Album Review: Morgan Wallen - One Thing at a Time
Is it worth the hype?
Morgan Wallen is one of the biggest things in popular music right now. He is dominating country radio and streaming, and the only person who seems to be able to match him is Luke Combs. Morgan had a free concert in Nashville to celebrate the release of his latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” and people were wrapped around the Bridgestone Arena to get tickets. At his regular tour dates, the cheap seats are selling for insane prices. The cheapest ticket I could find in my area was around $150 for his stadium show at FedEx Field outside of DC this coming September. There’s no denying he’s a gigantic player in the music industry right now.
I’ll admit, I’ve never understood the hype. I like a few of his songs, like “Sand in my Boots,” and “Whiskey Glasses.” I think his cover of Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up” is subpar compared to the original, which is one of my favorite recordings, ever. Of course there is that little matter of screaming a racial slur in front of his home back in 2021, but is seems most people have either forgiven or forgotten by now. I will admit, the cover and the racial slur soured my opinion of him, but with this latest album release, I decided to give it a listen, and give him a chance to win me over.
He did not.
This might be the most boring album I’ve ever heard. A song featuring Eric Church couldn’t even begin to save this project for me. I decided to grade the album song by song, and I used an emoji to give each song one of three grades:
👍 - Good Song - 10 Points
😐 - It’s Fine - 5 Points
🗑 - It’s a Skip - 0 Points
Here are the grades from each of the 36 songs:
“Born With a Beer in My Hand” 😐
“Last Night” 🗑
“Everything I Love” 😐
“Man Made a Bar” (Feat. Eric Church) 👍
“Devil Don’t Know” 👍
“One Thing at a Time” 😐
“98 Braves” 👍
“Ain’t That Some” 🗑
“I Wrote the Book” 🗑
“Tennessee Numbers” 👍
“Hope That’s True” 😐
“Whiskey Friends” 😐
“Sunrise” 🗑
“Keith Whitley” 🗑
“In the Bible” (Feat. HARDY) 🗑
“You Proof” 🗑
“Thought You Should Know” 😐
“F150-50” 🗑
“Neon Star” 🗑
“I Deserve a Drink” 🗑
“Wine Into Water” 🗑
“Me + All Your Reasons” 🗑
“Tennessee Fan” 😐
“Money On Me” 🗑
“Thinkin’ Bout Me” 🗑
“Single Than She Was” 🗑
“Days That End in Why” 😐
“Last Drive Down Main” 😐
“Me to Me” 😐
“Don’t Think Jesus” 🗑
“180 (Lifestyle)” 🗑🗑 (Only counts as one, but lord this song sucks)
“Had It” 🗑
“Cowgirls” (feat. ERNEST) 🗑
“Good Girl Gone Missin” 🗑
“Outlook” 😐
“Dying Man” 👍
When you add it up and average it out, that gives the album a 3 out of 10. I believe this system works.
There are some bright spots on this album. “Tennessee Numbers” is probably the best track on the album. I thought the song was clever. I also liked “98 Braves” for the same reason. “Dying Man” is lyrically simple, but the production matched the song well.
(If you’re a huge Morgan Wallen fan, you may want to stop reading now. This is your Trigger Warning.)
As for the rest of the album………
When I listen to an album for the first time, I focus on the lyrics. In most cases I can still like a song if the lyrics are good, but the music/production isn’t in my wheelhouse.
I got insanely bored listening to this album.
Albums with the normal 10-14 tracks usually have some good songs and some worth skipping. There aren’t many LP’s that are worthy of repeated play-throughs. Reaching that level of perfection on a 36 song album is impossible. As you can see by my individual song grades, I really started getting bored after track 12, and the album never got me back. By then, I felt like I was listening to the same song over and over.
The final line in the chorus of “Whiskey Friends” is, “Won't you play a little Whitley for me and my whiskey friends?” Two songs later, there’s a song called “Keith Whitley,” and the final line in its chorus is, “Kinda like good whiskey, Keith Whitley and you.” At this point, I’m yelling at the damn stereo in my car, “YOU JUST DID THIS TWO SONGS AGO!!!!”
After I listened to it, I decided to do a little digging and figure out just how repetitive this album is………and it’s worse than I thought.
Out of the 36 tracks on the album:
35 involve alcohol consumption in some way, shape, or form.
22 are break-up songs, or songs about an ex.
13 songs bring up pickup trucks.
11 songs include religion or religious imagery.
6 songs mention tobacco in some form.
It would take some true lyrical mastery to have this many songs about the same topics and keep it new, fresh, and/or different. This album didn’t even try.
Out of the 36 tracks, these words, or variations thereof, are used at least once on multiple songs:
Dust: 5 songs
Beer: 7 songs
Truck(s): 8 songs
Home/Hometown: 10 songs
Bar/Barstool/Bartender: 14 songs
Drink/Drinking/Drunk: 15 songs
I’m sure there are several more examples, but these are the ones I could remember hearing repeatedly.
Now keep in mind, I’ve only written about the album’s lyrics so far. Musically, the production is flat and boring as well. There are a few tracks that have some nice instrumentation on them, but they only offer a small reprieve from the boring loops, snaps, and beats that we’ve heard over and over again in almost every genre of music that has been played on the radio during the past decade. There’s nothing unique or satisfying about music created in a MacBook Pro, in my opinion
This would have been okay release at 10 songs if the right 10 songs were selected. He could have even split it up into 3 separate albums and released one every 4 months or so. At 36 songs, this project becomes a long, boring, monotonous chore to listen to. To put it bluntly, listening to the entire album in one session is painful.
Look, I know many artists are much better live than recorded. Everything I’ve heard leads me to believe that this applies to Morgan Wallen as well. Unfortunately, nothing on this release makes me want to fork over at least $150 to see how much better his live show is. Clearly I’m in the minority in that regard, since all of his shows sell out in minutes.
I’ll just delete this out of my Apple Music library, forget it ever happened, and continue bopping to Muscadine Bloodline’s new release from last week, “Teenage Dixie,” but I do hope Morgan’s core fans enjoy it more than I did.
Thanks for reading.
-Trav