Single Review: “Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It” by Darius Rucker

Now this is exciting. The lead singer of Oone of the greatest pop bands of all time lends his voice to country music to cross yet another musical boundary. Many may recognize Mr. Rucker as the lead singer of Hootie & The Blowfish and his trademark vocal sound has followed him all this way. It’s impressive how Darius can adapt his pop vocals to a solid country sound almost effortlessly and flawlessly. This tune preserves the vocal style that he has in his band, but it doesn’t preserve the bands sound, generally a good thing. He’s not trying to use the music that put him in the spotlight to make it in country music, instead he has adapted himself to the genre and becomes a country artist, not some crossover fad.

This song is your classic country song of personal regret and haunting memories. Darius takes the persona of a man who left his girl behind and is now looking back on the choices he made. He shows little disappointment for his choice, but instead has a sense of understanding and acceptance that what he did was the wrong thing to do and he’ll never get the chance to make up for it. The name of the song is an interesting play on words as Darius shows two situation, him looking back in his rear view and him considering what might have been when thinking of his ex’s wedding, to which he states “Don’t think I don’t think about it/ Don’t think I don’t have regrets”. He attempts to install a sense of understanding in his ex and in the listener as to how he feels about what he did despite how easy it seemed to be for him to run away and how heartless he seemed to be at that time. He continues to look back and think to himself about how things could have been if he just turned around and faced what he ran away from.

No doubt this song will stir some musical controversy about cross-genre performances and probably earn a lot of bad remarks. However I think it’s a solid tune. Maybe not as attractive as some of today’s traditional and neo-traditional stuff, but it avoids the mistakes that caused the likes of Bon Jovi and Kelly Clarkson to earn some nasty comments from the critics. Instead of mixing pop and country, Darius moves more towards a solid country sound that actually works quite well for him. That being siad this might actually go over quite well and I think Darius will fit right in.

Listen: www.myspace.com/dariusrucker

Grade: B+