In the midst of slick country and western dominating the adult pop charts in the mid-‘90s came singer-songwriter Bobbie Cryner’s second album Girl of Your Dreams. It didn’t go anywhere and to date it remains the last album Cryner has released.
Bobbie Cryner’s second album, Girl of Your Dreams (MCA), is one of the most satisfying pop albums to come along in any genre in the last three or four years. It’s as slick as anything coming out of Nashville, but I don’t think there are more than a few places on it where I wasn’t totally captivated by Cryner’s bourbon-with-an-edge-of-sugar contralto.
It’s probably useless at this point to complain that country music has abandoned its rural roots. Country has been in the process of slicking itself up for the last thirty years. That it’s now more popular than ever is simply a fulfillment of where the mainstream of the music has long been heading. Mainstream country music is now an adjunct to adult contemporary pop albeit with country’s constant subtext of the compromises people make in order to go on living. And if too much of the direct access to emotion that’s always distinguished country is buried under anonymous, interchangeable arrangements, rote musicianship, and formulaic songwriting, there are still singers so unembarrassed in their approach that their gift is a large, unsubtle, sometimes overwhelming emotional satisfaction. I hope we never lose the performers who can still plug into the original spirit of the music. But we’d better start to cherish the ones who can bring something real to the factor Nashville has become.
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