ELVIE SHANE

                                                                "Forgotten Man"

                                                                 Wheelhouse Records

Elvie Shane has unapologetically walked his own path, pulling from traditional country influences to deliver tug at your heart lyrics as he’s shown on “Miles (With My Mama)” and his platinum hit “My Boy,” while punching a rock-n-roll kissed country aura that immediately bends your ear as the guitars pump through the anathematic structures on songs such as “County Roads” and “My Kinda Trouble.”

With “Forgotten Man,” his first release since his debut album BACKSLIDER, the ultra-personal song taps into that anthem-like, rock kissed side of his arsenal to speak straight to the heart of the hard-working, blue-collar types.

“Go to bed early, wake up at dawn,” immediately leaps from the speakers to strike the heart of the working-class people who are strapping on their steel toed boots, as he then continues with a transparency that shows he clearly gets it when he sings of punching the clock before shifting gears to paint the perfect picture of the small-town country way of life that most of these types live:

“I got a little white house with a flag in the front

Way that it is, is the way that it was

Dirt turns to mud here, steel turns to rust

The color of my neck's still the same as my blood”

Wrapping into a freshly infused heartland rock style that brings the right amount of fuel into the grit of his everyday man vocal, Shane pumps a fist through the anthem styled, autobiographical chorus:

“Daddy spent his whole life working for a dollar

Name on his patch, more like a badge of honor

Sent me off to school, tried to turn me to a scholar

Can't unpaint the blue on my collar”

And while all of this is the perfect reach to his core demographic as it is, unlike other blue-collar anthems, Shane craftily taps into the everyday frustrations of the all too often “forgotten man” who is working so hard, day in and day out, but is never getting ahead thanks to gas prices getting too high, rent skyrocketing through the roof, and the banks messing up the retirement plans.

There are several songs in country music that are designed to strike the right chords with the middle-class, small-town, hard-worker, but never has one come along that absolutely grips the cold hard truth of the realities the way that Elvie Shane has done on “Forgotten Man.”

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)

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