“With soaring guitars and an honest vocal performance, Rusty Reid reminds us that even in a complicated world, there is still plenty of beauty worth holding onto.”

Some songs have a way of making the ordinary seem extraordinary. “Oh What A World” (originally written and recorded by Kacey Musgraves) is one of those songs. It’s a song that makes you look at your everyday life and see it in a different light. Rusty Reid’s version of the song takes that concept and gives it a different twist. Rather than going for the ethereal, otherworldly quality of the Musgraves original, Reid brings it down to earth and delivers it with a warmth and sincerity that’s very much his own, with a definite rock edge. It’s on his album Lone Stardust (Masterworks of Texas Songwriters) and the cover is more than just a homage to a great songwriter. It’s a very personal statement from an artist who really feels the song.

What’s so good about ‘Oh, What a World’ is the sense of wonder it evokes. Life can get so bogged down in all the responsibilities, the disappointments, the day to day stuff that you can easily lose sight of the fact that life is wonderful. The song is all about that, about looking at the world and seeing the wonder in it. Its appeal is in that very contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary. You don’t need some massive life change or some dramatic event to appreciate life. Sometimes you just need to look at it in a different way and that’s it. Reid’s version of it is very much in that spirit, it’s a very reflective version of the song without it being at all remote or sombre. Reid’s vocal delivery is absolutely fundamental to the success of this version. He’s going for a grounded performance and that’s what gives the song such a tangible emotional quality. Rather than just drifting through the arrangement, the vocals have space to deliver the words and their meaning. There’s room for the performance to develop, particularly as the guitars come in. That progression is what gives the song such a sense of release, as if the music itself is opening up to embrace the sense of wonder at the heart of it. It’s a very effective balance between restraint and power. It starts off with a very reflective quality and then develops into something much more expansive, allowing you to sit with the song and its message before it really lifts you. The instrumentation is very much to the fore in this version. Jason Roller on electric guitars, Chris Condon on acoustic guitar to provide that earthy warmth and grounding, the electric guitars then giving Reid the chance to really go for it and take the song into a more emotional area. Dane Bryant on keyboards adds a lot of depth, Jay Gorman on bass and Robert Blair on drums provide a solid platform for the rest of the instruments. It’s a much fuller band interpretation, one that retains the reflective quality of the original but allows Reid’s own musicality to really come through.

The decision to slot “Oh, What a World” in at the end of Lone Stardust is particularly apt. It’s the only track on the album by a female songwriter (co-written by Musgraves with Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk) and Reid felt there was something in the song that spoke to his own spiritual sensibility. He describes it as the perfect song to close the album as it provides a kind of uplift after all the emotion of the tracks that have gone before. It’s not just a song to end the record on, it gives the cover a purpose. It’s a song to end on which allows you to take stock of everything that has gone before and come to a kind of peace with the journey. Originally from Texas and now based in Seattle, Reid works in indie folk, pop, country and rock. That breadth of experience is probably what allows him to take a song that’s very much in the modern country-pop vein and deliver it in a way that’s very much guitar and live band. He doesn’t go in and try to recreate every single detail of Musgraves’ version. He respects the songwriting and finds a way to make it his own. That’s often what makes a cover worthwhile in the first place really; you can still recognise the song, but you hear a different facet of it through the new interpretation.  “Oh, What a World” is a very good concluding piece to Lone Stardust (Masterworks of Texas Songwriters). The guitars are big and soaring, the vocals are very personal and the arrangement allows the song to really breathe. The key thing is that it’s got the essence of the song back again: the value of just stopping for a moment and taking in the world around you. You don’t need to alter the message of the song in any way for it to work. Rusty’s version of it works because he brings his own take on it, his own musicality and that’s what gives it the power to make you appreciate it as a song about wonder, gratitude and the sheer beauty of being here.

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