practice Swing”, and not hear their own lives in it and so it goes.
“How did I end up here, where I don’t belong? Like a steel guitar in a disco song” he muses, brilliantly, on “Hometown”, but you know, deep down, that Mize knows exactly where he belongs. “Get Em Together” (a duet with Clare Dunn) is insanely catchy, and as if to prove the team of songwriters he has are perfect for him “Prettiest Girl In The World” is genuinely beautiful.
“Slow”, appropriately enough, does its thing slow and funky, and serves as the State Of The Union as far as this record goes, and the suggestion that this knows its place in history, that it is content to be exactly what it is, is all over “Something Just Like This”.
“Still That Kid” is going to make Logan Mize big. Its fair to say it doesn’t break any new ground, but it was never meant to. It’s the sound of a man who knows exactly what he wants and has the talent to deliver it.
It runs in the family.
Rating 8/10
