Gene Watson recreates his hits with impressive accuracy
When an artist re-records their hits, it’s often at the instigation of a label looking to capitalize on the artist’s name; the lure is often nothing more than a quick payday. In this case, country vocalist Gene Watson has taken it upon himself to re-record twenty-five tracks from his fifty-year career, and the motivation is more complex. On the surface, he’s celebrating a half-century in the business, revisiting songs that took him up the charts in the ‘70s and ‘80s and have become old friends in live performance. Underneath, however, there is an artist looking for some measure of control over a catalog that’s split across four labels, and for whose reissues he isn’t likely compensated very generously.
With that in mind, he set out to re-record these songs as closely as possible to the originals. He sings each in the original key, in a voice that’s as good – or possibly even better – than that on the originals. He and producer Dirk Johnson are also quite successful at recapturing the textures of ‘70s and ‘80s recordings. It’s an interesting, if somewhat eerie feat, but with most of the original recordings still available, it adds little to Watson’s legacy (as did 2009’s A Taste of the Truth, for example). More interesting would have been to hear his current perspective on these songs, rather than his ability to recreate earlier work. It’s hard to fault an artist for wanting to be paid, and given the sustained quality of Watson’s sixty-eight-year-old voice, this is still a generous and musically satisfying collection. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com] 