A decade ago I did a really silly project. I called it QROCC, or the Contemporary Review of Contemporary Country, and it was basically me (with a small handful of other contributors) reviewing every country or country-adjacent record I could find that came out that year. Its been a minute but across the four issues I remember being not too far away from reviewing 400 albums.
That was also the year I really tried to make a go of it as a freelance writer, so spending all that time doing writing that was in no way ever going to get paid was a pretty smart thing to do. I remember a bunch of stuff from that moment; I still think The Ghost of Highway 20 is Lucinda Williams’ best album and The Weight of These Wings stands out to me in Miranda Lambert’s discography way more than I think it does for most people. Without doing it I wouldn’t have ever been introduced to Sturgill Simpson or Lori McKenna, Adia Victoria or Malcolm Holcombe, Carrie Rodriguez or Granger Smith or the Wayfaring Strangers comps and so much more.
My go to anecdote about the project is how funny it was to have written this* about The Cactus Blossoms’ record You’re Dreaming (short version: I thought the album felt unintentionally Lynchian) the year before they appeared as the second guest band on Twin Peaks season 3. It seems David and I at least partially agreed on one thing in particular, once.
But to the Dolly of it all: I was a loose fan of Dolly before 2016, but the project left me loving her for the last decade. That year she put out an album called Pure & Simple which I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else ever reference for any reason (although glancing at the wiki now it apparently was her first #1 record in a quarter century?). I loved it then and love it now, even though it feels in some ways like a dry run at her next album, I Believe In You, a frankly treacly mess of a children’s album.
The thing that really stuck with me about Pure & Simple was the song “Can’t Be That Wrong,” a song about pining for an old lover that ends with a kind of shocking final line: “To hell with heaven if it means I'll lose you / Anything that feels this right can't be that wrong / It just can't be.“ I certainly didn’t expect in 2016 to be listening to a Dolly Parton record that more or less openly said fuck it, infidelity in the case of love is more important than going to heaven. Straight up: "to hell with heaven?" I needed to learn more, so I dug in and found out it was a fairly light reworking of a single from 30 years prior from the soundtrack for her movie with Sylvester Stallone, called “God Won’t Get You.”
The lyrical differences between the two songs are fairly minor; there's the obvious title change, where instead of ending with "it just can't be" she ends with the repetition of the titular scolding refrain "If you think that God won't get you, well you're wrong." The other main change is that a verse is removed from the earlier to the latter which explicitly references their "secret rendezvous."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but three decades after Dolly dropped a fairly successful song about how cheating is understandable but will be punished, she reworked it on a relatively kid-friendly record to be a song that does remove any implication that the cheating is actively happening but also says fuck god if I can't love someone, potentially carnally, just because I'm married. That's weird! I like it a lot. And not because I think it's ethically sound. You probably shouldn't cheat! But there is a depth of feeling and an insight on process in those changes that turned me from a "Jolene's pretty good and isn't it wild she wrote that Whitney Houston song" to someone who truly believes: Dolly Forever.
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