Tracy Byrd

"Tiny Town," from native Texan Tracy Byrd's recent The Truth About Men, is the third-best tiny-town tune I've heard this year, behind "Nowhere," the Bubba Sparxxx/Kiley Dean duet from Bubba's Deliverance, and "Shh," the unlisted closer from Atmosphere's Seven's Travels, in which MC Slug big-ups his home of Minneapolis, which...

By Mikael Wood

November 13, 2003

Audio By Carbonatix

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"Tiny Town," from native Texan Tracy Byrd's recent The Truth About Men, is the third-best tiny-town tune I've heard this year, behind "Nowhere," the Bubba Sparxxx/Kiley Dean duet from Bubba's Deliverance, and "Shh," the unlisted closer from Atmosphere's Seven's Travels, in which MC Slug big-ups his home of Minneapolis, which probably doesn't qualify as a tiny town even if Slug makes it sound like one. In his song Byrd spends the verses outlining daily life in typical Nashvillian detail: "My dad ran a station by the railroad track/ Half his life spent on his back underneath a car"; "My mom sold Avon in the neighborhood/I'd wait in the car hoping she'd done good so I'd have a dime to spend on the ice cream man." Then in the chorus he reverts to cliché but tries to wriggle out of it by copping to his laziness: "They say home is where your heart is/And I guess it's true/And they say you can't go back/But I close my eyes and I'm driving through." And it works, the juxtaposition successfully capturing that ineffable blend of the novel and the familiar that is the small community's situation--the reason a young guy I know won't move out of the frozen backwater his extended family calls home, the reason plenty don't. It's nowhere, like Bubba says, but it's also everywhere, all the time.

Mikael Wood

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