Lucy Hale is the Pretty Little Liars star that has been causing a buzz on the country scene for the last year. Entering a music career, she chose country as her landing place, drawn to the stories and her roots and love of the genre. That in turn began an extensive radio tour and promotion process, slowly pushing her into the public domain and onto our radars, led by the sweet, summery single ‘You Sound Good To Me’ (which debuted in January to fair sales but dropped off pretty quickly) and now her debut album, ‘Road Between’. There was a lot of anticipation amongst industry folk and closely-watching fans, purely for the addition of another female artist vying for radio play and a spot somewhere on the charts, due to the lack of women currently making ground and struggling to be heard. Each new female is pounced on in eagerness, awaiting some magical commercial/substance-filled formula that brings balance back around.
‘Road Between’, therefore, is probably not what we’re looking for. But then again, that’s a tough boot to fill. There’s nothing particularly bad about this album, but it does place the emphasis on country-infused pop rather than the other way around, and places itself securely as a coming-of-age record. Lucy celebrates young love and heartbreak throughout; the coy pleas of ‘Kiss Me’ sit neatly beside the magic nostalgia of Joe Nichols duet ‘Red Dress’ and similarly against the car-themed storytelling of ‘From The Backseat’. The blurred lines of casual infatuation and sex are explored in ‘Love Tonight’, the drum loop complementing the R&B off-beat, while ‘Lie A Little Better’ channels a Rock & Roll/gospel vibe through its pop arrangement to express the inability to be dishonest about how she feels when a particular guy is around.
All in all, the Mike Daly-produced project is very much a product of being signed to Hollywood records. With a huge number of co-writes on the record, Mike appears to be leading Lucy, who was perhaps unsure with it being her first time in the studio. The result is a fairly polished, teenage and young adult-orientated collection of tracks that showcase Lucy’s growing vocal ability and more specifically her youth, targeting girls similar in age who have similar experiences with love and relationships and trying to establish their place in this world. Nowhere is that more clear then than with the title track ‘Road Between’, a twangier-instrumented power pop ballad that places Lucy’s vocals at the front and center and requires her to sing out. Placed halfway through the album, it’s in the perfect position to ground things and become the anthem, a kind of Britney Spears “I’m Not A Woman”-esque expression of being caught in the middle. Not where you want to be, but not where you started.
Lucy continues to identify with young impressionable girls in the aptly titled ‘Nervous Girls’. One of the stand-out offerings here, it has a more acoustic arrangement than the rest and takes on its own life with a raw edge from the vocals, an almost spine-chilling delivery. Despite it being aimed at the same audience that Taylor Swift ruled when she first hit the scene (and arguably still does), there’s an atmosphere to ‘Nervous Girls’ that helps bring the emotion home for many listeners. It’s really here that Lucy is emerging as her own artist, separate from the Carrie Underwood she channels in ‘Goodbye Gone’ and the breezy summer hits of Danielle Bradbery. ‘Just Another Song’, the closer to the standard edition, details the flooding back of unwanted memories when a song is heard after a heartbreak, but Lucy taps into a darker and more universal theme when the deluxe portion begins and we hear ‘My Little Black Wedding Dress’. Disguised in all its girlishness, the soulful track quietly admits that desire we all feel for love at the end of the day, while ‘Loved’ repeats this more confidently and with more conviction, again despite its tendencies towards a young fairytale fantasy.
It’s clear that Lucy Hale is talented, both when it comes to singing and songwriting (she has a few co-writes here). As with any debut album, particularly for a young artist, it’s a process of refinement and finding out who she is. As songs like ‘Feels Like Home’ indicate, there’s a countryness in her that goes far beyond the standard country pop fare, an influence that protrudes through some of the glittering production, delivering a charming awkwardness and a favoring of the more rustic. So how will her career fare? I’m sure she’ll do just fine. Of course, there’s limited radio play for females, especially new ones, and she might need to settle with the road of Kacey Musgraves and her fellow women for now if she’s to outlast bro-dom. If she can develop her talent, her writing, get a few more life experiences under her belt and delve deeper into the country genre, then I’m sure she’ll make some great music. We just have to make sure she doesn’t choose acting over music.
