Review on Amazon.com
Many artists cite influences heard in this young man's style, but none of them seem to belong in the lineage of those artists the way Chris Denny does. This is not a reworking of the classic "American heartland" sound like you might hear from a group like Arcade Fire, this is more like a new Heartland Classic picking up right where the legends left off. You might find another guy with an interesting enough voice to cover the classics effectively (if you are lucky), but seldom is that voice packaged with such a deep understanding of songwriting, and specifically what it was about every legend that made them so great.
If you are one of these people who still waste time "misunderstanding" Bob Dylan, Neil Young, or old-school country songwriters like Mearle Haggard and Johnny Cash (another Arkansan), then you are probably mentally unprepared to properly appreciate exactly what Chris Denny represents in the timeline of important American songwriters.
When I see groups like Godsmack poorly copying Alice in Chains, and Puddle of Mudd poorly copying Nirvana (Kurt is rolling over in his grave), I am naturally disgusted, and that's the kind of music that floods Arkansas radiowaves. Those artists are not only unoriginal, but their choice of groups to emulate is unoriginal, and the context they place themselves in is uninspired as well as uninspiring. The main way Chris is different is that his voice is FAR from a cheap relica of his idols. He borrows from his idols with so much humility and reverence as if he were playing these songs in a private concert directly to Johnny Cash's ghost.
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