Upon This Greasy Rock
On Morgan Wallen’s overstuffed, transportive double album (UPDATED 2/3/2021)
Update 2/3/2021: A video taken Sunday night captured Wallen using a racist slur, as TMZ first reported Wednesday; his label has suspended his recording contract, and the biggest radio chains in the country have barred his music. I’m leaving the essay below up for posterity, but I want to make it clear that I don’t support Wallen or excuse his racist behavior, nor do I think anyone should. Hopefully, as people including Jason Isbell have pointed out today, Wallen’s label and the country music establishment will take this as yet another belated reminder that there are plenty of artists — including plenty of Black artists — who deserve the platforms too often given to white men who perpetuate racism and other forms of marginalization and societal harm.
The town that sits at the confluence of Tennessee State Roads 33 and 66 is called Sneedville now and has a population of 1500 or so, but a long time ago people there knew it only by the name it acquired for its function as a place for hunters to clean game: Greasy Rock. The Scots-Irish who came there forced out the people who’d lived in the area before, people of Native American/African/Mediterranean descent who’d flee to the mountains and later come to be known as Melungeons; if the place had a name then, it’s not recorded by the Tennessee Historical Society. At any rate, a clutch of families soon joined the men who called it Greasy Rock. One of them was named Wallen.
A couple of centuries later, a family by the same name, still in Sneedville, would produce a boy named Morgan. In some jolt of cosmic humor, or maybe a case of a place’s name defining its destiny, that child from the place once known as Greasy Rock would become a prodigal son of mullets and cut-off flannel shirts, his celebrity predicated on his ne’er-do-well charm, his offputting antics and his purveyance of songs that are, simultaneously, proudly slick and roughshod, songs with names like “Beer Don’t” (as in, “People got their own opinion about how redneck we are — but beer don’t”) and “More than My Hometown” (as in, “I can’t love you more than my hometown.”)
I grew up about 70 miles from Sneedville, but as far as I know I’ve never been there. Been through it would be more likely, but only marginally. It is not a place on the way to much of anything. Morgan Wallen’s family moved closer to the city when he was a teenager, and he went to Gibbs High School, the alma mater of Kenny Chesney and Ashley Monroe, about half an hour from the west Knoxville suburbs where I grew up. His lyrical referents have more to do with two-lane state highways and gravel drives than my stoplight-choked Kingston Pike, flanked with replicable subdivisions. Even so, I felt a pebble lodge in my throat a few seconds into Wallen’s new album, when he sings about a “little town outside of Knoxville hidden by some dogwood trees,” and I felt it expand a few songs later, when he laments that “this bottle tastes like 865” — still the first three digits of my phone number and probably his, too.
Many of the songs on Dangerous: The Double Album rely on similar wistful reminiscence, usually tinged on one end or another by booze (whiskey or beer, of course; the salt breeze of opener “Sand in My Boots” carries a suggestion of tequila shots, promptly swatted down in favor of darker stuff). Then there are the songs set in bars, the dirt-road ragers and the various intersections of those three modes. The standard version of Dangerous has 30 songs, the Target exclusive deluxe edition 32. Many of them are very good, and a few are excellent; the rest, about half the record, tend to be offensive only inasmuch as they add empty calories to what could have been, in a more streamlined package, a minor pop-country classic.
Wallen’s decision to release a self-consciously mammoth album just a couple of years after his 14-track debut lands him in a few different conversations. Most obviously, Dangerous recalls the intentional bloat mastered by Drake and employed by many of the hip-hop artists who have come in his wake, which superficially replicates the bursting-at-the-seams aesthetics of rap’s pre-streaming mixtape heyday and has the financial benefit of goosing streaming numbers, now the most powerful engine in an artist’s pursuit of chart success.
Country hasn’t followed as eagerly in that particular direction, possibly because of how differently its economy operates. Tours and radio play matter a great deal in cementing the hierarchy of the genre’s centrist contingent, and as recently as a few years ago, a healthy majority of country fans still preferred buying their music on CD. The pandemic has shifted things, though, stymying some of those traditional platforms while country streams see bigger increases than any other genre. TikTok hasn’t generated country hits as it has for other sectors of pop (“Old Town Road” notwithstanding), but social media did power Wallen’s success in 2020, with Instagram hype pushing “7 Summers” toward the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Dangerous debuted earlier this month at number one on the albums chart thanks to the more than 240 million times people streamed its songs that week, a number that annihilated the previous record for a country album. A couple of weeks later, Eric Church — who has a songwriting credit on one of its tracks and a namedrop on another — announced that he’ll release a triple album this spring. It’ll have 24 songs, six fewer than Wallen’s double. To put it a little cynically, Dangerous might be Wallen’s way of shotgunning a sweating beer, cannonballing into pop music’s deep end and waving for the rest of the country industry to jump in behind him.
But the double-album branding also recalls, at least for me, one of the great country albums of the past decade, Miranda Lambert’s The Weight of These Wings. After five albums that employed mainstream country trappings in the service of some really good songs, and in the wake of a tabloid-fodder divorce from Blake Shelton, The Weight of These Wings was, she said later, “something for myself” — richly rendered, self-searching and, if not experimental, decidedly left of Nashville’s center. Intentionally or not, her aesthetic choices — the washed-out photograph on the cover, the songs’ thoughtful insularity, the 94-minute runtime — situated her as an artist seeking to establish a legacy beyond a clutch of hits. “Gunpowder & Lead” will always make me nostalgic, because one of the moms in my middle school carpool played it on repeat and because it sounds like mid-2000s radio, but The Weight of These Wings is unstuck. Its kind of bigness is timeless.
Dangerous doesn’t fit perfectly into either of these camps. It’s not musically voracious or expertly written as The Weight of These Wings, and even if it were, Wallen doesn’t have the back catalog or the personal history for his double-album to signal a turning point like Lambert’s did. But the two records share an aspirational quality, an ambition to eclipse even the most lucrative cogs of the country machine, even if Wallen is speeding down the middle of the road whereas Lambert seemed to find artistic fulfillment off toward the peripheral horizons.
Nor does the reading of Dangerous as Spotify-bait totally work, for the simple reason that this album offers too much to grab onto. Drake and Billie Eilish became stars and arguably defined stream-as-form because of their keenly skewed ears and subtly effective hooks, but much of the music made in their wake is anodyne by design, built on “vibe” more than “song” but without the expansive or enveloping qualities of good ambient music, reverse engineered to inoffensively and anonymously populate playlists. Dangerous is too dynamic for this designation. Wallen is a traditionalist in that his choruses wallop you, and in that his better songs twist country cliches into details that pull you in and make you listen more closely.
Wallen doesn’t make background music, then. But he does make music that would sound great in the background. His songs have a metatextual nature — they beg to be heard to in the places they’re about, streaming out of a dive’s jukebox, blaring from a truck radio, lilting overhead at a beach bar, coloring the atmosphere of the river, the tailgate, the parking lot party. In the context of the pandemic, it can feel both escapist and bittersweet. It can also feel queasy, considering the maskless Alabama partying that got Wallen booted from SNL (before he apologized, got invited back and starred in a sketch mocking his bad choices). Mostly I look forward to these songs inconsequentially soundtracking better times, and to debating with my friends who care about this kind of music which of these songs are great and which are utterly inessential.
The tradeoff for all this sense of place is that Wallen doesn’t really do character sketches, even of himself. The subjects of his songs are often silhouettes of women — he’s done them wrong, they’ve done him wrong, or the world has done both of them wrong, and he’s usually drinking about it. The moments when Wallen stumbles into introspection are some of the most thrilling, especially as they suggest he’s grappling with his demons in a way that involves neither making out nor blacking out. On “This Bar,” an ode to you-guessed-it, he recalls with some regret his 21st birthday, when he “got whiskey bent on whiskey sours, ran my mouth to an out-of-towner, learned a big lesson when I met the bouncer.” On the title track, he’s staying in for the night for fear that his heartbreak could break him: “I could see me sittin' in the back of a cop car bangin' my head on a window / I could see me slammin' that last call shot glass, losin' everything in my billfold.” Most moving of all is “Silverado for Sale,” a capsule profile of the titular vehicle, the lovestruck narrator who needs money for a ring and the teenager he imagines he’ll sell it to, who’s also the kid he used to be. There are a million country songs about cars and trucks but the best ones endure for a reason; the Silverado is a vector to the past and the future, a symbol of time’s penchant for collapsing in on itself.
But only twice on Dangerous does Wallen spend a whole track looking hard in the mirror. One of them is his rendition of “Cover Me Up,” Jason Isbell’s calling card. Wallen’s affection for the song is clear from the first verse, and soon he’s belting it like a seasoned karaoke performer. But his robust performance, with a guitar keeping tempo rigidly as a click track and cymbal crashes gesturing at moodiness, is hardly believable. Even if you don’t know from Isbell’s backstory that “Cover Me Up” is his redemption narrative in miniature, you can hear it in his original, how his baritone quavers as he portrays his egotistical, self-destructive old self, how it firms into a resolute declaration of love. Isbell seems to come away understanding that only vulnerability can build something strong enough to withstand that bursting dam he sings about in the second chorus. Wallen doesn’t have writing credits on all the songs on Dangerous, but “Cover Me Up” is the one time he sounds like he’s singing someone else’s song.
The other, and far more effective, is the album’s penultimate track, “Livin’ the Dream.” Wallen finally says what he’s been hinting at for nearly an hour and a half: He’s fucking miserable. The drugs and booze and sex have worn him down. He’s racked with loneliness, and with guilt for feeling so lonely, for not appreciating what he worked so hard for, what his mama prayed so hard for. “I meet a thousand people who think I got a thousand friends,” he sings, and the way he says it, I don’t need to ask how many he actually has.
I understand the grounding impulse of what Wallen does on much of Dangerous, how the unexpected turbulence of ascension has made him reach for the places most entrenched in his memory. I hated country music, or played at hating it, until I went away to college and discovered that it told the story of the place I missed, and I realized that it was part of the air I was born into. (Wallen may not have cared much about country growing up, either; based on his professed teenage devotion to radio rock, I’m guessing he was also more of a 94.3 The X guy.) Since I moved into my first solo apartment a couple of years ago, I’ve been filling my walls with touchstones: posters from shows at the Tennessee Theatre, prints from the 1982 World’s Fair, a map of Knoxville circa 1886. Because of the pandemic, I haven’t been to east Tennessee in more than a year, the longest I have ever gone without seeing home. I’m sure that the best of these songs hit me harder for all the time and distance.
But where we’re from is not all we are. For Wallen, 2020 meant crossing into bona fide stardom with songs about treading water and looking over his shoulder. It was also the year he became a father, made an ass of himself by flouting public health standards, and got arrested outside Kid Rock's Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N' Roll Steakhouse. As “Livin’ the Dream” evinces, all that steam is looking for a way out. Dangerous does plenty — too much, honestly — to explain where Wallen comes from and to suggest, via its grandiosity, where he wants to go. Maybe next time he’ll tell us who he is.