"I’ll Just Take These," "A Long Way Home," the novelty "That’s Okay," and the Ray Price shuffle "These Arms" are all straight country, although "These Arms" contains a trippy bridge that shows Anderson and Yoakam were still open to experimentation within a pure country context. Biographer Don McCleese writes, "Though the road of love remains rocky in Yoakam’s material, the arrangements reinforce the lighter touch…The opening steel run of ‘Same Fool’ evokes the ‘ Rainy Day Woman’ of Waylon Jennings while the following ‘The Curse’ proceeds at a Johnny Cash lope, and the majestic ‘Things Change’ and the string-laden ‘Yet to Succeed’ rank with definitive Dwight." Yoakam also employs the vocal mannerisms of his hero Buck Owens on "I Wouldn’t Put It Pass Me" and "Same Fool," the latter sounding like a Roger Miller song. Dwight could have been the biggest country star possibly of all time if he’d had the marketing skills of Garth Brooks to go with his talent." Īlthough it produced no Top 10 hits, the atmosphere on A Long Way Home is bright and vibrant with Yoakam wearing some of his influences on his sleeve. He had great songs, and songs rule the roost no matter what. There was more money to be made in country music in the 1990s than ever before, but the music had reverted to the sort of formula that Dwight had resisted from the start." Producer and guitarist Pete Anderson, who was Yoakam's creative partner from 1983 to 2002, told Guitar World in 2012, "Dwight and I sort of blazed our own trail and did what we wanted because he had an extraordinary amount of talent. In his book A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, writer Don McClesse notes, "As long as Dwight sold a ton of product, he was worth the trouble, but as soon as he didn’t, he wasn’t. This had far more to do with the climate of country music at the time than the quality of the songs. I’m proud of the other things, but…you could feel that the journey was completed." However, the LP's first single, "Things Change," missed the country Top 10, while a second single, "These Arms," bombed completely, stalling at #57. Yoakam later admitted that "…we knew we’d probably taken it as far as it could go. Musically speaking, A Long Way Home is a return to a more palatable country sound compared to some of the ambitious material on Yoakam's previous studio album Gone (1995) and the cover album Under the Covers (1997), which contained rock, pop, soul, and Motown influences. A Long Way Home had thirteen songs on it, and they were all mine. Writing is stationary it allows me to ponder and think outside myself. "I wrote some of the best material I’ve ever written while shooting in Austin, Texas. Although the country star's commercial stock fell as his interest in acting grew in the latter half of the Nineties, Yoakam later insisted: Yoakam wrote most of the songs while shooting The Newton Boys with Austin director Richard Linklater. Yoakam wrote all the songs on the album himself. 11 on the Billboard Country Album, with two of its tracks charting on the Hot Country Singles chart. Last Chance for a Thousand Years: Dwight Yoakam's Greatest Hits from the 90'sĪ Long Way Home is the ninth studio album by American country music artist Dwight Yoakam, released on June 9, 1998.
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