Ballads & Bangers: Static & Liquor Talkin'

"What makes a song a banger? The most important is the hook, that sticks in your head, after you hear the song just once. In addition it will also have a solid beat, that you can't help but move to. And recognizability is also key."
(DJ Rinehart / deepinthemix.com, July 23 2023)

They sort of represent the opposite bookends of a musical bookshelf: the catchy banger and the smooth ballad. They are the flamboyant, which thrills and the mellow, which triggers feelings. Not always do they catch the broad public's attention. Maybe because the timing just isn't right, maybe because they are deep cuts that not everyone gets to hear or simply because the artist is not well enough known (yet). And although musical tastes always are personal and subjectiv, this spot here shall give those songs a little stage to shine.

Ballad: a song or poem that tells a story, or a slow love song. (dictionary.cambridge.org)

The 38-year-old songwriter and singer Caitlyn Smith is by now not only a mother of three children, but also has to face the potential reality, that a big, commercially successful career might not happen for her after all. Her first two albums ("Starfire" [2018] and "Supernova" [2020]) were rightly praised to the highest degree. But since her music is stylistically difficult to classify, it increasingly kept falling through the cracks that separate the different genres. Eventually, the hits didn't come and Caitlyn Smith started to get somewhat forgotten.

On May 3, 2024 she is back with a new song that is no longer released by her previous label Monument Records, but has been issued independently. It is one of the emtional ballads that Caitlyn Smith knows how to convey so incomparably. Written by herself, together with Joe Clemmons, the song is called 'Static' and is a touching experience about disappointed feelings in a relationship. Even if she herself perhaps understands the lyrics in relation to the current situation in her own career, as she says at pulsemusic.proboards.com:

"I wrote it with my friend, joe clemmons, from a spot of exhaustion… this world is so loud - it pulls us in so many directions - demands us to "do more" and "be more" - and it's so easy to lose sight of the magic."

"As a creator, its easy for me to get trapped in the hamster wheel of chasing success - and I forget sometimes how little it actually matters. I started playing music because it made me feel something. It was therapy. It was fun. It was magic."

There's a whole lotta bullshit running through my head tonight
and I’m sitting in the passenger seat, watching it all blur by.
I miss the butterflies, I miss the thrill of the high,
and I'm flipping through the radio for something to make me feel alive.
(Static / Caitlyn Smith, Joe Clemmons)

Banger: a popular song or piece of music with a loud, heavy beat (= rhythm) that people like to dance to. (dictionary.cambridge.org)

He doesn't have a Wikipedia entry yet, and his first musical attempts were in the field of R&B, hip hop, and soul. But since 2022, Texas-born Don Louis has unmistakably changed his style and redefined himself somewhere between country and R&B. He has released more than 15 songs since then, which sound more or less traditional and recognizably country. In 2024, he made his first appearance at the CMA Fest in Nashville, and with the banger 'Liquor Talkin'' (written with Cale Dodd and Kip Williams), Don Louis is now announcing his first full-length studio album on the small Texas label Money Myers Entertainment.