Music reviewer Dave McKenna puts his finger on an odd phenomenon that tells us a lot about the music industry and pop culture. In a review of a Keith Urban concert, he writes,
You’d have to go back to Glen Campbell to find a pop-country star whose musical skills are buried any deeper in hit records than Keith Urban’s.
The guy can really, really play a guitar. But while Vince Gill and Brad Paisley, Urban’s peers on country’s guitar-hero scene, throw a few licks into even the most mindless single to remind you of their genius, Urban usually keeps his fingers to himself in the studio.
In a live setting, however, Urban turns his inner shredder loose.
That’s right! Glen Campbell was a highly-lauded studio musician hailed as a guitar virtuoso before he started churning out pop singles. I never understood why insiders considered him such a guitar hero until I heard him play at Branson, Missouri! Vince Gill has a reputation as a supreme bluegrass instrumentalist, something you might never expect from his soft-voiced country hits, though, as McKenna says, he tries to break out somewhere in most of his tunes.
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