Own It or Disown It #14: Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose

There are the essential albums that need to be in everyone's collection. There are the personal favorites, the ones that aren't highly acclaimed but still get played every once in a while. And then there are the albums that you stick in the back of your collection because you want to forget that you spent money on them. "Own It or Disown It" gives the writer the opportunity to look at such discarded albums and determine if they are diamonds in the rough or if they deserve to be used as mini-frisbees.

Welcome to the first week of Owning Metacritic, in which I dedicate an entire month covering albums that I purchased mostly because of their ridiculously high rating on Metacritic. Get used to me saying “this album doesn’t deserve as much praise as it gets”, because I’ll be saying it practically every week, though whether I will backpedal after using that phrase each week is up in the air. This album was the first purchase I made at Metacritic’s recommendation. No, I’m not making this up.

Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose holds a Metacritic score of 97 and is tied with Led Zeppelin’s How the West Was Won and Brian Wilson’s SMiLE for having the highest Metacritic rating on initial release. It’s worth noting, though, that West was made up of old concert work and SMiLE was made over the course of forty years, so Van Lear Rose, in essence, is the highest rated album on Metacritic to have been written and recorded since Metacritic launched…and it’s a safe country album. I don’t want to credit this album’s success to a whole bunch of old, white dudes who gave it a perfect score after listening to it once, but I will say that I didn’t see Van Lear Rose pop up on any “best album of the decade” lists—in fact, I don’t recall it ranking high on many lists dedicated to ranking the best album of 2004.

The appeal of Van Lear Rose isn’t grounded solely in that it’s another Loretta Lynn album—much attention was given to Jack White’s contribution to the project (this is 2004 Jack White we’re talking about, so this was still considered a good thing). Really, though, White’s presence is barely felt here. He only sings on one song (“Portland Oregon”) and only wrote one song (“Little Red Shoes”), and for the most part, he plays to compliment Lynn’s singing rather than come up with crazy compositions that marked his earlier work, which is understandable (and probably for the best) but those who bought this album to hear White play were sorely disappointed. That’s not even getting into the problem I have with Lynn’s vocals, or rather, how her voice does not go with her songs. Don’t misunderstand me—Loretta Lynn is a national treasure, and she doesn’t phone anything in at any point on this album. The problem is that most of these songs would work so much better with a younger vocalist. It’s a strange paradox since Lynn wrote most of the songs herself, but “Portland Oregon” and “Have Mercy” are both seductive numbers that would sound better sung by someone half of Lynn’s age.



This problem is accentuated by the numbers that are written age-appropriately. “Women’s Prison” tells a story of a jilted woman on death row, and though she doesn’t get too graphic with the details, she gets enough of the picture across to unsettle any audience. The title track is pure country goodness, with waxing violins setting the backdrop for a sweet little story about a young woman who fell in love at a young age and everything turned out all right for once. Also, while I’ll claim that some of these songs would work better with a younger vocalist, I also think that only Lynn could get away with a song like “Miss Being Mrs.” It’s not as though Lynn sounds like she’s running low on inspiration or stories to tell, so why bring any filler to the dance? I should also mention that a party trick of mine involved putting on “Portland Oregon” without saying who recorded the song and have friends try to guess. One hundred seconds in, Lynn’s vocals would kick in and everyone would groan.

Based on just its own merits, though, Van Lear Rose is an enjoyable listen if you’re into country music. There are no risks taken, but this is probably the best “safe” country album I’ve heard in some time. The compositions are predictable, but they are still pretty good. If you’re looking to get into country music, you’d do well to pick up a Drive-By Truckers album over this one, and I don’t think this album deserves its incredibly high score, but it is still a solid album with a few tracks that you’d do well to check out.

VERDICT: OWN

Alright—that wasn’t too painful. It’s not as though I’ll have to look back at a month of excessively long albums of scattershot quality, right? Let’s just see what I have to look at next week…



...gulp.