Search - Bryan White :: How Lucky I Am

Consider the following parallel: In the mid-1970s, Olivia Newton-John defined easy-listening country-pop with breathy come-hitherness and cloying sentimentality. What goes around comes around, as Bryan White proves with his fourth squeaky-clean charmer. With the exception of some ambient pedal steel and fiddle, White's power ballad style is about as country as Luther Vandross. In fact, his adolescent coos and oohs sound like samples from the froth favored by today's R&B crowd. With all of Nashville at his disposal, White lays the production on thick, employing the Nashville String Machine to gloss songs that have all the punch of sugar cubes dissolving in Evian. When he picks up the pen himself, he drips slush like, "You got the power, you got the mind / You got the skills, Baby, I ain't lyin'." If this is country music's final inoculation for the soft-rock world of middle-school sock-hops, supermarket aisles, and orthodontist offices, well, at least it's over with. --Roy Kasten