Teea Goans’ first four albums established the singer as a traditional, country-leaning song stylist, quietly winning her an international fan base without the attendant intrusions of household-name status. Seeking sustainability and sincere self-expression over chart success, Goans built a sturdy (though essentially hitless) indie-artist career with expert guidance and production from former Capitol Records exec Terry Choate.
Goans’ latest outing finds her undergoing a bold yet genuine reinvention that risks leaving some longtime fans behind even as it invites broader recognition. In truth, Goans’ fifth album plays more like a debut, being her first effort as a songwriter rather than strictly an interpreter of outside (and often older) compositions. This significant transition was spearheaded by longtime Nashville session musician and hit songwriter Jim “Moose” Brown, who served as producer and mentoring co-writer on the album’s 10 stylistically wide-ranging country/pop songs. The resulting diversity of these collaborations informs the album’s title, All Over the Map.
The collection could have been summed up just as fittingly with the rollicking honky-tonker “There’s More to Me,” the album’s sole clue to the singer’s old-school country roots as well as a sly declaration of artistic independence from them. The track wraps up an opening three-song sequence that most consistently reveals Goans’ authentic inner terrain before All Over the Map takes a left turn into uncharted territory. Heartfelt and sage advice fuels the philosophical, Americana-flavored lead-off track, “Enjoy the View,” while the warm intimacy of marital contentment whispers beneath “Easy,” the antithesis of stormy relationship songs like the lounge-blues ballad “What’s a Girl to Do” and the uncharacteristically dark “Untangled,” on which Goans’ muscular vocal attains a previously unheard intensity.
This combination of easygoing personal expressions and dramatic, faux-first-person story songs creates a sometimes uneasy bipolarity, presumably the result of the singer’s see-sawing songwriting explorations with Brown, a hit-savvy Music Row veteran who has begun nudging Goans onto a more commercially viable path while carefully helping her to further cultivate and expand her own well-grounded musical identity. To the credit of both, Goans is developing a promising new artistic dimension, though as an artist she’s still finding the balance between her new voice and her true voice.
Those two occasionally contrary streams converge comfortably enough on “The Detour” and “The Beat of a Backroad,” both of which combine modern country chart potential with Goans’ typically upbeat sensibility. Still, neither song possesses the depth or penetrating perspective of the album’s swaying, inspirational closer, “That’s What I Know,” featuring understated vocal contributions from Vince Gill. A spiritually informed manifesto for our times, it strikes a near-universal chord, save for a few references that sweetly tie it to Southern American sentimentality.
On first listen, lines extolling Grandma’s fried chicken and old porch swings may seem like familiar, perhaps even production-line country tropes, especially as they pop up among lyrics that soberly explore an American (and by extension, global) landscape of increasing anxiety, division and uncertainty. It’s on subsequent listens, though, that a cynical perspective such as this may begin to shift. While she may be a still-developing writer, the rural-Missouri-born Goans is demonstrating her fast grasp of a fundamental songwriting rule, writing what she knows rather than reaching for a lofty but forced and inauthentic verbal image.
Any listener in need of hope conveyed in a caring and unaffected manner can be grateful that Goans isn’t afraid to communicate precisely who she is: a country girl (though hardly unsophisticated, as her body of recorded work confirms) and an openly professing Christian believer whose faith-affirming expressions in “That’s What I Know” are clear-eyed and intentional, with neither a hint of rose-colored blinders nor a trace of graceless religiosity. For someone else, it might not be fried chicken, sweet tea or spring blossoms, but for Goans it is, and her choice to fix her eyes on whatever she finds lovely, excellent and praiseworthy in the midst of cultural upheaval is in fact a refreshingly practical application of Philippians, chapter four.
Teea Goans’ chapter five, All Over the Map, is a sometimes zig-zagging creative quest that finds the blossoming artist in prime voice and en route to new horizons, getting her bearings while keeping her internal compass firmly in hand.
