All the main-stage country bumpkins are bred to perfection these days. No cuts, no bruises, just ruddy cheeks and clear blue eyes from here to Sunday. They feel incubated, churned out of a Tik-Tok conveyor belt of silky-smooth voices that sound like they should be singing in the church choir rather than the local dive. The product is sleeker, the presentation more refined and palatable, but it’s almost always hollow. Why are we hosing down the dirt, the grime, and the demons that tell us half the story? What’s a hard day’s work even worth it if you didn’t walk the walk yourself first? What’s the point of the destination if someone else took the journey, meticulously marking the map so that you didn’t trip?
The son of a steel mill worker, Tucker Wetmore is no stranger to dirty hands and some sweat on his brow. The vague outline of his story is comfortingly familiar: a failed football star turned to the pen and piano once his days in pads had ended. There’s some comfort in his cook-cutter background, but the unknowns in Wetmore are what makes him the most enticing. It’s the mysterious whys to his what not to’s. It’s the reverberating guitar licks that linger around the echoes of that sharp, blue-collar drawl from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It’s the parts unspoken that pull you in, the whispers of what we can be, that keep you in your seat.
The layman would tell you the parts unspoken are left that way because they would reveal downright plagiarism. Give “Break First” and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” a listen back to back, and you’ll see what they mean. It’s similar, maybe glaringly at times, but you never get the sense it’s intentional, at least on his part. Even if the shades and hues of his predecessors are lurking under the brim of Wetmore’s ball cap, this first full-length effort is collecting a cache of experiences owned, not borrowed. The hat he hides his face in keeps those blemishes out of the sun; it’s best not to let them sizzle before they heal.
And if he is taking true ownership, it’s apparent in personal anecdotes and regional pride. “Brunette,” the record’s best contender for a raucous live boot-stomper, gallops through the boxes you must check for a night on the town with this cowboy. It’s western in its speed, contrarian to the hunters of Nashville bachelorette parties, and most notably, it’s just downright giddy. Wetmore sounds like he’s got ants in his pants as this romp speeds into a gallop through the downtown twilight. Conversely, “Give Her The World” throws those spunky sentiments back in your face. Trotting out of our line of sight and to the end of a gift returned, he pushes a Dean Dillon line out from his Jon Pardi voice. “Holding her is like holding the wind.”
Like most cowboys, women are the clear number one, bolded item of Wetmore’s list of avoidances. It’s the one he can’t seem to shake here, intrinsically tied with the whiskey and its fuel for wanton relationships. On “Bad Habit,” he tries to go cold turkey on one to keep the other. By “Drinkin’ Boots,” we’re back to step one of twelve. It’s a movie we’ve all seen before, but Wetmore sounds collected in his contemplation. That breezy, summer-night production wanders but never wanes on his conviction. You may have heard it before, but you haven’t heard his version before.
Despite some of our singer’s hard-to-swallow pills, digesting them is the easy and sometimes morbidly fun part of the whole ordeal. Like any well-weathered traveler, he boils years of strife down to a few quick-witted phrases. “Three words, too late, damn girl, you’re the one that got away,” the crowds on “3, 2, 1.” It’s a dust-filled cruise down the driveway made muddy by misty eyes. It borders on cutoff-jean corny, but again, he saves himself with that west-coast, beachy production, gliding Wetmore away from the tacky panache. His colloquialisms contain a possessive quality that, just like their singer, is hard to pin down. It’s more eclectic than maybe even he gives himself credit for.
A lot of radio fodder and just-north-of-pop acts squawk on their small-town ideals as if they were gospel, then turn around and pair those old wives’ tales with arrangements that could slip onto any generic billboard dominator record if it had fewer strings. The modernization is there with Wetmore, though he’s rid of those man-out-of-time shackles. Sonically, he’s never wishing he was somewhere that he’s not. “Wine Into Whiskey” encapsulates this perfectly. It’s sleek and beautifully crafted while retaining the tough and gruff in a far more worldly sense; he’s not clutching his pearls if the bar doesn’t have Willie on the jukebox, but he’s not yawning if that’s where the needle drops. You get the sense this cowboy is cultured, just as comfortable cruising streets illuminated in neon as he is in the saddle of a four-wheeler under nothing but starlight. Everyone involved in “What Not To” feels dialed in on making a project that feels as malleable as its umbrella genre is becoming.
It’s not just the sound that’s molded by shared experience, that are then turned into lessons owned. If most of this record is hooting with the owls, its title track is busy soaring with the eagles. “What Not To,” a deeply convicted, gut-wrenching ballad, spells out the crux of his demons. It’s a poignant contrast to share how you learned your lessons by taking notes of others who never learned theirs. But it never disagrees with his “do it myself” mentality. The trauma sustained, in this instance, is a journey in itself.
Tucker Wetmore and ergo his debut record are far from sounding like the dawn of a new day, though they’re not keen on lingering for too long on old ones either. Both the craftsman and his project are open and honest about the fact that they’re still finding themselves. When all is said and done, Wetmore can be found on his back porch as the sun sets, and he wipes away a layer of sweat filled with lessons. Feet propped up, whittling away and excising the parts of himself he’s learning to leave behind. Those warts then get scribbled into his notebook of “what not to’s,” the only luggage he needs to bring tomorrow for the long journey ahead. Now, he stands weightless in the face of the frontier, the rest of us watching his figure grow smaller over the horizon, hoping these lessons can carry him the distance. If he made it this far, he can surely find the rest along the way.
