Tritt Writing Happier Lyrics
Travis Tritt, maker of some of the Nashville mainstream’s hardest-rocking records of the ‘90s, indicates that family values have begun to affect his music.
The 35-year-old singer, currently headlining the Burning Thunder Tour in intermittent stops around the nation, says the life-changes that have come with his 1997 marriage and recent fatherhood are “probably changing the content of the songs I’m doing.
“Instead of songs about losing love or about trying to find it, a lot of the songs I’m writing now are about having it and being happy with it and what joy that’s brought to my life. So it might be a little bit more of an upbeat, positive type of content.”
That shouldn’t hurt Tritt with today’s country radio, a medium that loves “upbeat” and “positive” while avoiding sad laments and a lot of the other kinds of gritty life-reflections that used to stereotype Nashville music.
Such an approach also promises better sales prospects for his next album, due in early fall, than so far have materialized for his last one, an excellent package titled “The Restless Kind,” which won raves from critics but has sold less than his usual million-plus (only “around 700,000,” he says) and got less radio airplay than he’s used to. All that, he adds, occurred because programmers rejected as “too country” his attempt to highlight the traditional country - as opposed to the more familiar Southern rock - side of his musical roots.
But fans of Tritt’s grittier and more bitter work shouldn’t assume he’s no longer going to be performing such less-than-warm-and-fuzzy fare as “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares),” the anti-love song he wrote in the wake of an ex-lover’s departure, or “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin”’ and so on.
No wilting flower, after all, is apt to headline a tour billing itself Burning Thunder.
“Artistically, I still like to get out on the edge,” confirms the Georgia native. “I still like pushing the envelope and doing the rowdier stuff.”
Brooks & Dunn special
On July 2, CBS-TV is scheduled to broadcast a one-hour special titled “NASCAR: 50 Years on the Fast Track with Brooks & Dunn.”
In the special, lots of race-car footage will be built around a live Brooks & Dunn performance in Roanoke, Va.