The album opens with a brilliant pun, “Near Mrs.,” which finds Camp pondering all the women who were almost his wife and all of the circumstances which ended those relationships. “Little Bitty Crack in her Heart” is not quite up to the level of the first track, but it is an enjoyable ditty all the same. “Stop Look and Listen” is not a cover of the Patsy Cline classic, instead it is a brilliant song which uses hopping trains as an escape for a broken heart, offering advise on how to avoid riding the pointed “cow catcher” on the front of a train. “Moving On Up to a Double Wide is precisely the sort of song which could easily collapse into the worst kind of Redneck stereotyping. Camp keeps himself firmly on the inside of the working class, offering, as reason for the move, The owner of the plant's finally giving in, he don't wanna see our picket line again.” However, life is not all fun and games and few people sing a good old fashioned country weeper better than Shawn Camp. “In Harm's Way” finds Camp crooning with all the aching power of George Jones. Most of his slower songs echo Jones, both in vocal style and in tone. The songs are generally about lost loves, but they have a weepy undertone of booze and late nights that may well have been the reason the relationships died, but are certainly the best way to get on with it. “Since you left I can't stay sober,” he laments in “Since You Ain't Home,” a song that uses the disintegration of a house as a metaphor for its owners heartbreak. Camp returns to the same theme as “Near Mrs.” on “Clear As a Bell,” only this time it is the church bells of an ex-lovers wedding that serve as a wake up call. The album closes with its strongest track, “The Grandpa that I know,” a ballad about the trappings of a funeral.
Camp is an amazingly gifted singer and songwriter. It has become almost a cliché in and of itself to say that a relatively unknown artist deserves wider acclaim, but it’s the only way to describe Camp. Unfortunately, timing was not on his side. In the early part of the 1990's there was an overabundance of neo-traditional male singers. This created a market for music like his, but also made it very difficult for him to get noticed. As the nineties passed, mainstream country got lighter and poppier, and there were few if any slots on mainstream radio for twangy vocals and weepy steel guitars. Country music moved to the suburbs, and only those whose drinking problems were worthy of a power ballad went to bars. Around this same time many singers were opting to go the alt-country route, but this was not a path that made room for all. Perhaps the greatest flaw in alt-country was its rejection of those who wrote carefully crafted, Nashville songs with strong hooks and excellent wordplay, but lacking any Gram Parsons edge. This left little room for really good, simply country singers like Camp without much of a place to go. Hopefully, this is an oversight one side of country or the other will remedy in the near future.
You can support Shawn Camp by purchasing this album at Amazon | iTunes.
If you prefer your music to be more than ones and zeroes you can buy the phyiscal CD at Amazon.
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