Rascal Flatts – “Every Day”

This is part of a fascinating trend that I keep meaning to write about: in contemporary country songwriting, women can do no wrong. The most striking thing about the RF album is that on every song about a relationship the only blame ever placed is on the man. The woman is always sheer perfection.

That’s smart marketing, since most of their target audience is female. It just comes off as self-loathing over the course of an album.

I wonder if these guys have started “cutting” yet. What is the deal with this chorus?! Add another reason to the list of why I dislike Rascal Flatts.

Chris, that’s interesting. I didn’t listen to half of their new album, so there’s no way I ever would have noticed it. I didn’t notice it as a trend in contemporary country music, either, but do you think it’s a conscious decision or the byproduct of trying to appeal to women?

MikeKY, you’re welcome.

Zach, you bring up a good point about the song being overly generic, but I don’t think it works as well in the religious context.

Samantha I dislike them because the powers that be in country music have pushed them to the forefront and taken away the country music I grew up listening to and i miss it on the radio. I can go to a top forty radio station and hear music like this if i want it…they are not bad musicians or singers….they just should not be on country radio. Just one man’s opinion from nashvegas.

i know this is irrelevant, but someone mentioned the new brad paisley song. is anyone else dissapointed with the song choice? i just don’t get it, with so mayn good songs on 5th Gear, why would he choose that one??

Doesn’t that sort of violate the other unspoken rule that a major label artist will never cut a song that makes themselves look bad? Or am I getting my unspoken rules mixed up again?

I really need to pay more attention to what people don’t say at those NSAI meetings.

That’s the trouble with unspoken rules — people don’t speak ‘em.

Women have been salvific figures in country music for about the last 15 years, so Rascal Flatts is nothing new. The general formula for the mid to late 90s was bad boy meets woman and/or finds Jesus and becomes good boy. I haven’t really thought of this in terms of country radio’s increasingly female demographic but it makes sense. However, country songs have always been harder on men than on women, which is why I find songs like “The Midnight Oil,” where the woman is unquestionably the bad “guy,” to be so interesting. Fast-forward to the modern day: even in a female cheating song like “Stay,” we get the sense that the woman is the one being wronged.

“Salvific”! Gotta write that down.

I completely agree with Joe. This song is about God, not about a person who someone is dependent on. It’s beautiful.

It took every ounce of self-discipline for me to stay seated during one of the songwriters’ (I won’t name names!) live performance of this song, and felt completely nauseous by the end of it (and I saw some others in the audience letting out long, deep breaths of ‘thank god that’s over’, too!); frankly, it doesn’t belong in ANY genre; it’s a classic case of two songwriters’ tapping into each other’s ‘deep dark desperate place’ of dysfunction and coming up with lyrics – entirely heartfelt and sincere, if that performance was anything to go by – which belong in a therapist’s office (spoken from a couch!), not a song. Sorry. We songwriters ALL have our musical ‘odes to dysfunction’ (!) but there ought to be some system of checks and balances which helps us to assess which ones belong in the world at large, and which one’s should stay put in (in the bathroom cabinet behind the razors?!). Too bad this team didn’t provide each other with such checks and balances before they shopped the song, thereby inflicting it on the world: THAT said, the damn thing’s a hit…so who are we to fault it?! – Go figure ’cause this is one I can’t figure at all….
;)