No Fences - Brooks, Garth (CD 2000)

Four years ago I met my significant other and found my meager CD collection suddenly being mingled with a significantly larger collection, including every album ever done by Garth Brooks. Amongst these was one of my favorites of his, No Fences.

Anyone who has ever heard Garth knows his distinctive voice and mild Western twang mixed in with guitars, fiddles, and many times some pretty strong percussion (at least, strong for country). I m one of the few who has never really figured out what s so extraordinary about Garth Brooks, I love his music and think he s very good at what he does but am confounded by the superstardom he s experienced in recent years.

This CD contains some of my all-time Garth favorites, namely The Thunder Rolls and Wild Horses but unlike some of his other albums such as Sevens it does have a very good variety between the power ballad style of The Thunder Rolls, the mellow ballads like Unanswered Prayers, all the way on up to the upbeat twangy tunes like Two of Kind Working on a Full House. Personally I m a fan of the more mellow sounds and the ballads so this is a great selection for me with enough upbeat to keep it from being monotonous.

Even if you re not a Garth fan this is a pretty good album if you enjoy the likes of George Straight, Chris LeDoux or the like you ll probably want to consider this addition to the collection. This is one of the earlier albums which is, I think, why I like it so much a lot of Garth s newer stuff is just starting to sound too much the same as everything else he s done or - possibly even worse - to sound exactly like all the other pop/country hybrids they re passing off as country music on the radio these days. This is still far removed from The Outlaws or the even older bluegrass-type music I was raised with but strikes a pretty good balance between the country of the 60s and 70s and the semi-country of the 2000s.

I do have to admit that while there are some Garth songs I can t get enough of (The Thunder Rolls is one of them) I do in general get tired of him pretty fast and can usually only listen to one of his CDs before I have to switch to something different often something radically different like Pam Tillis, but my old standbys such as Chris LeDoux is still enough of a switch seriously I often think superstardom is based mainly of the skill of those who market your work because I do think that Garth Brooks is talented and his music is well worth having I also think that there is plenty out there much better, obviously a point of personal preference.

Overall this is one of those essential earlier albums to add to your collection, if you catch yourself getting bored easily with similar styles or tempo from one song to the next this is a great CD to keep you interested with a pretty uniform slow/upbeat/slow pattern throughout the disc. If you haven t bought any Garth Brooks yet and are partial to the slightly older sound this is a great CD to start with.