Album Review: Highway 79 by Ne-Yo
On his first country-inspired record, cut in Nashville twenty years after his debut, Ne-Yo writes the plainest songs of his career and lets the R&B voice do the rest.
Twenty years after “So Sick” made him the songwriter everybody wanted in the room, Shaffer Chimere Smith went down to Music City and cut a record named for the year he was born and the road that runs through the Arkansas he was born in. He has always been careful, in interviews, to say that he doesn’t consider it a country album; that would be an insult, he says, to those who have spent their whole lives working in the genre. It takes no label to describe what Highway 79 is. The backbeat drums, the strum of the guitar, the group hook energy, the Nashville feel—all of it serves to carry the only instrument he has ever believed in, and give it words clearer than those he usually uses.
On “Hate Me Now,” he asks a woman if she truly wants the truth, then tells it to her bluntly. “I’ve had women beg me for honesty/Then regret it ‘cause the truth can be so mean,” he sings, and then the hook states the deal that he’s making clear: “Hate me now, love me later.” On the second verse, he pushes it to that uncomfortable edge where he admits to having clocked the girl at the grocery store, stands on it—“I’m all for you, but yeah, she was beautiful”—then finds the only thing left to stand behind: “At least you can say I kept it real.” Not a flattering picture of himself and not one he tries to paint.
There is nothing worse than expertise at work in “Wish I Didn’t Know You”; that expertise knows exactly where the weak points are. “Wish I didn’t know how to make you cry/’Cause you wouldn’t be gone, and I wouldn’t be why,” he sings, then moves on to the image that tries to reverse the whole thing: “Wish I could put your clothes back in the closet/Put your heart back in your chest.” By the bridge, he gives up on the bargain and begins imagining her with the next guy: “Doing all the things I shoulda done.” “Thinking What I’m Thinking,” produced by his longtime collaborators Louis York (Chuck Harmony and Claude Kelly), explores the same ruins from within the marriage, where the love is still there, but the two of them “done got comfortable with being miserable.” His solution is a tiny one, a bag packed, a weekend nobody knows about, and the sweetest line slips in from the side: “I’m thinking candle light and whiskey/I don’t even drink whiskey/But I love the taste on your lips when you kiss me.”
For “Ms. Tundra,” it isn’t trying to be sweet at all. “I circled the globe,” he tells you, and then goes through sampling every type of woman “under the sun and even under moonshine” before coming home with a comedy line dance number about a country girl he compares, front to back, to a pickup truck. “I call her Ms. Tundra ‘cause she built like a truck/Anytime I get hungry, she serve it right up.” It works entirely on truck-and-road puns, “curves like a backroad, can’t move too fast,” “back it up and put it in park,” the crowd chant answering every boast with a “Hell yeah.” It’s silly, and it knows it’s silly. Chuck Harmony’s beat is built for a roomful of people doing the same dance moves, and it’s as far as the Nashville experiment ever gets.
The night opens with “Up Out & Gone” seeking “a kind of night that I can’t remember” and “a beer, ice cold like December,” the hook running the title out until the room can yell it back. “Dance Right Now” spins a night at the bar into a dodge, with all the checking he could have done (“if you want my money or my heart,” whether she is “dressed up like an angel but there’s evil in your soul”) waived away in favor of the floor. “Next Round On Me” is the softest of the trio, and the one that passes by quickly, a stranger nursing a drink and making an offer that comes with no catches: “Ninety-nine proof, no chasing.” It settles into the same mid-tempo love as “Only Ever Been You,” where he stacks a lottery ticket and a private jet, “Eighty thousand people in attendance just to hear me sing” before waving them all away for one person. The feeling is genuine and the songwriting a little cliché; one after the other, they blur into one pleasant stretch that neither the tougher songs nor the sad songs go near.
He strips away the dressed-up romance in “Simple Things,” the makeup, the hour on the hair, the red dress with the slit, then tosses it all aside for the sweats and the ponytail and delivers the line that sums up what the whole song is about without any adornment: “I’d equally praise a sandwich that you made.” The road dog verse finishes it off, “so many nights out on the road/To come to the conclusion that there ain’t no place like home.” “Crooked Halo” works the same trick, pointed outward at a woman “picking herself apart/Making mountains out of blemishes that nobody notices,” then reinterprets each flaw as a badge of honor: “The flaws in a diamond are the reason they shine,” “Scars are the trophies you take home/When you survive whatever tried to break you.”
He keeps the grand gesture till last, a final ballad of giving one’s all for someone who could never take anything less. “I gave my all/I gave too much/I gave everything, still not enough” goes the chorus of “If I Roped the Moon,” and the verdict on her is harsh: “You want the world, never wanted my heart.” The second verse observes the same man as he watches another guy fall in love with her in just the same way he once did, “the good guy who’s yet so naive,” and he finds no strength in him to tell the man to back off. This is his tried and tested formula for love that ended in pain, the grand romantic pain that after ten albums of putting it in all kinds of gloss, sounds genuine when played out on the simple Nashville sound.
This simplicity is his entire plan, and it succeeds for the most part. The confession songs lead us down their expected paths, regret songs find some real emotion in plain speech, and the truck jokes are entirely committed. The soft spot in the middle of the album keeps this from getting to a higher ranking, a few devotion albums blending into one another with the clarity of songs surrounding them. But then the tradeoff Ne-Yo has made here, gloss for directness, helps get him to his best songwriting in years.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Wish I Didn’t Know You,” “Simple Things,” “If I Roped the Moon”