Way back at the dawn of his career, a shocking 15 years of hair loss ago now, Dwight Yoakam looked to be crossover big. Riffing on Buck Owens and Don Rich, Yoakam and longtime collaborator Pete Anderson were presented as hard-core country traditionalists who had simultaneously been blessed with the cool rock imprimatur of the L.A. punk scene. As his finest albums came and went, though, Yoakam evolved into a recording artist too interested in cross-genre fusions to be embraced any longer, I suspect, by the old-school country fans who’d once seen him as their savior, and a performer a bit too enamored of his hillbilly pose to be trusted completely by rockers. Under The Covers, Yoakam’s seventh studio release, wants to be crossover big, but, to my ears anyway (one country, one rock), it should be neither embraced nor trusted.
A handful of cuts work well enough. The opening version of the Everly Brothers’ Roy Orbison-penned hit “Claudette” cooks with a big (if overly familiar) Pete Anderson riff, and Yoakam slows down The Clash’s “Train In Vain”, filling in all the new spaces with bluegrassy touches. The closing covers of Johnny Horton’s “North To Alaska” and Jimmie Rodgers’ “T For Texas” (a hidden track) are nearly as strong. But we’ve also heard all this before, and this album means to do more than just revisit “Fast As You” “Bury Me” and “Honky Tonk Man”. No, Under The Covers wants to show how versatile Yoakam is. I guess it succeeds, though not in the way he probably hoped.
Much of Under The Covers is so bad that it’s really hard to put into words. Some tracks were simply doomed to failure from the get-go, like a terrible duet with Sheryl Crow on Sonny & Cher’s “Baby Don’t Go”; let’s just say that anyone who can be outsung by Sonny Bono has serious problems. And so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the main thing these covers uncover is that, deployed outside of country music, Yoakam’s voice has real limitations. Whether it’s the gentle, Glen Campbell-style feel he tries to give “Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues” (not a bad idea, in theory) or the clumsy Latin rhythm he uses on Them’s “Here Comes The Night”, Yoakam’s dulled voice consistently has difficulty sustaining notes or even figuring out what to do with a line if he’s not going to end it with a Lefty Frizzell-inspired curly-cue.
I’ve saved the worst for last. Yoakam’s cover of the Kinks’ “Tired Of Waiting For You” is done up Harry Connick Jr. style (to call it “Frank Sinatra style” would be to insult both Frank and the style), and Yoakam tries to swing along with it, employing jazz-pop phrasing that his voice is simply not built for, to put it kindly. K.D. Lang could pull this off, and probably even Raul Malo or George Strait (George was the best thing going on his Frank Sinatra duet). But Yoakam shouldn’t even be allowed to sing like this in the shower. It’s just really, really bad.
“Tired Of Waiting For You” might even be as bad as anything I’ve ever heard; I’d have to think about it for awhile, and I’d just as soon not. But I am dead certain that Under The Covers is the worst album of Yoakam’s career. Throughout, his thin voice just keeps fading away, like he’s a singer who’s not only out of breath but out of ideas. And this lousy covers album — coming on the heels of a mediocre live record, and with a Christmas disc already on the way — makes me worry that’s precisely what he is.
