Brooks & Dunn’s latest single, “Cowgirls Don’t Cry” has been getting a lot of airplay over the past four months or so. It’s by the numbers country. It’s not their best moment, but it’s not bad either. I don’t claim to be a huge Brooks & Dunn fan, but I like them enough to defend “Neon Moon” as the well-written, perfectly executed slice of slick country-pop that it is:
Mmm… Now here is “Cowgirls Don’t Cry”:
The song has a nice enough melody which puts it above a dishearteningly high number of contemporary mainstream country songs. The production is very clean. There is some nice steel guitar, fiddle, and piano playing. Dunn’s vocals are good, but the lyrics leave something to be desired. Since clean production and crackerjack musicianship is par for the course in contemporary country music, the song remains average at best. When Brooks & Dunn originally released “Cowgirls Don’t Cry” as a single it didn’t do as well as they had hoped. But they had an inspired idea, they went back into the studio and added a special guest vocal by Reba McEntire.
This helped the song gain in popularity by leaps and bounds, and with good reason.
Ms. McEntire’s appearance in the song is not a long one, but it makes all the difference in the world. If you don’t want to listen to the whole song again start around the 2:15 mark through to the end:
At 2:41 when Reba’s voice kicks in, I don’t care about the treacly lyrics anymore, nor do I care that it doesn’t really make sense for her to sing at that point in the song because it is supposed to be the protagonist of the song’s father speaking, not the protagonist. I don’t care that Ms. McEntire’s inclusion could easily be written off as a gimmick to sell more records. I don’t care because I believe her. I don’t even know what it is that I believe, but from the moment she starts in shaky and vulnerable until she finishes with a renewed sense of purpose and strength, I’m all hers. The moment Ms. McEntire starts singing, the song is elevated to the transcendental. The only problem is that the moment ends much too soon.
