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Date Posted: 09:10:51 10/24/01 Wed
Author: DWIGHT- YOAKAM-KY
Subject: REVIEWS

MORE REVIEWS OF DWIGHT'S CD'S:
: Last Chance For a Thousand Years: Dwight Yoakam's Greatest Hits >From the 90's (Reprise)
by: Josh Deere

All the old ones, plus new recordings
How appropriate for a CountryCool.com album review. Dwight Yoakam probably has more "cool" in his pinky than most people have in their whole bodies. I mean, only he could sing Sometimes I miss the warm, bright lights/Sometimes I miss the crowds/Sometimes I miss the women I wrapped each song around. Few have done Elvis, and fewer have done him well. Dwight did—twice ("Little Sister," "Suspicious Minds"). How about his cover of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." Imagine that, Freddie Mercury in a honky-tonk. But Dwight pulls it off with style. After all, that's what he's all about. Even The Gap clothing stores, who corner the market on trendiness, included the song in a television commercial. The greatest hits package even has a cool title: Last Chance For A Thousand Years. Something tells me James Dean is smiling up there somewhere—he probably has a new favorite album.





dwightyoakamacoustic.net (Reprise) by: Grant Alden


Alone in a studio with his guitar, his still unquenched ambition, a decade's worth of hits (and, apparently, a modem), Dwight Yoakam has chosen to reprise a generous 25 songs for public re-consumption. The production of dwightyoakamacoustic.net is so barren and understated that the album sounds almost like songwriting demos.
Sure, acoustic.net is a curious offering, coming on the heels of a greatest hits summary earlier this month, but once you get past the informality of their setting, Yoakam's newest reading of these songs seems oddly automatic; they don't ache anymore. Indeed, his vocals have become so cluttered with flourishes, especially on "A Thousand Miles From Nowhere," that Yoakam comes to resemble Reba McEntire. "It Won't Hurt" ("when I fall down from this bar stool") is classic, heart-broke country, but Yoakam turns its melody into a pretext to exercise his repertoire of vocal tricks, instead of settling into the words.

Throughout, Yoakam, who has developed something of a film career in recent years, lets his voice runs the full gamut of its well-rehearsed gestures — swoops, breaks, swallowed growels — but it still has that glorious, nasal resonance. And regardless, his selection of songs drips with emotion, even if Yoakam himself doesn't deliver in that respect. How can the failed marriage of "Nothing's Changed Here" not hurt, and deeply? How can there be no attack to an oddly plaintive "Big Sister?" Occasionally, as with "Readin', Rightin', Rt. 23," Yoakam sings simply enough to invest himself in these songs, but for the most part, he sits back, and lets the material speak for itself.


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TOMORROW'S SOUNDS TODAY
by: Jay Orr



The irony hangs heavy in the title of this strong outing. Yoakam -- whose creative base is Hollywood rather than Nashville's Music Row -- has understood since the start of his career that great new country music can come from a crafty blend of the past and the present.
Tomorrow's Sounds Today is presented as utterly contemporary and hip. Yoakam sits in a suspended bubble chair on the cover. In the insert booklet he poses in front of speakers fashioned out of whitewashed, nude female forms. The music itself sounds fresh, but classically familiar at the same time.

Producer Pete Anderson works with an intriguingly broad sonic palette, enlisting Chris Hillman to play mandolin on "Time Spent Missing You," adding Flaco Jimenez's accordion and Skip Edwards' Augie Meyers-style organ to the Yoakam-Buck Owens duet "Alright, I'm Wrong." Owens, a key Yoakam influence, sings harmony on "The Sad Side of Town," a honky-tonk weeper the two wrote together, and he duets with Yoakam on "I Was There," an Owens original.

Yoakam keeps things interesting elsewhere by using an "I Fought the Law" cadence on "Dreams of Clay" by adding a taste of reggae to "For Love's Sake" and by referencing classic Hank Williams Sr. on "The Heartaches Are Free." Recalling his 1997 collection of remakes, Under the Covers, he also includes a country version of Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me." Gary Morse's pedal steel, especially, helps achieve a fetching transformation of the rock classic.

So Yoakam delivers a dose of tomorrow's sounds all right, but by incorporating plenty of timeless musical touches, he also proves that some things never go out of style.


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