Member Since: 11/15/2011
Posts: 13,901
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Carrie Underwood doesn’t hunt, and she may not eat meat. She has given a lot of money to the Humane Society. Her estate just outside of Nashville has all of these no hunting signs all over the place. For someone who has succeeded so much in Country Music, this suggests a kind of separation from the culture. Unlike Blake Shelton, who can sing without irony the line, “A gun’s like a woman, son / It’s all in how you hold her,” or the coterie of hunters (Aldean, Bryan, Justin Moore, etc.) who get money from Cabela’s or the NRA or Outdoor Life Network, she makes a song about the absence of a gun’s power. “Little Toy Guns” frames domestic melodrama to talk about domestic violence — but the woman who wishes, “No smoke, no bullets, no kick from the trigger when you pull it / No pain, no damage done,” also wishes male phallic violence would be transformed, would become harmless, that men would become boys. The song tells Nashville that the men who shoot are boys playing cowboys, and it’s also an argument for safety. But just as importantly, Underwood makes this argument through a traditional female voice. The song is adroit in those formal choices, but it could not have been done without the songwriting of Hillary Lindsey, who seems to have made writing these kinds of women’s voices a life goal. (She writes really well for men, too — but consider her work on “Sober,” or “Backseat of a Greyhound Bus,” or “Cheap Wine and Cigarettes.”)
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love this review of LTG 
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