i'm listening obsessively to the records of 'joey + rory' = (him and her) feek. feek? feek. it's hyper-trad country, sounding like the more homemade side of keith stegall, i.e. like alan jackson. the songs are sort of faith and family-oriented, but get over the reaction to them as reactionaries (ask yourself, can you really do without such things in some form?). i say that joey feek is about as good a country singer as it is possible to be; on some of these performances i would't edit a single note. and there are some flat-out killer country songs (where are they coming from?) (though it's a bit inconsistent), with also a line in cheating. they really wear the hyper-traditional thing easily. and their daughter heidi feek makes kind of chris isaacsy atmospheric hipster country.
she's one of the few singers who could stand up to the, um, demands of a song called 'sweet emmylou'. she's definitely not imitating her. but she's emulating her, and she can. she really kind of rings more like the open-voiced linda ronstandt, who i've been thinking a lot about lately, and in relation to emmylou of course as well. but honestly she is her own thing, and where she rings and where she catches, for example, or the dynamics, are very distinctive. she can shape a whole song as a very coherent performnce. anyway, just sayin.
i guess they came from the of-course doofy cmt show 'let's duet,' where blake shelton, currently on the country charts with brand-new dreck, was a judge. speculating, the people who beat them were like thompson square or lady antebellum. bad, in other words. at any rate, you can't think less of unknown artists for being in those competitions; you'd try anything, like a magazine writer pitching the new yorker for decades. any way you cut it, that there is a country star.
