Frank Kogan

I talked Ashton Shepherd's "Whiskey Won The Battle" out of obscurity and into Tom Ewing's World Cup Of 2008 competition coming up in March, and have already prepared my spontaneous retort for when the song gets eliminated early on:

"Tonight the ballot let me down!"

The regular question - what REALLY obvious/huge 2008 things are we missing?

— The World Cup Of Opening Tracks (@peoples_pop) February 17, 2021

Just tacked a terrific country, er, album track onto the end of the Suggestions Box; can't say the song was a big thing or groundbreaking ("Whiskey Won The Battle" by Ashton Shepherd, but you can guess what won the war), but the dearth of country here is always embarrassing.

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) February 17, 2021

I'd pretty much forgotten Ashton till yesterday when I looked up my Nashville Scene country critics ballot for 2008:

Ashton Shepherd sounds like a caricature of country music, a twang as wide as rivers are deep, no heart left unwrenched, no string untugged, the result being uncannily gleeful and exuberant; then at the end, "Whiskey Won The Battle" — as clichéd as the rest — is a gutkick of total conviction. Country song of the year, except maybe for Willie Nelson's "The Bob Song," a cover of some old Big & Rich fanpack folderol about a guy sitting in his tree taking the piss out of everything he sees, or something, Willie turning it into utter beauty.

I've actually already used the ballot-let-me-down gag, not regarding 2008 but 2011: is a play on words on Merle Haggard's "The Bottle Let Me Down," from 1966, which Ashton Shepherd is referencing and riffing on in "Whiskey Won The Battle." "The Bottle Let Me Down" was covered by LeAnn Rimes in 2011, so when I included her in my nonsingles list I used the headline "Tonight The Ballot Let Me Down." Here we are:

Tonight The Ballot Let Me Down (February 11, 2012)

Anyhow, if you read down the commentary for that list, you'll see that the ballot's fine but that my memory let me down. Recall this from last month's philosophical disquisition:

And my favorite of Hyuna's live TV versions of "Just Follow" featuring Zico (as opposed to the EP track which featured Dok2 who wrote it) made my singles list for 2011 (iirc) but is on my Top 5 Nonsingles Of The 2010s 'cause that's where there was room for it (I've not gotten around to posting here about that list but here's the playlist).

As it happens, not only did I not recall correctly, but I'd also forgotten my lengthy spiel on the very subject of why I was putting Hyuna's live-on-television "Just Follow" on my nonsingles list rather than my singles list:

"So, why does your webrip of a live Dia Frampton performance get classified as a single, but your webrip of a live HyunA performance get classified as a nonsingle?" 'Cause Dia Frampton's "Heartless" was on The Voice, which is an American Idol–type talent show, and for those shows the live performances are what everyone cares about. The popular ones tend to have a singles-like impact. Whereas the HyunA performance was just a live TV clip designed to promote her and her album. If that clip had gotten massive YouTube views I'd probably have counted it as a single. (I chose that performance rather than the album version, 'cause (obviously) I think it's better; also, it was significantly different, having Zico rather than DOK2 in the "featuring" spot.) The real question might be why didn't I discount the live "Heartless" in favor of the quickie studio version that was available for download and actually charted in the Hot 100 and made it to something like 27 on iTunes (Wikip and Google aren't giving me a consistent number for the latter)? The answer here again is that it's the live version that everyone cares about, and the live version is significantly better. Over the years I've put six talent-show clips on my singles list, the other five being Jordin Sparks' "I Who Have Nothing,"* Brooke White's "Love Is A Battlefield,"* Adam Lambert's "Mad World," Didi Benami's "Rhiannon," and Didi Benami's "Play With Fire," all from American Idol. I chose the live version for four of those five, "Mad World" being the only exception. I don't draw any conclusion from that about live talent show performances being generally better than the corresponding studio quickies, since I don't even bother with the studio version unless the live version is extraordinary. So if a live version is extraordinary I'll listen to the studio version, but if the studio version is extraordinary I won't even hear it unless the live version is extraordinary too.

*Hmmm. Apparently I didn't list "I Who Have Nothing" at all in 2007, and, though in 2008 I did list "Love Is A Battlefield," I put it on my songs list but not on my singles list, deciding I suppose that it was not a single.

LeAnn Rimes "The Bottle Let Me Down"


Dia Frampton "Heartless"

Near unanimous opinion online that Dia Frampton had a Cher Lloyd a-star-is-born moment several days ago on NBC's The Voice with her twisting and half wispy, half guttural version of Kanye West's "Heartless." It continues to grow for me the more I listen, her voice scooping into the soil and rising up to what I'll describe incongruously as a dark alto trill, throat-grabbing, breathtaking. Much richer than Kanye's Autotuned original. Kanye's voice seemed aligned with the lyrics' analytical puzzlement - the song circling around among Yes, she really is cold and heartless, No, they say she's cold and heartless but they'll never understand our love, I don't understand our love, as you ditch me and then play me, and voices say "heartless." Dia lets the lyrics take care of all this while she goes for earth-flow and splatter and high-pitched reflection.

NBC runs online a little too soft, so I recommend you push the volume a little:



( But what's bugging me is the narrative that Dia and NBC have concocted )