One of the Boys

iTunes Review

With her third album, One of the Boys, the “Redneck Woman,” biggest new star of country music 2004, returns with her most intimate and revealing album to date. Co-writing nine of the album’s eleven tracks, Wilson minces few words and handles a few paradoxes in the process. Case in point, the title track is not a celebration of fraternal order, but a plea to be seen as more than one of the boys, as a poor woman suddenly steeped in success with a tender side aching behind the tough party-girl exterior. Not that she can’t crank it up for a good time. “There’s A Place in the Whiskey” works up a barroom sweat with a Skynyrd-meets-ZZ Top electric jam exorcism. But Wilson comes into her own on the ballads and mid-tempos, which are purebred country, defiantly traditional in an age when Nashville has been leaning hard on pop. Wilson uses fiddles, steel guitars and mandolins to support her poignant confessions and tracks such as “The Girl I Am,” “Heaven Help Me” and “Pain Killer” are refreshing in their no-nonsense, traditional country approach.