Darryl Worley

1	Awful Beautiful Life 3:52
2	If I Could Tell the Truth 3:42
3	I Love Her, She Hates Me 3:33
4	If Something Should Happen 4:40
5	Work and Worry 4:01
6	If It Hadn't Been for Love 4:13
7	Was It Good for You 3:27
8	Find Me 3:50
9	Wake Up America 4:14
10	What Makes a Man Do That 4:20
11	Better Than I Deserve 4:05
12	Whistle Dixie 4:40

Barnes & Noble

On his last disc, Have You Forgotten?, hard-country newcomer Darryl Worley topped the charts with his topical, prowar sentiment. This time around, however, the Tennessee-bred performer turns his attention closer to home, devoting much of this self-titled effort to family: the issues that hold blood kin together and tear them apart. On the thumping, rocking "Awful Beautiful Life," Worley sings of a typical Sunday afternoon featuring food, squabbling, and lots of love amid some tears. On "If Something Should Happen," a tuneful, mid-tempo shuffle replete with twanging guitar and moaning pedal steel, he takes the role of a man appealing to his friends to take care of his loved ones if he doesn't survive a surgical procedure. A love affair's end dominates some barflies' besotted conversation in the surging "I Love Her, She Hates Me," with a screaming fiddle and a foreboding top-strings guitar lick evoking the protagonist's anguish. "Work and Worry," paired here as paths to destruction, takes off from a shambling honky-tonk shuffle into a horn-driven Dixieland party. On a note of social responsibility, in "Wake Up America" Worley rips the drug culture as "a poison...spreading like a bad disease," tearing families and small towns apart, in an atmospheric, swirling arrangement that alternates deliberate, measured verses with propulsive, guitar-powered choruses. Worley has a rich, expressive voice, and at times his sound evokes a young Merle Haggard, especially on tender ballads such as the hymnlike "What Makes a Man Do That." The voice, the texts, and the arrangements make Darryl Worley an effective and moving portrait of this promising artist. David McGee

All Music Guide

This self-titled effort is album number three and a half for Darryl Worley, if you count his last release, 2003's Have You Forgotten?, largely cobbled together from his first two albums to cash in on the jingoistic single of the same name (which in turn was made to cash in on the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq) and featuring only six new songs, as half an album. Actually, Worley might have been better advised to wait a little longer before putting out a new disc, but then he and his advisors may have wanted to reposition him quickly from his flag-waving persona of 2003; the press release for this album claims it "completely reinvents him as an artist." If so, it reinvents him as a man somewhat humbled by world events, but still interested in them. In "Awful Beautiful Life," the single released long in advance of the album, he mentions in the song's bridge a cousin serving in Iraq (mispronounced "EYE-rack," of course), adding "We're all aware that he may never make it back." "Wake Up America" (the title should have a comma after "Up") sounds like it's going to be a political diatribe from the title, but it turns out to be a lament about drug addiction, an interesting cause for a singer whose songs are sopping with alcohol. More like it is the character of Earl, the protagonist of "I Love Her, She Hates Me," whose reply to every question, whether about Wall Street or football, is, "I love her, she hates me, I drink." Worley and his 18 fellow songwriters are steeped in standard country music subject matter: drinking, cheating, drinking, redemption, drinking, murder, drinking, being Southern, and drinking. They describe these subjects in lyrics that are filled with near and not-so-near rhymes (in one song, the word "drink" is rhymed with "tank," "gain," "game," "thing," and "lane") and littered with clichés, and Worley's backup musicians play typical country music with rock rhythms, a fiddle and a steel guitar never out of the mix for long. Worley has a serviceable but basically anonymous low tenor. This is nearly generic Nashville product, but Worley performs it with conviction, and that earns him his moment in the sun. William Ruhlmann