Of the album's fourteen tracks only two were penned by the idiosyncratic Texas singer-songwriter who startled listeners with original, genre-bending records when he first hit Music Row in the mid-80s. In the decade and a half following his debut, Lovett would release a series of records that fused various musical styles as well as seemingly incompatible generational differences. Plus, nobody wrote songs like he did.

Consider 1988's Pontiac. With "If I Had a Boat," Lovett re-worked Old West iconography into an enchanting defense of modern escapism. A year later, Lovett would record the jazz-inflected duet "What Do You Do/The Glory of Love" with Francine Reed on Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. The song re-casts a pair of outdated his-and-hers stereotypes as a modern couple amusingly nostalgic for the squabbling spouses of a Conway and Loretta track. Another stand-out is 1996's Road to Ensenada, an elegant, heartbroke record that gave us gems like "Her First Mistake." Here Lovett sings from the perspective of a journeying n'er-do-well who tries to win a fickle woman's heart by accurately guessing her back story. The sly narrator is a familiar type, but his wooing methods, like the song's billowing sound, are refreshingly novel.

Then in the 2000s something changed, as Lovett's records came farther and fewer between. A full seven years would pass between Ensenada and Lovett's next album of original material, My Baby Don't Tolerate. (In the gap: live record, anthologies, two discs of covers.) It would then be another four years until the mostly-original It's Not Big It's Large. In 2009 Lovett gave us Natural Forces, half of which was covers.

Big-money Santorum super PAC donor Foster Friess told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell:

Back in my days, [women] used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.

Women don't do that anymore, probably because guys like Friess got worried that women might be enjoying this technique after aspirin got all smooth and gel-capped and kind of sexy. Also, this most likely means that at some point, a horny young Foster Friess must have wound up disappointed in the backseat of a jalopy, with powdery white old-school aspirin all over his junk. Which is hilarious.

Professionally styled but still totally like you.

That argument demonstrates little understanding of country music or of Taylor Swift. It's rooted, I suspect, in a belief commonly held by smart people who don't care for country music: That country music should sound more like that one Johnny Cash song they like and less like Def Leppard.

But part of the point of country is that people who aren't country get no say in country, so people who want their country music to sound like their grandparents' country music should go dig out some Ray Price and enjoy it. That's the great thing about being alive now: All earlier culture is ours to savor, no matter what's going on now.

Most Americans, meanwhile, find the culture in front of them plenty edifying, and millions relish and relate to Taylor Swift, who is a great and fundamentally serious pop-music artist. Swift's music may sound nothing like Hee Haw, but the songs she sings (and often writes) are, in their strong narrative detail and lovestruck world view, still straight-up, grade-A country.

Now, as her single "Ours" creeps toward Billboard's country top ten, here's eight examples. I could offer 20 -- and she's just three albums in.

"Dig my beats, but pull your pants up."

But they're self-conscious, like kids trying on outlandish Halloween costumers: the audacity is part of the joke. Church, though, doesn't just download a beat and hope for pop crossover. His songs seem to rise up from their breakbeats, as surely as they might rise from their riffs.

This is a sea-change for Nashville: Looped, loud, and complex drum patterns are no longer a novelty. They are instead a widely accepted element of that great sonic storehouse that this conservative genre depends upon: Sounds That Most American White People Are Cool With.

Smarter and more honest than Fox & Friends

Good for him. Moments like this are why we need a Hank Williams, Jr.

Just to be clear, he's the middle (and middle-aged) Hank Williams, the one with the Muppet beard, the one who has never crossed over into Barnes & Noble/Utne Reader respectability. The one best known for posing important musical questions: inquiring each week whether or not America might be prepared to enjoy a spot of football, but also on the topic of why he chooses to drink and why he chooses to roll smoke.

(ANSWER KEY: Yes; to get drunk; to get stoned.)

Anyway, this unhousebroken old coot was invited onto Fox & Friends this morning, where he shocked the hosts and America by doing pretty much the one thing you aren't supposed to do on Fox & Friends. He compared Obama to Hitler without putting a question mark at then end of his sentence.

The Flatlanders are the only must-see band whose records are not as good as those of its individual members. Less a working band than old friends who knock some songs out together once in a while, the iconoclastic west Texas singer-songwriters have only recorded together officially, as a working unit, at the very beginning of their respective careers and again, now, in their elegiac kinda/sorta legend period.

That first record, now known as More a Legend Than a Band, is a ghostly collection hallmarked by Jimmie Dale Gilmore's high-lonesome, singing saw of a voice, which isn't to be confused with the actual singing saw layered into many of the tracks. Recorded in 1972, the tracks haven't dated because they seem to come from no particular time: They're hazy, natural, and strange, sounding something like if one of those shimmery panhandle highway mirages somehow booked itself some studio time.

Executive Visions, Inc.

Rascal Flatts or a heartland radio station's morning zoo?

Rascal Flatts is produced by the guy who played guitar on "Straight Up" by Paula Abdul.

That's not reason enough for them to be the worst hugely popular musical act in America, of course. After all, country fans don't much mind that today's typical Nashville hit sounds like all of previous pop balled up into 3:30 with a hint of twang, so why should it bug us?

No, the reason Rascal Flatts is the worst popular music act in America is how atrocious all those pop influences sound when wadded together and caterwauled over by Gary LeVox.

But let's start with that producer.

Thing Toby Keith Has Never Said: "Nah, man, that might be a little much."

Toby Keith, "Made in America"
Chart Position: No. 5

Verdict: Fantastic, but in the sense of fantasy rather than awesomeness.

Last year, Wal-Mart accounted for 48 percent of all country music CD sales, which means that Toby Keith's new top-five hit "Made in America" will most often be purchased in a store where the only thing tougher to find than a domestic product is an adult size small.

Before Keith got to it, Made in America was the title of Sam Walton's autobiography, then a Wal-Mart ad slogan back before mid-'90s globalization, and finally a dim memory and occasional punchline.

Unleashed this June, the resulting disc, I'm American, should clear up once and for all any confusion you might have had concerning Cyrus' feelings about the American flag (for it!), American soldiers (for 'em!), and choruses pitched higher than his speaking voice (ain't going to happen!).