The country band Gloriana will release its debut album next month. The group, from Nashville, is fresh-faced—their publicity photos look like Clearasil ads set in haylofts —but they’re not quite showbiz neophytes. Brothers Tom and Mike Gossin, who play guitars and sing, briefly co-starred in Madison Rose , a reality TV series about the travails of their rock group. Cheyenne Kimball (vocals, mandolin) was the winner, at age 12, of the NBC show America’s Most Talented Kid ; starred in the short-lived MTV series Cheyenne ; and in 2006 released The Day Has Come, a better-than-average collection of post-Avril Lavigne teen-pop ballads . (Vocalist Rachel Reinert rounds out the quartet.) Gloriana is modeled on Fleetwood Mac—or modeled on Fleetwood Mac-inspired country acts like Little Big Town : two guys, two girls, lots of four-part harmonies. What Gloriana adds to this formula—in addition to gallons of mousse and pomade—is boundless, shameless pep.
Exhibit A is the video for the group’s debut single, “Wild at Heart,” an eruption of beatific singing, dancing, hand-clapping, and ear-to-ear grinning. “Wild at Heart” is a bubble-gum pop song of the sort rarely seen these days: unrelentingly perky without a hint of distancing irony. In the wised-up world of postmodern pop, Nashville is the last bastion of pure camp.
Gloriana’s daffiness might be too much to take if the song weren’t so damn good. But “Wild at Heart” is a perfect single, a song-length hook, or patchwork of hooks: the “We Will Rock You” drum machine beat, the “Jack and Diane” guitar strum, the “funky breakdown.” The lyrics are also a pastiche—a sequence of clichés so complete that they transcend cliché and approach conceptual art. The song was composed by three pros, Music Row veterans Stephanie Bentley and Josh Kear, and Matchbox Twenty’s producer Matt Serletic, and it seems as if the songwriters grabbed random phrases from old hits, and assembled them, exquisite corpse-style, into verses, choruses, and a bridge. The result is a narrative, of sorts, about young lovers: “a couple kids runnin’ loose and wild” who have “nothing to lose but time.” The moon is shinin’. (It’s a “rebel moon.”) The stars “burn like diamonds.” The chorus delivers the money shot:
I’ll follow you where you’re leading
To the first sweet taste of freedom
You got me runnin’, baby
Wild at heart
In this summer of 2009, there’s no beating the hits of
the summer 1983
. But the next-closest thing to a song of the summer is “Wild at Heart.” Predictably, Gloriana is forecasting a long summer, and a hot one. (“Down a back road/ Long, hot summer,” sings Tom Gossin over the opening strains.) The song is almost as catchy as it is silly and almost as silly as it is great. It is the doofy sublime.
