Morgan Wallen has become one of country music’s biggest stars of the past few years, riding his Everyman persona and brooding, whiskey-soaked country-rock songs to success not just on country radio, but in the pop sphere. But he’s caused controversy along the way, too. He was dropped from Saturday Night Live in late 2020 after being caught flouting pandemic guidelines. In February of the following year, a video emerged of the singer using a racial slur, which caused the Nashville machine to briefly withdraw its support of his music.
That scandal caused widespread (and necessary) discussions about country music’s relationship with race; his regular-guy image and heart-on-rolled-up-sleeve romanticism kept his fanbase streaming his music despite it all. Dangerous: The Double Album, released a month before the slur video was released by TMZ, clocked in at 30 tracks — a streaming-age bonanza that helped his already-lofty chart positions. One Thing at a Time bests that track quotient, with 36 songs and no double-album disclaimer.
This megadose of Wallen doesn’t only ensure that One Thing at a Time will be lodged at the top of the charts for a while — alongside Dangerous, which is currently at Number Five on the Billboard 200 — it also reveals his preferred musical and lyrical tropes, as well as his fondness for simple, slippery vocal melodies that easily stick in listeners’ brains. His frizzled wail sounds most comfortable on midtempo cuts, which fuse the more downtempo efforts of hard-rock bands like Staind and Puddle of Mudd with Nashville touches like starlit slide guitars, while other tracks offer the occasional nod to wider musical trends, like the insistent trap snares of “Sunrise” or the Rich Gang interpolation that makes up the chorus of the “red-dirt wild child” chronicle “180 (Lifestyle).” The title track, meanwhile, combines country twang with snappy pop rock, its peppy guitars recalling the New Wave-leaning efforts of early-Eighties AOR acts.
nashvilleartistweekly.com 