Rating:
Genre:
Country
Release Date: 09/29/2009
Sammy Sadler is a journeyman country singer who has been recording since the late 1980s, but who suffered a serious career interruption when he was shot on Music Row in Nashville in the company of journalist
Kevin Hughes, who was murdered as the result of a chart-fixing scheme.
Sadler wasn't implicated in the scandal, but his career was derailed for a while. He reminds listeners of the incident in the closing track of
Heart Shaped Like Texas,
"Thank God," the one song he co-wrote on the album, and while that might seem exploitative, it's also the only truly personal moment on the disc.
Sadler has a warm, sturdy tenor voice, and he convincingly renders these 11 songs, which come from the pens of 22 writers. The material spans familiar country styles:
"I Wanna Be Loved by You" is country pop;
"Heart Shaped Like Texas" is honky tonk/Western swing;
"Thinking About Mexico" is Tex-Mex, etc. There is also a strain of Christian religion that runs through the album, notably on
"John 3:16." It's all perfectly adequate contemporary country music, but also unremarkable. Even when
Sadler gets hold of a song by A-list songwriters
Bill Anderson and
Steve Wariner,
"I'll Always Have Denver" (and ropes
Wariner into singing harmony), it's not really top-drawer material, as the derivative title suggests.
Sadler needs better songs and a more distinctive persona if he's ever going to be a country star.
~William Ruhlmann, Rovi
;)
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