album review: 'the mockingbird & THE CROW' by HARDY

There’s a lot of reasons why I’ve avoided talking about HARDY until now.

Part of it is a lack of interest, I’ve never found a song by him directly that I liked that much - as a songwriter behind the scenes, he’s written a decent number of tracks I would call good or even great, but I would not say that HARDY is the unique touch that put them over the top. And that shouldn’t be surprising - he started off as a cowriter behind the scenes about two years late to a lot of acts that were or would have been bro-country, especially Florida Georgia Line through a connection to Big Loud Records. And honestly, if he was to just stay in that lane behind the scenes, he’d be a presence I’d know about as a critic but the majority of people would not care.

But HARDY has been more ambitious than that - he was able to network shockingly well on Music Row and was able to rope together a lot more interesting artists for his Hixtape series, which would feature a lot of acts who frankly should know better than to be on anything called ‘hixtape’. It also earned him a fair amount of scorn from certain indie critics who would recognize his awkward fusions of country, rock, and even hip-hop as pretty bad, a caricature of sounds and lifestyles he couldn’t effectively back up, and I was initially among that group… but then after hearing HARDY’s vocal delivery on record, he became remarkably easy to tune out; it’s not like there’s no short supply of interchangeable white dudes on music row singing about the same list-driven cliches, and HARDY seemed to be just another one albeit with a more pronounced conservative streak in his framing, in both the songs he wrote for himself and others. But that didn’t have to be a bad thing either, and as we entered the 2020s, his writing was at least trying to get more interesting - he certainly was getting enough industry clout to do what he wanted and start releasing proper albums. Granted, I didn’t think he was interesting enough to pull off a ‘concept’ project like this was proposed to be, an hour long record with half country, half rock, where I was thinking about vetoing this altogether… but hey, I’d give it a listen or two, make sure I’m not sleeping on something, this could be good, right?

…so this is going to be a bit of a different review, because if you only listen to the first three or four songs of this album, you might be surprised I’m reviewing this at all - I skip over pretty formulaic mainstream bro- or bro-country adjacent albums all the time. But that’s not quite what HARDY is selling as a whole with this project, where I’d almost be inclined to call it a bait-and-switch, but it’s not really that either - if you’re paying attention, this isn’t really a surprise either. It functions more like a revelation, where not only do you realize those snobbish indie country critics may have had a point, but there’s a much larger, uglier underside to all of this that we have to explore. Because not only does this album reveal itself to be truly awful in shocking ways, it’s one of the few times I feel comfortable saying this guy is a poser and this is one of the most disingenuous country rock albums I’ve heard in years.

And that’s not a criticism I make lightly - in fact, outside of very rare cases, it’s not an accusation I ever make! The whole concept of having to live the life you paint in your art is a fallacy, the emotional resonance of the real scene can help deepen the experience but the truly great storytellers and musicians and artists can create those transcendent emotions without having lived them directly. And as someone who also covers hip-hop, there can be bloody consequences to ‘living your rhymes’, and a system that’s looking for every excuse to play on that cultural assumption. And while the implied real world danger in a lot of country and rock has been effectively dead for years outside of isolated niches and characters, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t space for artists trying to play the swaggering bad boys of the scene, there’s certainly a market for it. Indeed, in Nashville right now there’s a lot of folks who are tired of the saccharine side of boyfriend country and are thinking about bringing in a sound inflected with more rock muscle and attitude. Hell, this was very similar to how a lot of bro-country came up in the early 2010s, especially for those with a little more macho, brooding presence, with many of the artists in that lane still active to this day either on stage or behind the scenes, and I’m the one who has said that subgenre had more quality than it was often given credit - hell, a lot of the stuff I liked most from that era came with more muscle!

But as someone who was active through that era, so much of how it worked depended on execution, and more to the point should be placed in the larger context of the era, which a decade later is different than the rise of bro-country, where if there were larger cultural stakes they felt offset by a rowdy, less serious vibe - and yes, that had ugly consequences, talk to any woman in country trying to break through in that era, but at least there was a party. In 2023, HARDY is not following in the footsteps of Florida Georgia Line or Jake Owen - indeed, the most stark parallel immediately I got was early Eric Church, albeit with a lot less of the rootsy Americana of Chief and more of The Outsiders - we’ll get back to this. Hell, I’d argue that’s the first major problem with this album: HARDY’s not a bad singer so much as he’s unassuming - he doesn’t have a lot of distinctive texture or firepower or emotive presence where his nasal drawl rarely matches the burlier production, the sort of artist where it doesn’t surprise me at all he started off more behind the scenes - hell, on record Eric Church has never been acclaimed as a powerful vocalist either, even if I’d argue he’s developed a powerful intensity that translates. And hell, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing if you have a distinctive artistic vision or a knack for great songwriting…

Well, let’s start with the country side of this project, where I’ve got a critique of HARDY’s writing that has been nagging me for years: the details of his writing paint in broad strokes that feel neither as clever as he thinks they are, nor all that personal. HARDY has gotten credit for being a more innovative storyteller than many of his peers - it’s why he’s been able to network so well - but it’s a surface level innovation that never really asks that much of the audience, or helps him develop an identity. Take ‘beer’ - it’s basically a bro-country song written from the perspective of beer, but all it’s really about is commemorating good times, a gimmick to get you in the door but not do much more. Or take ‘i in country’, built off the main line ‘no i in country, but there’s a y-o-u’ - not in that order of course, but it’s all built around a general premise of wanting to share a country life together - a neat little songwriting trick, but it doesn’t feel that personal, or add distinct details to HARDY himself. But that’s not saying we don’t get clues as to how HARDY sees the world - ‘red’ is a collab with Morgan Wallen where it’s all about being a redneck out in the sticks and the first line on the hook is ‘it ain’t about politics, I’m talking small town’… as if signifiers like the bible and the flag and the troops - or indeed Morgan Wallen on this song - aren’t inherently political by their presence. Or take ‘wait in the truck’, which as I talked about on Billboard BREAKDOWN is all about a macho revenge fantasy of finding some girl who got abused and shooting her abuser, playing the protecting alpha - which almost feels old-fashioned in its political framing of domestic abuse. Or you get songs that are just poorly structured, where ‘screen’ is very much a rant about not living in the moment with folks behind that screen, or the atrocities you seen on the news with someone pointing a gun at a preacher, so instead you need to be like him living life… behind his back porch screen; the same principles of deflection are in play here!

But none of that is new or surprising - no, the song that initially really rubbed me the wrong way was ‘here lies country music’, the ode to the loss of real country music on the radio… and I’m looking at HARDY with the side-eye because this guy is an industry figure who built his reputation integrating rock and hip-hop elements into a country sound, it’s certainly not neotraditional for all of the pedal steel he tries to drizzle over this. He’s not Alan Jackson or George Strait with ‘Murder On Music Row’, which was more focused and targeted at the industry, but HARDY can’t make that song seriously because he is Music Row, he’s been entrenched in that scene for years! And this is coming after one of Nashville’s best years - country is alive and well, who are you to be proclaiming it’s dead, or that you are in any way responsible for helping to resurrect it? And it’s not like the first half of this album is particularly well-produced or executed country - I can hear the programmed percussion smuggled into Joey Moi’s mixes and how HARDY is just as comfortable placing blink-182 alongside Hank Williams, or how there’s some various obvious synthetic vocal layering, or how allergic this album feels towards any basslines or fiddle. It’s rarely distractingly bad outside of some weedy high frequencies left in the mix on ‘happy’ and ‘screen’, but it has all the pieces that make country traditionalists recoil from this sound. My general issue is that many of these songs feel lacking in a strong groove or central melody outside of the vocal lead, so the “country” side of this album starts running together.

Because that’s the true elephant in the room, because right after that song we get the title track, very much intended as a transition from the country half of this album to something more rock - so it feels particularly disingenuous to lament the death of country when you’re going to hop into an entire different genre - but this is where the album tips into much uglier, but predictable territory. It’s worth highlighting that on the hook of this song he outright admits he’s been ‘singing songs that sound like other songs you’ve heard’… but then the guitars sour and we get some tangible bass, and he’s swearing that going to make darker songs that aren’t kissing the ring are going to make him ‘the crow’ instead of ‘the mockingbird’… in other words, instead of radio country, we’re getting modern radio rock, and it’s immediately followed by ‘SOLD OUT’, where you hear the crowd chanting his name and he’s shouting about how he still drinks and drives a big truck and will post pictures of his hunting of Instagram, so that’s how you know he didn’t sell out! And look, I’m a sucker for faster acoustic strumming, but we then get utterly underwhelming rock guitars you’d hear on any stock post-grunge song from the 2000s, increasingly limited grooves, and HARDY’s painful attempt at a metalcore growl when he doesn’t sound like Uncle Kracker. This is where I have to reference Eric Church and The Outsiders again, because at least when he had his rock and metal pivots a decade ago, you could tell his influences were swampy and weird and were taking compositional risks, borderline prog and blues, whereas for HARDY it’s post-grunge and radio rock leftovers complete with grimy vocal filters, record scratches and drum machines Kid Rock rejected - hell, by the time we get ‘TRUCK BED’ it’s this hideous and painfully dated bleeping trap percussion that I’m not sure rock wants either, same with the overly synthetic, abysmally mixed ‘KILL SHIT TILL I DIE’! The absolute worst case occurs with ‘RADIO SONG’, featuring Jeremy McKinnon of A Day To Remember of all people shouting ‘FUCK’, and I don’t think I’ve heard a more badly executed tonal transition between country tones and bland djent chugging - because he’s now self-aware about all the country cliches he has to cram into the record but this, it’s not a ‘radio song’… you know, except on the dregs of mainstream rock radio.

Because that’s the reality of this: HARDY wants to frame the back half of this album like The Outsiders, where it’s gnarly and heavy and giving the middle finger to your system, man, because this is who he really can be - and I don’t buy it for a second because he outright admits on these songs that he’s a part of this system, he plays by their rules, and the attempts at subversion are just embracing a different arm of that system - he’s already sold out, on the first half of this album! This is why I called HARDY a poser, because the ‘skin in the game’ he’s presenting isn’t challenging that market or his audience outside of swearing to offend the censors with cuts like ‘KILL SHIT TILL I DIE’, and the best way to describe that song is militia-core that plays to the meathead metalcore crowd and reveals a bit of that reactionary edge this album is too terrified to embrace - more of it is ‘THE REDNECK SONG’ and ‘I AIN’T IN THE COUNTRY NO MORE’ that plays to generic rural sentiments Jason Aldean’s been selling for since the late 2000s. And It’s not surprising that HARDY has those sympathies, where ‘JACK’ is the dark mirror to ‘beer’ on the first half of the album, or just how much scorn and implied threats of violence are towards women who throw him out like on the bridge of ‘TRUCK BED’ and ‘.30-06’. But here’s the noxious thing: for as much as those sentiments lurk on this album, more often that not it feels like a flimsy commodification of that redneck lifestyle, complete with a different set of brand names whether it be country or rock, and a shallow one at that. I’m not saying I want HARDY to go full Jason Aldean and infuse Music Row with more reactionary rhetoric - I’m saying that HARDY and Music Row want to sell you guys a brand of it that’s sterile, derivative, increasingly miserable, and just as part of the system, reinforcing those values. And not for nothing, for as much sloganeering as there is on this, it feels painfully hollow opposite a Zach Bryan or Cole Chaney or Pony Bradshaw or Adeem The Artist who can tell the very human stories of the folks of the folks HARDY wants to write for and sell to - except there’s the rub, because a lot of those folks don’t have the money for the big Nashville tours and festivals, so he’s selling it to those who have money, and want to cosplay the lifestyle and “values” without any convincing grit or texture.

And that’s not new - that’s what a lot of folks have been railing against on Music Row for decades now, the commodification of a certain style of country music that reinforces what America should be, and increasingly what you should buy to get there, and that can be fine too. What drives me off the wall about this album is how HARDY really wants it both ways - he wants to be the guy who can collab with everyone on Music Row for endlessly forgettable cowrites because that’s what pays the bills, but then also be the snarling rock star and rebel son who screams at the system and makes the shallowest of commentary. And the biggest problem is that he’s not convincing at either - charitably two sides of the same brand management coin, but his brand of country is hollow and increasingly impersonal, and his brand of rock is dated, grooveless, unflattering, and frequently embarrassing. The country side of this double album is better, more generic but something HARDY’s production can convincingly deliver, but both sides feel empty and lacking unique personality, the sort of cuts you’d get from a hired gun who writes more for others than himself, and doesn’t have much to say when he tries to get personal. And don’t tell me this is “experimental” - I’ve heard enough mainstream country and rock and a lot more of the real edgy stuff in the underground to recognize when someone’s doing the bare minimum; it’s corporate, hollow, and doesn’t even have the decency to be truly heavy or have fun. Hell, HARDY references all the birds - sometimes you need to be the rifle.