Give or take Patty Loveless, the best country singer in the world today just might be Gene Watson. Unlike most of his chart contemporaries, whose voices have naturally deteriorated with age, Watson has hardly lost a step in the studio since he cut his classic sides (“Love In The Hot Afternoon”, “Farewell Party”, “Fourteen Carat Mind”, and about twenty more top-10 hits) in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He can still deliver one line in a nuanced near whisper and the next with force enough to make you feel as if you’ve just been slapped. Nor has he surrendered to fashion by adding multiple curlicues to the end of each line to signify deep feeling. His is a less-is-more singing style — in the tradition of Jack Greene, Marty Robbins and Conway Twitty — that at its best reveals more character in one moment of restraint than most singers do in entire albums.
Then & Now is one more swell record for Watson in a career that at this point has seen three decades worth of them. There are no surprises here, just timeless country music. The opening cuts, “I’m A Fool For Leaving (I’d Be Twice The Fool To Stay)” and Only Yesterday”, are the sort of records that deserve to be in rotation alongside the latest Dierks Bentley or Lee Ann Womack singles; the former is a fiddle and pedal steel two-stepper, the latter a tender love ballad that plays it quiet not unlike the Brad Paisley/Alison Krauss hit “Whiskey Lullaby”, albeit without the star power or reassuring angels. Same goes for an excellent new version of his 1978 hit “You Could Know As Much about A Stranger”, a song and performance which plumbs a level of relationship detachment that has rarely been equaled.
Of course, these cuts will not be hits. Their themes are too bleak and ambivalent, their sounds too twangy for anyone other than Alan Jackson to get away with, and their singer is too old. Maybe that makes Gene Watson the best alternative country singer in the world, too.
