It’s with purposeful intent that Gretchen Wilson starts her new album, “One of the Boys,” with an upbeat song called “The Girl I Am.” While Wilson has never been the sex symbol Shania Twain once was, she’s also never been the complete tomboy the album’s coy title suggests.
Wilson has always existed somewhere in between for fans of her easily digested pop-country music – and she nails that rough-around-the-edges persona on her new record’s smart title track.
She croons: “I can do most anything a man can do/I can hold my liquor with the best of you … I know I don’t act much like a lady/But I still need to be somebody’s baby.”
In “The Girl I Am,” she contemplates: “Sometimes I cry for no good reason/Sometimes I fight, and I ain’t a man … But I’ll always be the girl I am.”
Her lyrics are hardly poetry, but you have to appreciate their directness. Wilson is many things to her fans. But mainly she’s the liberated woman not afraid to drink, cuss or ground her man from the Silverado when he’s bad. It’s her own form of feminism, and it’s a formula that has touched a nerve.
Yet it is a formula. For 2004’s “Here for the Party,” Wilson and John Rich (ex-Lonestar, current Big & Rich) wrote “Redneck Woman,” the song that ended up breaking her career wide open. The song was an unabashed celebration of her low-rent past – and it was a caricature that still defines Wilson’s work even amid her third record, for which she co-wrote nine of the 11 songs.
In “There Goes the Neighborhood,” she proudly sings, “I was born in the country on an old farm road/Worked for a living but I still stayed broke/Everything I had was either borrowed or loaned/ Except my mobile home.”
It’s catchy, and her pride and self-confidence is contagious. Still, like much of her work, it’s musically flat. Wilson’s better with her humor, which skews toward the “It’s Five O’clock Somewhere” variety. But when she milks the bartender’s popular last-call mantra – “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here” – she fails to connect with the universal experience of being kicked out of a watering hole at closing time.
The electric-guitar-driven pop song “You Don’t Have to Go Home” celebrates that part of bar culture only true drinkers know – a nod to the hard-partying, shot-and- a-beer image she’s made for herself. But unlike past songs such as “One Bud Wiser,” “Not Bad for a Bartender” or “Redneck Woman,” this song’s experience seems more duty than pleasure. Her shtick is starting to weary like an assembly-line job.
Like her other records, this one has its peaks and its valleys. She’s best when playfully talking about how she defines herself now, but she’s sounding tired when she celebrates how she defined her character more than three years ago. Wilson tries to even out her record with a handful of cloying ballads sappily titled “To Tell You the Truth” or “Heaven Help Me” or “Come to Bed,” the latter of which is this album’s first single.
They don’t work. But they do give you another peek into Wilson’s mind, which is obviously more girlie than boyish.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
