Album Review: Rhonda Vincent – Good Thing Going

Rhonda Vincent has recorded excellent albums in both the bluegrass and country genres and infuses her bluegrass work with country elements. Her tendency to incorporate country instead of pop elements into her bluegrass may explain why Vincent has not achieved the same widespread acclaim as Alison Krauss, for she is at least Ms. Krauss’s equal in talent. Good Thing Going is significantly more country than 2006’s All-American Bluegrass Girl: her recent effort is short on bluegrass breakdowns and long on love songs. It’s the variety of these love songs — from kiss-off to heartbreak to odes of everlasting devotion — that makes for an interesting, top-to-bottom project.

Vincent garnishes her country lyrical structures with prominent but not dominant acoustic instrumentation. Within this framework, she achieves significant thematic and musical diversity. “I Will See You Again” retreads the familiar pop-country theme of one spouse waiting for the other in Heaven and even features a conveniently heart-wrenching funeral scene that contrasts with the disc’s more bluegrass tracks, “Hit Parade of Love,” a fast and furious Jimmy Martin cover, and “Bluegrass Saturday Night,” a novelty meta-analysis of performing bluegrass music that is a poor choice to close the album.

The album’s title is curious, as there are a lot of emotional ups and downs for a project titled Good Thing Going. “I Give All My Love to You” puts Heartland, Big & Rich, etc. on notice by proving that it is possible to write a country wedding anthem that is not hopelessly trite while “World’s Biggest Fool” is the female “Oceanfront Property” and “Scorn of a Lover” is the tale of a woman wronged. The title song provides some insight into this anomaly, as Vincent enumerates the imperfections of her marriage before counting her blessings. The clear message is that love is the “Good Thing Going,” even through all the tribulations that accompany its experience. Vincent attempts a tender, philosophical exploration of this phenomenon in “The Water is Wide,” which features a guest vocal by Keith Urban, but the water analogy makes about as much sense as the one that failed “Islands in the Stream,” and the cost of this miscalculation is an important piece in the album’s cohesiveness.

As usual, Vincent’s vocal performance and musicianship are beyond reproach. However, her decision to embrace a more country sound engenders idiosyncratic genre obligations that Vincent does not entirely meet. While there’s not a bad song on Good Thing Going, there’s not a great one either, though “I Gotta Start Somewhere” comes close. Bluegrass allows furious picking and high-lonesome vocals to ameliorate rather simplistic lyrics, while Vincent puts lyrics out front and they sound deficient on some tracks. Nonetheless, Good Thing Going is a solid work of country-bluegrass that should attract interest from a wide swath of the genres’ fan bases.