Sometimes, you hear a song and you just sigh. That’s what happened when I pressed play on David Fanning’s new radio single ‘Doin’ Country Right’, and instantly regretted it. The Red Bow recording artist gained some traction last year with a “country” version of Justin Timberlake’s song ‘Drink You Away’ (spoiler alert: it wasn’t country), but is now pushing for a full official launch with ‘Doin’ Country Right’ with his brand of “stick anything on as long as it vaguely represents a song”.
By that I mean that he really doesn’t have a music taste, and unfortunately that is to his detriment. In theory the act of listening to everything and taking influence from it all is a postmodern freedom that allows for more interesting, creative and intricate music, but what actually happens is it becomes a mess of pandering to every single available style, thereby ruining every one of them. “I didn’t have a favorite country CD that I listened to all day long,” he says. “I was listening to country radio”. While that quote is pitched as proving his love of country radio (sucking up, much?), what it actually says to me is that he is a casual listener. He doesn’t find one or two artists that he loves and obsessively listens to them until he wears them out, he just lets music wash over him and is passively content with all of it. The result of that is not someone who is passionate about music, no matter what he would tell you, and because he’s never actively focused on one artist or genre for any period of time, what comes across in his music is just a load of noise and a complete misunderstanding of what it is to be a musician and a creative. Meshing everything together because you cannot distinguish between which styles are compatible and which aren’t is not creativity. It’s misguidedness.
And that comes across in ‘Doin’ Country Right’. With an overdriven electric guitar line that repeats notes in an excruciating manner, electro synths and hip hop beats, alongside a delivery that doesn’t seem to conform to country, rock or hip hop, it is a jarring mix whose vocal whines in an annoying, extra slow drawl in some attempt to sort of half rap. David sounds inherently bored in his performance, and so do the programmers (not players, I must note). And I’m not surprised; the track is non-descript, doesn’t go anywhere, and the repetition doesn’t make it catchy, it just turns off listeners. One only has to look at the YouTube comments to get a general sense of how many fans it’s not winning over, as a stream that usually is full of lovers of this kind of material is full of comments like “doin’ country wrong ong ong ong ong”, “this ain’t country at all, complete shit”, “one of the WORST SONGS EVER MADE”, “this is horrible”, “please come back with something more original”, and “if you have to repeat your chorus like that get a new songwriter” (all genuine comments here). Most acts of this style still have plenty of champions, so the fact that the negative outweighs the positive here is pretty worrying for his team.
And the final two commenters are right, the lyrics are just plain awful. “Red dirt dust”, “ice cold can”, “blues jeans on” and “when the sun gets low” are just some of the laundry list clichés this track claims for its own. Heather Morgan, Josh Osborne and Jimmy Robbins are responsible for this, and each one has gone right down in my estimations. This isn’t even a song. Half of the lyrics don’t even make sense. Most of it is syllable repetition.
Tip for songwriters and performers: don’t be lazy. Consume music, and practise your art till it hurts and then do it some more. Because if this is anything to go by, fans are going to notice, and it’s not going to end well for you.
