Hell Kenny is only a few months from turning 50 himself. You can even excuse the cavorting with Kenny Chesney.
Surprisingly though, he emerged with another Top 5 hit nearly 10 years later with 2004’s “Loco.” Now with “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” snaking its way up the charts, the fairly mild and oft forgotten career of David Lee Murphy that started back in the mullet era and has now made its way to the Sam Hunt-influence Metro Bro craze might eventually land him in an elite class of country music performers that have attained Top 5 hits in three separate decades.īut what’s the value in late career success when you sell out to attain it like David Lee Murphy has done here? You can forgive the lightness in the writing. But after four Top 10 hits in a span of two years in the mid 90’s, David Lee Murphy virtually disappeared, and was dropped from MCA Nashville. “Dust on the Bottle” was a fine song, as were a few others from his discography. I don’t know if David Lee Murphy’s career was ever incredibly celebrated by anyone but his dedicated fans. I mean, are we really talking about a collaboration between Kenny Chesney and David Lee Murphy in 2018 breaking into the Top 25 in the charts, with indications it could end up at or near #1? Aside from the production, I’m not sure if the song is “bad” necessarily, it’s just a pretty meaningless effort from a very odd pairing. “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” is just heavily-processed vocals in your standard cookie-cutter white boy reggae Kenny Chesney toes in the sand eternal sunshine ditty. But unlike even many of the super hits from today’s “country” stars, the electronic drums don’t get drown out by the end of the first stanza for pounding stadium drums, they keep droning on throughout the entire damn song with not even a semblance of effort at texturing, completely ruining any other redeeming elements in the song, if in fact there were any.īut there really aren’t. As soon as you hear the unmistakable tone of an electronic drum beat, you’re out.
It literally takes the conscious country music consumer one second or less to bail on this song. But when it comes to “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” the career of David Lee Murphy might have been better left to fond memory. Normally we may be compelled to stand up and cheer when an older country artist whose been previously put out to pasture gets a second chance at life. David Lee Murphy had his only #1 hit way back in 1995 with “Dust on the Bottle.” Now Kenny Chesney has knocked the dust off of David Lee Murphy in a very weird collaboration called “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” that is inexplicably on its way to becoming a bona fide modern country hit.