I’m Gonna Love While I Still Have the Time

In a story I broke last week, everyone is going country. But unlike Jessica Simpson and people of her ilk, Darius Rucker, you may know him better as Hootie of Hootie and the Blowfish fame, just doesn’t put on the cowboy boots and ten gallon hat and throw in a fiddle or two hoping to appeal to country fans without going too far away from their pop roots, Rucker has dove head first into his country debut Learn to Live and you even believe when he talks about owning the Best of Patsy Cline.

Just as his first solo album Back to Then was a seamless transition from the frat rock of Hootie into a classic R&B singer, the baritone of Darius is a perfect fit singing in front of fiddles, banjos and slide guitars. And he goes full country where he loses the girl, loses the dog, but that’s okay because there is plenty of whiskey to drown his sorrows. Things do not get much more country than All I Want where he tell the cheating hussy to take the house, the money because, “All I want you to leave me is alone.” That’s some Garth Brooks stuff right there. Also in that vein is the equally entertaining song about drunk dialing, the appropriately titled Drinkin’ & Dialin’.

But Live to Learn is filled with plenty of country music cliche with quicky plays on words like Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It. Then there are more than enough over dramatic songs like It Won’t Be Like This For Long, an ode to a daughter that is growing up to fast (don’t they all) or the even more sappy I Hope They Get to Me in Time, a first person account of a car crash victim. Then there is the title track which sounds like a cast off from a Carrie Underwood album.

It should be noted that the first single, Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It just so happens to be the first top five country song by a black dude in twenty years. Charlie Pride anyone? Remember the good ol’ days when Ray Charles and Lionel Richie could be found on the country charts and Kenny Rogers could be found on the R&B charts before music got so homogenized.

Song to Download - All I Want

Learn to Live gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.