Country radio has got problems. They play the same songs FOREVER! The day its audience gets iPods and/or satellite radio, the tightly-controlled Nashville scene is gonna implode. Country fans are subjected to a weird combination of Top Forty from the sixties and the nineties. There’s a homey feel like the sixties, only hits, but there’s the incredible burnout that pop Top Forty started instituting about fifteen years ago. This sells records if people are listening. But it’s almost intolerable to listen. Because they play the same damn songs for six months.

But, the one advantage of this is just like the sixties, you know EVERY song. When I saw Jake Owen Sunday night, I knew his hit, "Startin’ With Me". Unlike some pop or rock opening act. Who is usually unfathomable, playing recognizable songs.

So, because of the endless repetition, and my inability to stay at the rock competition, where the music is inherently worse, I’ve got songs stuck in my head. Like Jason Michael Carroll’s "Livin’ Our Love Song".

I don’t know if I loved this the first time through. But it’s now my favorite country cut. It’s the SWAGGER!

Oh, it’s got a bit of twang, and the quasi-upbeat lyrics that are pervasive in country today. The old cry in your beer songs don’t seem to make it to the Top Forty, unless they’re accompanied by a wink.

Tolerate the fiddle in the intro, this is the country reference, so the stations will play the song. Along with the country vocal intonation. But, this is a ROCK song. Not that different from Lynyrd Skynyrd or Allman Brothers. Sure, a bit more pop…but by the end, Skynyrd was pretty pop.

Baby, when I look at you
With your hair falling down in your baby blues
Standing there across the room
I get so lost in the way you move

He’s sipping a beer at the bar, she’s dancing with a buddy. And he’s proud, that he’s got HER! But he’s no wimp, he’s just honest.

"Livin’ Our Love Song" has got a groove, it’s got all that magic of a Clive Davis construction, but it still retains its soul. I can point you to more rock-oriented country music, but this is the kind of stuff you get addicted to when you switch formats. You give a little, and get a lot. This is not music made in L.A. or New York. But these people would be a lot more fun to hang with. Even if the characters in the song are married. At the club of the minute in Hollywood the music with the big beat would be blasting, you wouldn’t be able to hear yourself as you asked the girl with the injected lips with the fake tits hanging out of her dress what she was up to, before she ignored you. If your life is less flashy, if you think a good conversation is better than a bump on the dance floor with someone so fucked up they can barely speak, come to the country world. Oh, you’ll get high on whiskey and beer. But you’ll feel fully alive. Because these people are like you, with more questions than answers. But that’s not STOPPING THEM!

Check out "Livin’ Our Love Song" at Jason Michael Carroll’s MySpace page