Album Review – Colby Acuff’s “Enjoy The Ride”

Americana (#570) on the Country DDS

Musicians are tasked with writing and singing songs that appeal and speak to the experiences of everyday people, even though musicians often lead rather unusual lives, whether they’re successful and selling out arenas, or struggling to get by and touring the country in a van. It was recognizing this gulf in perspective, and wanting to break down that barrier and speak to listeners on their level that Colby Acuff wrote and recorded his new album Enjoy The Ride.

Officially, this is a concept record, meaning Acuff and producer Eddie Spear approached it with a cohesive idea the runs through every track, even if this album doesn’t come with some of the sonic interludes or sweeping movements that mark many conceptualized works. The concept started with Colby and Eddie interviewing normal Americans on the streets of Knoxville, TN, Johnson City, TN, and Asheville, NC, asking folks about their lives, and then using the answers to frame 11 true life character studies that comprise the album’s tracks.

Instead of complex arrangements or esoteric concepts presented to the audience in an attempt to stoke the imagination, it’s actually the simplicity of the ideas and perspectives presented in Enjoy The Ride that make this album so unique and compelling. There is both an infinite beauty, and a gripping sadness as you walk a mile in the shoes of these everyday average characters, or perhaps break out in goosebumps as you realize you’re one of them.

Don’t consider each song as being about a specific individual necessarily; it’s more about how each song is a different shade or era of the same person, and that person symbolizes all of us as Americans. Along with a simple approach to the songwriting, there’s a similar unpretentious approach to the music, not necessarily stripped-down and empty, but devoid of extended solos, musical interludes, or stark characteristics, keeping the listener’s perspective sharply focused on the character studies themselves. Though no songs feels too short, the album only presents a 33-minute runtime.

For some, Enjoy The Ride might come across as a little too Mellencamp’s “Little Pink Houses” for their taste, including how some of the songs rely on these fetching, but rather saccharine melodies, and lean into simple concepts you’ve heard presented in country and classic rock songs many times before.

But once you’re made aware of the album’s underlying concept that necessitated Colby having to walk away from his major label deal to implement, you really start to understand what these songs are going for. Though some of the tracks feel a little obvious, others present a subtle brilliance. For example, “Her Song (Numb To Everything)” seems to be about a woman who believes in Astrology and has a positive outlook on life. But in truth, the song is just as much, if not more about the narrator describing this woman, and how he’s more numb to the world.

Enjoy The Ride also feels incredibly timely with the way “average” or “middle class” for many young Americans no longer means owning a house and working a stable job. Songs like “Cost Of Life” and “Good As It Gets” are very much about resignations to reality. “A childhood misunderstood is knotty wood that burns forever brighter,” Colby sings on “Good As It Gets.” You also realize with subsequent listens that roughly half the characters that appear on the album are men, and the other half are women.

In the center of the album is “Average American,” where Colby Acuff really spells the concept out in its most stark and honest assessment. There is this pernicious element of the American dream that tries to convince us that being normal, being average, enjoying a simple life, working a little job and going through the motions in middle America is an inferior existence that’s patently uninteresting.

What Colby Acuff does through Enjoy The Ride is expose the poetic beauty of individuals who have the courage to succumb to the regular rhythms of American life, not from fear of being different, but because it’s their way to squeeze everything they can out of their experiences, and still have the time to savor them.

There are no big questions asked in Enjoy The Ride. But in some ways, the biggest questions of all are answered through it. Life is life. You’re dealt a set of cards, and you do the best you can with them. Mistakes are made along the way. Promises are broken, lives are shattered, but victories are won, and spoils are taken.

Perhaps the most important thing in life is to not focus on a scoreboard, or bank account, or what reality your Instagram profile presents to others. It’s to enjoy the ride no matter what lane you’re traveling in. Because no matter who you are, you only have one of these things. So get busy making the best of it.

8.2/10

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Stream/Download Enjoy The Ride