Beautiful Day

Having divorced Dixie Chick Emily Erwin in 2008 after nine years of marriage, you’d expect Charlie Robison’s 2009 album to open with the kind of embittered divorcee twang that country music fans are used to. But the uplifting “Beautiful Day” reminds us that severance can be a friendly process amongst mature people. The catchy title track muses on the woman he lost while simultaneously poking fun at her, so yes, Robison’s fifth studio long-player is a divorce album. But the tunes here play with a bit more maturity and complicated subject matter than your usual honky-tonk jukebox gems based on broken hearts and bruised egos. Of course it’s not all California sunshine and therapy sessions — in the fast-talking, country-rocking “Yellow Blues” he all but calls his ex a coward — then in the slow burning “Down Again” he blames himself for blowing it with her and faces his own music with a realistic sleep-in-the-bed-you-made redemption. He closes with an eerily sad version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Racing In The Street” because even a songwriter as good as Robison sometimes needs the tunes of others to recognize his pain.