John Michael Montgomery
Letters To Home
All the country stations I listen to are attaching this track to pro-war/pro-soldier campaigns. This is because it manages to combine the concrete and the abstract in a really banal way. Nothing is metioned about war or death, except for the line “strap on my gun and get back to work”, which is hidden in the fourth verse. (Killing Arabs is just another job, like being a farmer or truck driver, nothing more and nothing less.) Up to that line it could be a song about any prodigal son. The campaigns also work the explicit literalism about sending letters from home based on a song called Letters to Home. No one called country subtle.