Album Review: Josh Turner – Everything is Fine

Country artists take note: Josh Turner and producer Frank Rogers have just issued an audio textbook in Contemporary Album Production. And I’m assigning it as required listening. There will be a test.

Turner’s third studio album manages to avoid the tragically over-textured sound that plagues most of its contemporaries, and it proves that yes, Virginia, there are acoustic instruments in modern country music after all.

Everything is Fine is a series of smartly sparse tracks which showcases perfectly placed musical hooks and exquisite melodic construction throughout. And whereas many of today’s “albums” are little more than seemingly random assortments of same-sounding songs that bleed together into a stream of hypnotic boringness, Everything Is Fine is very much an album in the sense that its individual elements are distinctive and memorable on their own, while still fitting a broader artistic vision and context.

That context, which Turner dubs “South Carolina low country” on the album’s closing track, is a charming and warm aesthetic that, despite it’s sometimes less than sophisticated lyrical approach (see: “Trailerhood”), feels authentic, natural, and comfortable.

What’s even more impressive about this latest effort from Hannah, South Carolina’s favorite son, however, is that the typically conservative artist has taken a fair share of unexpected musical risks. Yes, the record has a tendency to dissolve into Turner’s usual pining over his wife, family, and Jesus, but it also finds him stretching vocally on “Nowhere Fast,” a duet with R&B artist Anthony Hamilton that shines as the album’s highlight and one of the finest cross-genre collaborations in a very long time. (Sorry, Jamie Foxx.)

Elsewhere, “Another Try,” featuring fellow Belmont University graduate Trisha Yearwood, is a surprisingly progressive deviation from Turner’s generally upbeat radio persona, and the quasi-Americana narrative “The Longer The Waiting (The Sweeter The Kiss),” is nothing if not stunning.

Still, this album isn’t perfect. The title track is a frustratingly cliché laundry list of typical country motifs (wife, family, truck, dog, church, the river, the moonlight, good job, etc), and songs like “Soulmate” and “Baby, I Go Crazy” consistently settle for easy, predictable rhymes.

But it’s difficult (and unfair) to fault an album for not being deep or poetic when it neither tries to be nor needs to be–and there are enough excellent lyrical moments here to offset the sometimes marginal material.

Everything Is Fine might not be the kind of record that launches Turner into global superstardom–it is a humble record; at times a deceptively simple record; and it is a record that is strongly laced with traditional undertones. At the same time, however, it is a record that shows considerable growth over his previous two releases, and, in this critic’s opinion, it is a record that far exceeds expectations.

Recommended Tracks: “Nowhere Fast“, “Another Try“, “The Longer The Waiting (The Sweeter The Kiss)“.