Uncle Kracker: Midnight Special

Rhapsody is playing tricks on me today, and refuses to display most of this week's new releases (instead it's showing me Christmas music - it'll be a cold day in hell when Harry Flugelman lets an actor tell him what to do!  wait, no, that's not right.  I meant to say it'll be a cold day in hell when I listen to Christmas music BY CHOICE...).  Anyway, that means I've had to search the mystical Interwebs for new releases instead, which has reminded me both how many albums I don't actually listen to (sorry, guys!), and that Uncle Kracker is still a person.  In the world.  That exists.  And makes music.

The first question I had when I remembered that Uncle Kracker was still out there was why in the hell would anyone ever call themselves Uncle Kracker VOLUNTARILY???  This is a question I've had for a while, but I finally took the time to look it up because hey, why not?  What I discovered is that not only is Kid Rock responsible for one of the least-good country albums I've listened to since starting this blog (sorry, Aaron Lewis.  keep your day job!), but he's also responsible for Uncle Kracker's horrible moniker, since he's the one who started calling him "cracker" back when they were just wee lads (the "uncle" part came later, when he wanted the world to know that indeed, he wasn't wearing a STITCH under that trench coat the other band calling themselves Cracker objected to his name).  However, if nothing else, I admire the Uncle's committment to it, a commitment you can see tattooed all over his forearm if you check out the biography page on his website.

The other thing you will learn, should you choose to follow that last link, is that Kracker calls this newest release "a full-on country record", although “Maybe not the ‘A guy walks into a bar and goes, ‘Where does a man go to get a drink in this town?’ kind of country, but it’s my version."  So now if you're wondering what, exactly, his version of country is, the answer to that question is basically a cross between Kid Rock and Jimmy Buffett, with the lyrical sensibility of a whiter-trash Train.  And while that image should evoke truly everything you need to know about this record, I'll throw in a couple of bonus nuggets anyway: "You Got That Thang" is a less-classy and more-country version of Train ("You walk in with a crooked smile/Yeah your hair's a little out of style/But ooo-ooh you got that thing/You're in and out of relationships/Your nail polish is always chipped/But ooh-ooh you got that thing"), "Nuthin' Changes" is like a less-classy and more-country version of Jimmy Buffet ("I got a yacht parked down in the Keys/I write my name in the sand when I pee/My bod's tan except for me wrist/That's where my shiny diamond Rolex sits"), and "Nobody's Sad On A Saturday Night" is an equally-classy and LESS-country version of about a billion other country songs ("Some Johnny Cougar/Some Southern Comfort/Winners and losers/We got each other/The world looks better in neon lights/Cause nobody's sad on a Saturday night").  And that is LITERALLY all you need to know.