Family (album)
Encyclopedia
Family is the twelfth studio album
by American country
recording artist LeAnn Rimes
, released October 9, 2007, on Curb Records
in the United States. It was produced primarily by musician and record producer Dann Huff
, with additional production by Tony Brown
and guest vocalist Reba McEntire
.
Family is the first album in Rimes' career where she has co-written every song for an album.
The album debuted at number four on the US Billboard 200
chart, selling 74,200 copies in its first week. Upon its release, Family received positive reviews from most music critics, who complimented Rimes' performance and songwriting. It earned her a Grammy Award
nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance
, for the album's lead single "Nothin' Better to Do
".
chart, with first-week sales of 74,200 copies in the United States. It spent a total of 20 weeks in Billboard 200.
In the United Kingdom, Family debuted at number 31 on the UK Albums Chart
, becoming Rimes's first album to miss the top 20 of the chart (though not all of her albums were released in the UK).
, which assigns a normalized
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average
score of 70, based on 12 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine
gave it four out of five stars and called it "surprisingly far-ranging underneath its soft country-pop veneer [...] a canny blend of the commercial and the confessional". Blender
s Jane Dark complimented its "lighthearted genre-hopping", writing that it "suggests nothing so much as a Broadway smash about a restless country star, borrowing from many styles, beholden to none". Sarah Rodman of The Boston Globe
praised Rimes' songwriting and dubbed Family "the best, most cogent album of her career". Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times
complimented her "gentle belting
-out" and commented that "the music echoes the fearlessness in the lyrics". Slant Magazine
's Jonathan Keefe called Rimes "a distinctive interpretive singer" and viewed that her songwriting gives the album "the kind of focus and thematic coherence that most Nashville acts can't be bothered with". Keefe cited Family as "among the strongest mainstream country albums of the past several years".
However, Q
gave the album two out of five stars and stated "There's little spark, despite her admirable willingness to take chances". Entertainment Weekly
s Alanna Nash gave it a B rating and commented that "Rimes displays new maturity in songwriting [...] though too often she lapses into posturing power pop". Adam Sweeting of Uncut
criticized its music, writing that the songs "sound like an update of the kind of AOR
racket Pat Benatar
and Heart
were making in the '80s". Dave Simpson of The Guardian
noted "A slightly too-smooth production and typically overblown Bon Jovi collaboration", but called it "an album full of swaggering rhythm'n'booze and emotional confessionals that explore a dysfunctional childhood". Despite finding the song "uneven", Rolling Stone
writer Rob Sheffield
gave the album three-and-a-half out of five stars and cited "Nothin' Better to Do", "Family", and "Till We Ain't Strangers Anymore" as highlights. Thomas Kintner of The Hartford Courant
called Family "a carefully manicured, but still lively assortment that highlights her substantial vocal strengths", and praised Rimes' singing, stating "She is prone to embracing tunes so disposable that they should be beneath her notice, but the melodic richness she showers on even the most lackluster lyrics makes for interesting listening".
Studio album
A studio album is an album made up of tracks recorded in the controlled environment of a recording studio. A studio album contains newly written and recorded or previously unreleased or remixed material, distinguishing itself from a compilation or reissue album of previously recorded material, or...
by American country
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...
recording artist LeAnn Rimes
LeAnn Rimes
LeAnn Rimes is an American country/pop singer. She is known for her rich vocals and her rise to fame as an eight-year-old champion on the original Ed McMahon version of Star Search, followed by the release of the Patsy Cline-intended single "Blue" when Rimes was only age 13, resulting in her...
, released October 9, 2007, on Curb Records
Curb Records
Curb Records is a record label started by Mike Curb originally as Sidewalk Records in 1963...
in the United States. It was produced primarily by musician and record producer Dann Huff
Dann Huff
Dann Huff is an American musician, session musician, singer-songwriter and producer. For his work as a producer in the Country music genre he has won several awards including the Musician of the Year award in 2001 and 2004 at the Country Music Association Awards and the Producer of the Year award...
, with additional production by Tony Brown
Tony Brown (record producer)
Tony Brown is an American country music record producer.He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina.Brown played piano for Elvis Presley. He toured with the TCB Band for much of Presley's final two years and was a part of the 1976 "Jungle Room" recording sessions at Graceland...
and guest vocalist Reba McEntire
Reba McEntire
Reba Nell McEntire is an American country music artist and actress. She began her career in the music industry as a high school student singing in the Kiowa High School band , on local radio shows with her siblings, and at rodeos. As a solo act, she was invited to perform at a rodeo in Oklahoma...
.
Family is the first album in Rimes' career where she has co-written every song for an album.
The album debuted at number four on the US Billboard 200
Billboard 200
The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists...
chart, selling 74,200 copies in its first week. Upon its release, Family received positive reviews from most music critics, who complimented Rimes' performance and songwriting. It earned her a Grammy Award
Grammy Award
A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance
Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance
The Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance was first awarded in 1965, to Dottie West. The award has had several minor name changes:*From 1965 to 1967 the award was known as Best Country & Western Vocal Performance - Female...
, for the album's lead single "Nothin' Better to Do
Nothin' Better to Do
"Nothin' Better to Do" is the title of a song co-written and recorded by American country artist LeAnn Rimes. It was released in May 2007, and served as the lead-off single to her twelfth studio album, Family. It was Rimes' fourteenth Top 20 hit on the U.S...
".
Singles
The first single, "Nothin' Better to Do", was released to radio on May 29, 2007 which she was nominated for a Best Female Country Vocal Performance Grammy for the 50th Grammy Awards, followed by "Good Friend and a Glass of Wine" and "What I Cannot Change", which was nominated for a Best Female Country Vocal Performance Grammy for the 51st Grammy Awards and went to number one on the Billboard Dance chart.Commercial performance
The album debuted at number four on the US Billboard 200Billboard 200
The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists...
chart, with first-week sales of 74,200 copies in the United States. It spent a total of 20 weeks in Billboard 200.
In the United Kingdom, Family debuted at number 31 on the UK Albums Chart
UK Albums Chart
The UK Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales in the United Kingdom. It is compiled every week by The Official Charts Company and broadcast on a Sunday on BBC Radio 1 , and published in Music Week magazine and on the OCC website .To qualify for the UK albums chart...
, becoming Rimes's first album to miss the top 20 of the chart (though not all of her albums were released in the UK).
Critical response
Family received positive reviews from most music critics. At MetacriticMetacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
, which assigns a normalized
Standard score
In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average
Weighted mean
The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...
score of 70, based on 12 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Stephen Thomas Erlewine is a senior editor for Allmusic. He is the author of many artist biographies and record reviews for Allmusic, as well as a freelance writer, occasionally contributing liner notes. He is also frontman and guitarist for the Ann Arbor-based band Who Dat?Erlewine is the nephew...
gave it four out of five stars and called it "surprisingly far-ranging underneath its soft country-pop veneer [...] a canny blend of the commercial and the confessional". Blender
Blender (magazine)
Blender was an American music magazine that billed itself as "the ultimate guide to music and more". It was also known for sometimes steamy pictorials of celebrities....
s Jane Dark complimented its "lighthearted genre-hopping", writing that it "suggests nothing so much as a Broadway smash about a restless country star, borrowing from many styles, beholden to none". Sarah Rodman of The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
praised Rimes' songwriting and dubbed Family "the best, most cogent album of her career". Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
complimented her "gentle belting
Belt (music)
Belting refers to a specific technique of singing by which a singer produces a loud sound in the upper middle of the pitch range. It is often described as a vocal register although some dispute this since technically the larynx is not oscillating in a unique way...
-out" and commented that "the music echoes the fearlessness in the lyrics". Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine is an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New York Film Festival.- History :...
's Jonathan Keefe called Rimes "a distinctive interpretive singer" and viewed that her songwriting gives the album "the kind of focus and thematic coherence that most Nashville acts can't be bothered with". Keefe cited Family as "among the strongest mainstream country albums of the past several years".
However, Q
Q (magazine)
Q is a popular music magazine published monthly in the United Kingdom.Founders Mark Ellen and David Hepworth were dismayed by the music press of the time, which they felt was ignoring a generation of older music buyers who were buying CDs — then still a new technology...
gave the album two out of five stars and stated "There's little spark, despite her admirable willingness to take chances". Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
s Alanna Nash gave it a B rating and commented that "Rimes displays new maturity in songwriting [...] though too often she lapses into posturing power pop". Adam Sweeting of Uncut
UNCUT (magazine)
Uncut magazine, trademarked as UNCUT, is a monthly publication based in London. It is available across the English-speaking world, and focuses on music, but also includes film and books sections...
criticized its music, writing that the songs "sound like an update of the kind of AOR
Album-oriented rock
Album-oriented rock is an American FM radio format focusing on album tracks by rock artists.-Music played:Most radio formats are based on a select, tight rotation of hit singles...
racket Pat Benatar
Pat Benatar
Pat Benatar is an American singer and four-time Grammy winner. She had considerable commercial success particularly in the United States...
and Heart
Heart (band)
Heart is an American rock band who first found success in Canada. Throughout several lineup changes, the only two members remaining constant are sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson. The group rose to fame in the 1970s with their music being influenced by hard rock as well as folk music...
were making in the '80s". Dave Simpson of The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
noted "A slightly too-smooth production and typically overblown Bon Jovi collaboration", but called it "an album full of swaggering rhythm'n'booze and emotional confessionals that explore a dysfunctional childhood". Despite finding the song "uneven", Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
writer Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffield is an American music journalist and author. He is currently a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, writing music reviews and essays on pop culture. Prior to that, he was a contributing editor at Blender before the print version of the magazine folded in 2009, and at Spin...
gave the album three-and-a-half out of five stars and cited "Nothin' Better to Do", "Family", and "Till We Ain't Strangers Anymore" as highlights. Thomas Kintner of The Hartford Courant
The Hartford Courant
The Hartford Courant is the largest daily newspaper in the U.S. state of Connecticut, and is a morning newspaper for most of the state north of New Haven and east of Waterbury...
called Family "a carefully manicured, but still lively assortment that highlights her substantial vocal strengths", and praised Rimes' singing, stating "She is prone to embracing tunes so disposable that they should be beneath her notice, but the melodic richness she showers on even the most lackluster lyrics makes for interesting listening".
Track listing
Musicians
- Tim Akers – keyboards, organ, Wurlitzer
- Jon Bon Jovi – vocals
- Tom Bukovac – electric guitar
- John Catchings – cello
- Eric Darken – percussion
- Mark Douthit – saxophone
- Dan Dugmore – steel guitar
- Paul Franklin – steel guitar
- Carl Gorodetzky – violin
- Barry Green – trombone
- Kenny Greenberg – guitar
- Mike Haynes – trumpet
- Rami Jaffee – Hammond organ
- Charles Judge – keyboards, programming, string arrangements, string conductor, synthesizer
- Russ Kunkel – drums
- Tim Lauer – accordion, Casio, Farfisa organ, keyboards, Mellotron, organ, Hammond organ, piano, solina, synthesizer
- JayDee Mannes – pedal steel
- Stuart Mathis – guitar, electric guitar
- Reba McEntire – vocals, producer
- Chris McHugh – drums
- Doug Moffet – baritone saxophone
- Steve Nathanv – Hammond organ, piano
- Michael Omartian – horn arrangements
- Carole Rabinowitz-Neuen – cello
- LeAnn Rimes – vocals, background vocals
- Matt Rollings – Hammond organ, piano
- Pamela Sixfin – violin
- Leland Sklar – bass
- Jimmie Lee Sloas – bass
- Michael Thompson – acoustic guitar, electric guitar
- Kris Wilkinson – viola
- Jonathan Yudkin – banjo, fiddle, mandola
Production
- Derek Bason – engineer
- Drew Bollman – assistant
- Tony Brown – producer
- Mike Butler – engineer
- Terry Christian – engineer
- John Coulter – design
- Richard Dodd – engineer
- Ben Fowler – engineer
- Darrell Franklin – A&R
- Mike "Frog" Griffith – project coordinator
- Mark Hagen – engineer, overdub engineer
- Nathaniel Hawkins – hair stylist
- Nate Hertweck – assistant
- Dann Huff – guitar, acoustic guitar, producer
- Joanna JanétJoanna JanétJoanna Janét is an American country music singer. Janét was signed to DreamWorks Nashville and recorded an album for the label, Destination Love, that was scheduled to be released in August 2002. The first single from the album, "Since I've Seen You Last," peaked at number 55 on the Billboard Hot...
– background vocals - Scott Kidd – assistant
- Steve Marcantonio – mixing
- David McClister – photography
- J.C. Monterrosa – assistant
- John Netti – assistant
- Justin Niebank – mixing
- Lowell Reynolds – assistant
- Troy Surratt – make-up
- Todd Tidwell – assistant
Chart positions
| Chart (2007) | Peak position |
|---|---|
| Australian Top Country Albums | 20 |
| Canadian Albums Chart | 33 |
| European Top 100 Albums | 100 |
| Swiss Albums Chart | 68 |
| UK Albums Chart UK Albums Chart The UK Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales in the United Kingdom. It is compiled every week by The Official Charts Company and broadcast on a Sunday on BBC Radio 1 , and published in Music Week magazine and on the OCC website .To qualify for the UK albums chart... |
31 |
| US Billboard 200 Billboard 200 The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists... |
4 |
| US Billboard Top Country Albums | 2 |
| US Billboard Top Digital Albums | 4 |
Year-end charts
| End-of-year chart (2007) | Position |
|---|---|
| US Billboard Top Country Albums | 61 |
| End-of-year chart (2008) | Position |
| US Billboard Top Country Albums | 31 |
Release history
| Country | Date |
|---|---|
| United States United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district... |
October 9, 2007 |
| Australia Australia Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area... |
October 15, 2007 |
External links
- Family at DiscogsDiscogsDiscogs, short for discographies, is a website and database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name discogs.com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc., and are...
- Family at MetacriticMetacriticMetacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...