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! What makes country hot at the moment is something that can't be graphed or computed. But it can be heard, sometimes on radio stations that play rock or even -- shudder -- easy listening. There is a bumper crop of new talent around, making personal, adventurous, uncompromised music for a wider audience that is not bound by country's strict conventions. It could be that things haven't been so fertile since the '50s, with the coming of Johnny Cash and the brash flush of rockabilly. For sure, the pickings haven't been so rich since Waylon and Willie and Merle and Kris broke through more than a decade ago.
All those outlaws of the past decade, those rebels against the deep-shag songwriting of mainstream Nashville, have become the '80s Establishment. There is a new pack out there now. Travis and Crowell. Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. K.T. Oslin and the O'Kanes and the supercharged Steve Earle. They are shaking all the wrinkles out of the music and ironing it into a different shape.
Travis is the ideal -- indeed, the pluperfect -- symbol for this accidental movement, the soft-spoken, tall-sitting, sweet-singing eye of a most congenial storm. "People think country music is related to a bunch of rednecks drinking beer and fighting," he reflects, with the pleasing tang of a North Carolina accent. "They think it's all songs about drinking and cheating. But it covers a lot bigger area than that, you know." He pauses, as if taking a survey of the acreage he is trying to describe. Then, after a minute, there is a shrug and a simple, smiling, "Covers everything."
When he sings, it surely seems to. For his years, he has done a fair amount of living, not all of it above the law, and he has a voice that can really sidle around a lyric, sound smooth flowing and knowing at the same time. Forever and Ever, Amen, which topped the country charts for three weeks, is a straight-ahead tune, an up-tempo litany of undying devotion -- all right, it's almost corny -- but Travis pulls it from the brink of bathos with some hair- trigger phrasing and a very sly, very worldly tone of voice. This singer's commitment may be total, but it's got as much to do with carnality as idealism.
The heat is all in the suggestion and the styling, of course. On the surface, everything is on the up-and-up. If it weren't, Travis would not have scored the invitation last year to become the youngest male member of the Grand Ole Opry. The first time he set foot on the stage of Country Central, he recalls, "no stage, anywhere, it don't matter the amount of people in the audience, no stage has made me feel like the Opry, has scared me as bad. By the time I finished my first two songs and came off, I was literally to the point of shaking. Done gone all to pieces!"