JUST OUT / MUSIC
Darius Rucker: ‘Learn To Live’
New York Times
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
COUNTRY
‘Hootie’ frontman comes alive in new genre
‘Learn To Live’
Darius Rucker. Capitol Nashville. 12 tracks
Grade: A
No pop star has ever needed rescuing from his reputation more than Darius Rucker, frontman of Hootie & the Blowfish, perhaps the least consequential successful band ever.
Though it had a string of hits in the mid-90s — the band’s 1994 debut album “Cracked Rear View” has gone platinum 16 times over — those songs felt like anomalies: warm, largely optimistic bar-band anthems carried by Rucker’s burly baritone.
Compared with grunge, Brit-pop, various strains of indie rock and anything with a programmed drumbeat, they were almost impossibly modest. They had no imitators. They spawned no scene.
But those same songs wouldn’t sound out of place on contemporary country radio. (Can a Rascal Flatts version of the sublime “Let Her Cry” be far off?) Rucker remains well suited to the genre. “Learn to Live,” his second solo album (in 2002 he released “Back to Then,” a tame, awkward, largely unpleasant collection of neo-soul), is impressively eclectic and sharply written. It’s one of the year’s most vibrant country albums.
Rucker has certainly studied the playbook. “Alright” echoes the self-consciously rural charm of recent hits by Craig Morgan, and “It Won’t Be Like This for Long” and “Learn to Live,” both about the wisdom that comes with age, suggest the more wistful songs of Kenny Chesney.
But Rucker’s most intriguing borrowing is on the clever, stinging “All I Want,” which shuffles along like a great Dwight Yoakam song.
Rucker’s ragged vocals leave a bruise, made even more purple by the song’s sprightly guitar (by a moonlighting Brad Paisley) and drunken piano. Perhaps it’s because Rucker has long been part of a group, but he’s not afraid of ceding space to his backup musicians, making even the songs on which his vocal presence flags, like “History in the Making,” sound robust (though there is no redeeming the grim, craven lament “If I Had Wings”).
Such missteps are few, though, and “Learn to Live” is seamless enough that it almost slips by unnoticed that Rucker is the first African-American to have a Top 10 country hit (the muscular “Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It”) since Charley Pride.
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