Jonny Corndawg

We are not making a living in times of honesty. Nope. We are making a living in an age of smug dishonesty and luxuriant ignorance, haunted by the tangible spectre of perpetual substanceless. Avarice is glorified and selfishness celebrated. This explains why exactly 90% of so-called "music," so grotesquely marketed today, especially over these company store radio waves bloated and lobotomized with self-righteous insignificance, is precisely impotent, and ultimately as sterile as an imaginary autoclave.

And with that making a living, are we truly enjoying our lives? Is happiness the only option in your playbook of fun? By this I mean, are sex and love and pranks and mirth and unselfconscious creativity an inevitable unconditional in your day-to-day? I can't really explain why, but when I experience the songs of Jonny Fritz, aka Corndawg, I also can't help but stop everything and just listen and then it dawns on me how severely neglectful I've been to my soul, denying it nourishment while frantic in clueless pursuit of some perfume-shaped mirage, occasionally of my own making. And this explains exactly why it's that other 10% of music being created today — practically under the snowflaked noses of the executive geniuses who dictate the relative dimensions of their prize turds posturing out of speakers everywhere with all the duplicitous sincerity of a soup fork — that makes the digging rewarding and thus the appreciation for this reactionary undercurrent of refreshing music all the more genuine.

And so it is with his 7th and newest album, "I'm Not Ready To Be A Daddy," that Jonny does yet again on record what he does best — live and live to craft his not-so-innocent innocence through song, song so marvelously vulnerable in sincerity and satire and humor and humility that if you are truly listening to what he's relaying in what has been dubbed on the internet as his trademark "Appalachian falsetto" (although I liken it more to that sort of giddy Alpine bulldyke meta-yodel ala Wilf Carter and Slim Whitman), there remains a warm wetness that clings to you, be it from tears or piss. And I have laughed and cried in abundance enough in awe of Fritz's masterful simplicity to have convinced myself I'd somehow pissed on my own face, more than likely during the easy-breezy brilliance of his daydream ballad of justifiable infidelity, "Oversteppin," the next to last track on the record, not to mention the album closer, "When A Soldier's In Love," which no words can do justice.

Jonny Fritz is no dilettante. Although he's hoofed his guitar the world round to perform before everyone from an armful to a stadiumload, his semi-rural Virginia foothill roots shine clear through the velvety compost that nourishes this new batch of pure country soul. You can almost hear the hack of the Wal-Mart greeter, smell the small-town disillusionment of the Pizza Hut slave, and feel the predominant phony culture of calamity that informs the entire sincere slab of "Not Ready To Be A Daddy." And all is not send-up. Porter Waggoner's "Rubber Room" is dutifully honored, with some wicked strings to boot, on "Torture Chamber, and Corndawg's plaint to open relationships oozes raw heartwrench on "Fellas."

Indeed, it is a beautiful thing when sincerity and satire and humor and humility coalesce. To experience the synaesthesia of all these I highly recommend this release, not to mention every single one of his previous outings, for which he literally gives his body to make happen. I don't know what else to say. - Bryan Martin