Gary Allan - Living Hard
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Artist: Gary AllanBrand: Baker & Taylor
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 2007-10-23
Music Label: MCA Nashville
Soundtracks:
- Watching Airplanes
- We Touched the Sun
- She's So California
- Like It's A Bad Thing
- Learning How To Bend
- As Long As You're Looking Back
- Wrecking Ball
- Yesterday's Rain
- Trying To Matter
- Half Of My Mistakes
- Living Hard
Free Music Notes for Living Hard
Free Music Review: A fun-loving, free-living record
Hit: 5 Stars
Gary Allan's last all-new studio effort, TOUGH ALL OVER, was a mournful record, written and recorded shortly after his wife's suicide. A GREATEST HITS followed, providing a good transitional buffer (most of Allan's hits have been mournful songs, after all). LIVING HARD is a return to the Gary Allan that we were introduced to, with a more rockin' edge that suits his voice and style perfectly.
LIVING HARD gives Allan a chance to cut loose. Sure, there are some more thoughtful numbers, such as the first single "Watching Airplanes," or the inflectional "Half of My Mistakes." But the true heart of the album lies in forgetting the sorrows, or at least whistling by them; Allan rocks it out on the title track, "Like It's a Bad Thing," and "Wrecking Ball," the latter one of the hardest-hitting rhythms in Allan's catalog. "She's So California" gets so caught up in describing a woman, it ignores the fact that "She's so cool, breakin' all the rules/Risin' star, she'll break your heart". "We Touched the Sun" details the relationship of a couple meant to be together, "Even if it's not forever...even if it's only for a little while."
Over all, the album is an anticipated departure from Allan's melancholy. Don't get me wrong--TOUGH ALL OVER is easily Allan's best record. But it's nice to have him rockin' out again, no cares or worries. He also co-wrote six tracks; thank God he's started writing more. Gary Allan is one of the best country musicians in the business--a singer, a songwriter, a guitarist (go to one of his shows...oh, man!). LIVING HARD isn't as good as its predecessor, but them I'm not sure any record could be. In a musical realm where radio embraces mediocrity, Allan stands out among his peers. As he himself sings: "I don't know about you, but I was put here to live and love/So what if i don't it like everybody else does."
Living Hard Poster
It's raw and emotional. It's freight-train-to-nowhere lonely. It's hard-rockin', no-apologies country music that has traded in its twang for a gravelly growl millions of fans recognize as the voice of Gary Allan. And with LIVING HARD, his latest release from MCA Nashville, Allan once again proves that, though times may change, the thread of truth at the center of his music remains the same. Features the new single "Watching Airplanes".Gary Allan has long been the go-to guy for intelligent, edgy country music, informed by the sweaty honky-tonk of the stop-and-sock joints of Bakersfield, CA, and the angry rock & roll of seedy L.A. On Living Hard, he wisely refuses to reprise his previous studio album, 2005?s masterful Tough All Over, which framed the tragic aftermath of his wife?s suicide, even as "Yesterday?s Rain," a memorable lament, might make you think otherwise. Rather, Living Hard largely finds its inspiration in the hipper pop-rock that forged half of Allan's musical altar as a youth: the Eagles ("Like It?s a Bad Thing"), the Beatles ("As Long As You?re Looking Back"), the Rolling Stones ("Living Hard"). This homage is largely found in the instrumental dressings here, as Allan, whose guts-and-growl baritone always telegraphs as much resignation as rebellion, is too creative to salute those sounds outright. Nor is Allan going to corrupt his own authenticity: Co-writing six of the 11 cuts, he rarely rises above the melancholia that perpetually paints him as a man reeling from the jaw-breaking punch of fate that comes out of nowhere, best exemplified in the dazed glaze of "Watching Airplanes" and the brilliant barstool Zen of "Half of My Mistakes." But when he comes up for air, Allan sometimes does so with comic results. On "Wrecking Ball," a sexy roadhouse rocker hammered home on junkyard guitar, he tangles with the wrong woman, to cyclonic end: "She?s a tornado / I?m a trailer house / That girl?s a hurricane in a dress." Allan may be burning the candle at both ends, but on this song and elsewhere, he?s just as seduced by the mystery of his predicament as the rest of us. --Alanna Nash
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