The Listomania I make the lists, you shoot them down. Quid Pro Quo.

144. Loretta Lynn ft. Jack White – Portland, Oregon

Fair warning. Jack White is going to have his hands all over this list, liked an e’d out light show monkey following a chick in a smooth shirt. Apologies to Ms. Lynn for having that reference in her blurb.

This track is a fully formed clinical study of the most successful reaction from the chemical mixture of Old and New. A weathered country and western legend of the 60’s and 70’s who had released one album since 1988, and the Detroit renaissance man of the 2000’s. On paper, it’s bad math. Like switching the order of an inner product with a non-Hermitian operator in Hilbert space. But listening to the song, it all checks out. Maybe it’s Jack’s knack at making anything and everything better, or Loretta’s star power and decade upon decade of powering through and making hits from scratch.

One certain thing about their combination is that they are taking classic sounds and stories and making something utterly new. Yeah, that’s a one-minute tremolo-picked and reverb-drenched guitar intro. And it does not sound out of place AT ALL. Before Loretta even saunters in between sheets of fuzz and slide, Jack uses 5-second noise fills that for some reason mesh perfectly with the classic country leanings of the rest of the band. Jack and Loretta trade lines back and forth, souls from very different places and times, coming together to create a perfect singularity of music, outside the lines of genre or trends. If only something happened in the last two minutes.