Something smells like cabbage and carnies...

Ever wake up and just wonder if somewhere, someone is watching your life (i.e., The Truman Show) in real-time? It freakin sucks to feel like that. To actually wonder if someone is watching and laughing his or her butt off at you and the situations you get yourself into over your lifetime. Irony would probably make the screen turn blue to the person watching my life. Sometimes things just really suck and it seems like someone has to be watching for it to all actually make sense. I hope that it's someone other than God, because if it's just him watching, I am ticked off at him again and I hate it when I feel that way. He's God, it's not very wise to push your luck with him about most things because he has the final say and authority. Some things just don't make sense to me. Life would be a lot easier if it was more like handling a loaded gun. You know when you pick the thing up, the weight of the choices you can make with it. Waving it around would be totally stupid and irresponsible, just handling it seems somewhat safer. It doesn't come that easy most of the time for some reason in the real world regardless of how safely you handle the gun. This leaves me wondering if there is just something that I did to bring certain things upon myself. My thinking is going way beyond the simple behavior/consequences relationship which I consider to be a no brainer. There are just some things that couldn't have been foreseen by Gandalf or Merlin regardless of their skills and abilities. These things seem to materialize like beings boarding the Star Trek Enterprise and I know that rarely ever do things appear like this, but sometimes they do. They can seem totally unrelated to anything that proceeded them and I think they may actually not be connected in a major way at all. It's hard to not find minor connections, but major warning signs don't always manifest themselves even to the parties in question. It almost seems like God or the observer just decided to see what would happen if one variable was altered. How might things change if A=1 rather than A=6? It's like I think I hear laughing somewhere, but I know it's not actually there on a conscious level. It's in the preconscious somewhere barely spilling from the deep, dark depths of the mind. Elliott Smith, how is Miss Misery? I don't think I want to know. Expectations aren't a good or bad thing, however, how you handle not having them met successfully can turn you into something else entirely different. Boeings look great when they are flying high in the sky, but the same plane looks like some scary, grey bohemith on it's way to explode against the ground. Where am I right now Kubler-Ross?

Maggie Austin: Georgia Clay Road

Maggie Austin
Georgia Clay Road
Gulfwind Records

Rating: 85 out of 100

The debut album from Maggie Austin, Georgia Clay Road, can best be described in four words: good, clean, country music. This is independent country music at its best and should have listeners wondering why Maggie Austin isn’t a well-known name already. The album is definitely a great one for the shuffle setting and could stay in the CD player for days at a time.

All of the songs are well interpreted by the musicians and listening to the album proves that they weren’t micro-managed while recording. There is not a bad song on the entire album, but overall “That’s Me” has to be one of the best ones because of the slide guitar and the chord progression of the song, especially during the chorus.

Most of the time albums start with their strongest albums and gradually start to die off at some point before either totally dying or coming up for a last breath at the end with a decent track. This album doesn’t do this at all. The last four songs are among the strongest on the album and show such variation in styles. The variation of styles among the last four include bluegrass mandolin (“Rain on a Tin Roof”), blues infused rock (“What Do I Do with Me”), a pop ballad (“I Wanna Be That Song”), and pop/country (“This Is Forever”). The song selection for the album is great and it keeps the album flowing well, never bogging down on the road in one mood.

Austin has a really clean, alto voice that handles each melody with a playful energy on the upbeat songs. Her vocals on the more emotional songs sound great when relating to pitch, but she misses some of the emotional content. It doesn’t sound like she is singing about things she can relate to on “Does Anybody Love Anymore” and “No Good in Goodbye” even though it’s obvious she has experienced those types of feelings. If she just took more chances in expressing the feelings people experience while in those types of situations, she would be hitting the nail on the head with the slower songs.

Family albums that are worth listening to are so much easier to find in country music today than in the past. Georgia Clay Road is one of these and is definitely one worth having in your collection. It’s not another generic country release and it’s hopefully a great beginning for Maggie Austin. It will be interesting to see what happens with her career in the future.

Ryan T. White

Found out more about this album at: www.maggieaustin.com

Found out more about Ryan and music at: www.thelaterrye.blogspot.com