Radney Foster's Mistake Song

Hmm! Let me see. When I think of Radney Foster, I think of his hits from the early '90's, "Just Call Me Lonesome" and "Nobody Wins". He co-wrote the former with George Ducas and the latter with Kim Richey. When I was searching for songs for Twangers 23, I wasn't thinking of Radney at all. A friend of mine made a few suggestions, including a song from Dierks Bentley's Greatest Hits cd. Although he found the DB cd to be disappointing overall, he recommended one song, "Sweet & Wild", a ballad in which Sarah Buxton joins Dierks. He did this knowing I'm not a fan of Mr. Bentley's music but hey, what's one song out of 20. I checked it out and found that it was written by Radney Foster and Jay Clementi. 

"Sweet & Wild" was originally recorded for Radney's 2006 album, "This World We Live In". In reading the reviews of that cd, a song that kept getting singled out for praise was "Half of My Mistakes" (hereinafter HMM) which Radney co-wrote with Bobby Houck. Who can't relate to a song about making mistakes? The song was a non-charting single according to Wikipedia. I found a live acoustic performance by Radney on You-tube in which he sang and played guitar along with an unidentified guitarist. Loved it so I bought the song on I-Tunes. Kim Richey sings backup on the album track. I found out that the song was also included on Gary Allan's 2007 album "Living Hard" but not released as a single. So I'm a little late discovering this song but it's good because there are so few really good songs on country radio at present.

The song starts "Half of my mistakes, I made stone cold sober, HMM I made at closing time". He admits in the second verse that "HMM I'd probably make em again". In the chorus, he concludes that he would spend more time on love than worrying about what's right or wrong. In the third verse, he gives some reasons for his mistakes: "HMM were made because I was moving too quickly" and others because "his heart was moving too slow". In the first line of the last verse, he sings "HMM I'd give anything to change how it ended". In the second line after singing HMM, he speaks the end of the line, "God, I wouldn't change a thing". (Don't know what inspired him to speak those few words, but it was very effective.) He then resumes singing the remainder of the verse, continuing "You can lean too hard on regret, but I don't recommend it". Give it a listen and see what you think.

Great song. When you watch the You-tube interview and acoustic performance, about two minutes in they show the names of some artists who have covered his songs: Brooks & Dunn's "Drunk on Love", Jack Ingram's "Measure of a Man", Keith Urban's "Raining on Sunday and Sara Evans on "A Real Fine Place to Start" plus the already mentioned Dierks on "Sweet and Wild" and Gary Allan on HMM. Not mentioned was "Godspeed, Sweet Dreams" by the Dixie Chicks which was solely written by Radney. Altogether, he has 404 writing credits on ASCAP.

Comments

[matt]

Bobby Houck is the front man of the Blue Dogs band and he and his band recorded that single first. It is on their "Halos and Good Buys" album.

[Robert Losche]

Thanks for the info. I should have googled Bobby Houck instead of just assuming that he was a co-writer but not a performer. I checked out the Blue Dog version on MySpace and it sounded good.