I've said earlier that most of the songs on "Play On" proved a relative disappointment to me. I supported the album at the time, but find little encouragement to go back to it now, finding each of the other three more satisfying in their own way. However, the paradox is that the album I find the least satisfying also contains the song that I would rate as one of my overall favourires of Carrie's career so far - "Someday When I Stop Loving You."
To take "Look At Me" first - although this does, strictly, qualify as a "cover", it differs from many of the usual run of cover songs by not having been previously part of an artist's own album release. It comes from the soundtrack of the film "Billy", based on the early life of Billy Graham, and, although sung there by Alan Jackson, that version got far less exposure than Carrie's main release version (with support vocals from Vince Gill). The song is by Jim Collins and Paul Overstreet (mercifully, freed here from the "tractor" songs they wrote for Chesney and Aldean). Paul Overstreet was responsible for a couple of Randy Travos' classics, and for Keith Whitley's beautiful "When You Say Nothing At All" (which Alison Krauss memorably covered). This though does not strike me as one of their most memorable. Carrie does sing it with a heart melting yearning and confessional vulnerability - but I can't fully shake off the impression of the song itself being a fairly predictable example of the Nashville Mainstream, with some neo-traditional echoes. Carrie has visited other examples of this sub-genre - I think, with more memorable songs.
By contrast, SWISLY comes across to me as what I want to hear in a contemporary Country song - real, relatable emotion, with traditional Country references, a twangy steel driven backing, the retention of a raw edge in the lyric, and no sense of an artificial debt to the more cloying "Nashville Sound". Two themes that I find particularly memorable are the desperation in the narrator's thought of lying down in front of the bus, and the imagery in the naturally inspired but impossible things that would have to happen before she forgot her love - culminating in the clever Roots Music reference to the grass turning blue. Casrrie called this her favourite song from the album, and although, she weakened one line, possibly for potential Mainstream radio susceptibilities, she kept the songwriters' arrangement virtually intact. Some of the concert clips of this song that I've seen show Carrie at her best, fully engaged with the lyric, emotionally powerful, and projecting a close rapport with the audience.