Label: Capitol Sound/Style: Standard-issue but likable and varied country-pop
By Steve Morley
There’s been some noise lately about Darius Rucker, the first African-American singer to have a number one country song since Charley Pride scored his last in 1975. When Pride emerged in the mid-60s, his task was far more difficult. He was a virtual unknown in an exclusively white genre, while Rucker—the lead singer for pop-rockers Hootie & the Blowfish—attained massive success with a string of mid-1990s hits. Still, the newsworthiness of Rucker’s breakthrough some 40 years later indicates the inherent limitations of the country marketplace. The full meaning of his recent achievement is hard to measure, given his past accomplishments and the significant fact that many of 1995’s pop fans have become the 21st century’s country consumers. On Learn to Live, Rucker effectively repurposes his proven appeal to connect with his old listeners as well as recruit some new ones.
On songs like “Forever Road,” the theme of relational commitment is more grounded and clearly stated than on Hootie’s lightweight love songs, and the singer’s newly sharpened enunciation suggests a greater investment in his subject matter. Rucker’s blurred, back-of-the-throat singing style was a Hootie trademark, but now he projects his chesty baritone outward, bowing to country music’s lyric-driven tradition. With his slight southeastern twang, he even sells the honky-tonk shuffle “All I Want,” a tongue-in-cheek breakup song that’s a hands-down winner despite going against the album’s grain.
In general, he favors thoughtful and philosophical fare like “If I Had Wings,” which asks big questions about existence and human conflict and concludes that the answers aren’t available to mere mortals. (“Why is there war, and why is there killin’?/ Have we forgotten some secret we knew/ Back when we were just children?/ If I had wings, I’d fly up to heaven…”) “I Hope They Get to Me in Time” finds an accident victim reflecting vividly on the reasons he wants to survive. The track’s drugstore-novel melodrama is countered by its subtle but effective message about the tragedy of drunken driving as well as its unresolved ending. (“I could see the headlights swerve, so I cut the wheel to the right/ Last thing I saw was that bottle turned up as he crossed that center line/ I see tiny hands, brown eyes fallin’ asleep to that lullaby/ And you slide over next to me as I turn out the lights/ I can hear the sirens comin’…”) On the following track, “While I Still Got the Time,” the previous song’s endangered character might be a survivor who resolves to live with integrity and “dance like nobody’s watchin.’”
Though the sentiment is uplifting, it borrows brazenly from Kathy Mattea’s 1989 hit, “Come From the Heart,” just as “It Won’t Be Like This For Long” imagines the same time-lapse childhood detailed in “You’re Gonna Miss This,” a recent No. #1 for Trace Adkins. Even the title track’s nod to grandfatherly wisdom rummages through Kenny Chesney’s 2007 hit “Don’t Blink” as it urges younger folks to be alert and “take some chances.” If Rucker isn’t overly ambitious with his angles on country’s time-tested themes, he does take a big chance by stepping confidently into new territory on Learn to Live, which contains evidence that he’s taken his title’s advice.
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