It doesn’t take much more than a couple of seconds to get caught up in the vibrancy of “Weary Old Highway” from Jim Hurst, and although I think the song gets even more exciting when Darin and Brooke Aldridge step into the mix, there’s no debating who the true star of this show is. As he has in the past, Hurst approaches the narrative he forms with these lyrics all too bucolically for us to ignore his soft touch, and where a lot of his contemporaries might have been more aggressive against a beat like this one, I think he was smart to utilize the bit of contrast in this arrangement to create more catharsis rather than tension. This is an artist who knows what he wants to make in the studio, and the affirmative feel of this track sells us as much.
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Lyrically, this is more or less on par with what I’ve come to expect out of both acts, but with a bit more competitive output given the fact that they’re all vying for the lion’s share of the spotlight here. That’s less of a factor when listening to Darin and Brooke Aldridge’s standard stuff, but it could be that Hurst is bringing a bit of edge out of their sound that we might not have been able to notice without a player like this one in the studio. The chemistry gets incendiary, which is exactly what I want in a song like “Weary Old Highway.”
The influence of contemporary Americana themes on the substance of the melodies in this single is hard for even the most ignorant of critics to dismiss as casual, but I’m also disinclined to say that Hurst is trying to join ranks with the progressive country scene that has been becoming a greater and greater alternative to the mainstream in the past few years alone. He’s still rocking the troubadour persona pretty steady in “Weary Old Highway,” even with a couple of strong, pop-adapted musicians like the Aldridges in the booth next to him, and the singer/songwriter undertones of this competition will be all the greater if he decides to play it solo in a live setting somewhere down the line. Any way you slice it, this is one artist who is nowhere near selling out his ideals for a bigger share of the market.
As full-bodied as they come, “Weary Old Highway” is a terrific example of what a solid country collaboration can sound like between ideal contenders, and it’s certainly made me appreciate what Jim Hurst, as well as Darin and Brooke Aldridge, are contributing to the American country music underground at the moment. There’s a bit of material similar to this floating around the scene, but very few collaborative efforts have been able to boast the kind of mad energy this one does without having to invite some external elements into the grander scheme of things. I applaud the work these three musicians are doing, and I hope to hear them play together again soon.
Troy Johnstone