So, Mike Prather is bringing me a little country-rock it would seem. It's been a while.

The initial sound of the song is the sound of a good old-fashioned country vocalist clearly telling the story of a girl he meets who is, shall we say, a little rough and ready in appearance and probably quite rebellious in nature. She even goes as far as to introduce herself as "Whiskey Brown", a name that suggests more than just what she should be called. A name that she most likely earnt.

The guitar playing behind all of this is utterly superb, but not even so much in how it's played through the fingers. It's more in how it's written. There is a touch of classical to the guitar as it shakes off the ideas of time signatures and form and instead flows and swirls between sticcato chords and flowing single notes in a movement that is both chaotic and beautiful and flows around the voice, telling the story along with it.

The nature of this chaotic beginning helps to off set things and give the feeling that our narrator is approaching this girl nervously, as though she is almost intimidating in her strong image and possibly self-destructive nature.

With the announcement of her name the guitar goes into a flowing strumming 4/4 nature, with the occasional skip and tap and the vocals taking on a more solid melody. The foot begins to tap as the story picks up pace and the singer goes back to Whiskey's place for a suggested evening of what you would expect.

The guitar then breaks back down to where it was before as the night ends. The poetic lyrics tell of how the narrator heads away to the north, getting away, both finds himself only thinking of that night and missing what he left behind "in the dark of that night".

The strumming chorus takes us into the third verse where the narrator goes back and finds a burnt town, so what to do? Go for a drink! "I'm drinking to remember, not to forget," the lyricist tells us.

As the last chorus reminds us of the muse one last time and then wraps things up, I must admit that I enjoyed this song a hell of a lot more than I expected to. The story telling was sharp and a strong contender for my "best lyrics" award this month. The story was also sentemental and fun. The character of Whiskey Brown was almost tengable just from her introduction in the first verse and the chorus was infectiously fun and rythmic if not exactly instantly memorable.

The musicianship and writing here must be given a huge amount of credit and teken for the fine works they are, and I get the suspicion that they are the works of a very experienced musician who's been doing this for a fair while.

The recording was a tad on the lacking side, which took a lot out of the clarity of the song unfortunately, but, just ended up showing how clear the vocal delivery was. This is always important in this style of music, which borders on story reading, and yet so many artists of the style don't speak clearly enough and leave you with an interupted feel as you rewind to work out what they said.

All in all, this is a real pleasure and much more to my taste then most other songs of the style. Mucho kudos!