I'm all for a little romance in this world but airbrushed Nashville-style country & western always strikes me as a risible form of escapism and the musical equivalent of Mills & Boon novels.
Still, it's a genre with massive appeal and judging by the fact that four of the eight tracks on this album are covers of popular American country tunes, strong-jawed Irish singer Pete Kennedy is a devoted fan.
The songs in question are Nickel Creek's When You Come Back Down, Lonestar's Amazed ; Colin Raye's 'Love ,Me' (written by Skip Ewing and Max Barnes) and Hal Ketchum's Small Town Saturday Night .
Despite the line "If you get too high I'll be there to catch you when you fall" Nickel Creek's is not a drug song; it would be more interesting if it was. Instead, the image of a woman soaring in the clouds while her man waits patiently on solid ground is a pretty corny metaphor for fidelity.
It's a way I suppose of pledging undying affection which the song Amazed expresses with less ambiguity: ("I want to spend the rest of my life with you" is plain enough to make it a love song tailor-made for wedding parties. Personally, lines like "your hair all around me - baby you surround me" make the relationship sound more stifling than soothing.
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Love, Me is based on a love letter from the singer's grandma to his grandpa which, for extra heart tugging effect, is read out at her funeral.
In this company, Kennedy's version of Hal Ketchum's lively tale of drunken revelry comes over as hard-hitting social realism.
Mercifully, his own songs are a little less cheesy but still fairly bland.
Yellow takes its imagery from nature as rain turns to snow and then slush. This Time reflects on times in our life when problems seem insurmountable; apparently inspired by an encounter with a drunk in London after a gig
The other two, Feelings ("All I can do is keep on trying") and a break-up song Time of Your Life were recorded live on June Carley's Best of Irish Midlands 103 radio show
Kennedy seems in earnest but his Irish-American singing voice sounds forced and this only serves to highlight the shallow sentimentality of these songs.
Pete kennedy's Website
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