‘We’re all in our little gettin’-right situation,” sings Cole Swindell on “Reason to Drink,” a rockin’ country tune with slashing guitars and pounding drums about all the things that drive people to seek solace in the mind-numbing and party-starting effects of alcohol.
Heartbreak, romance, fatigue from the daily grind, and just a general hell-raising attitude — “yeah, we all got a reason to drink,” sings Swindell. (Maybe it’s uptight to suggest that that worldview could be problematic, so I’ll save my quibbles about pathology for later.) Swindell’s main point is that, we’re all sorta the same, whether we’re crying in our beer or triumphantly raising a Solo cup in the air.
Or, as he puts it on “Both Sides of the Mississippi,” a song about how Northerners and Southerners and Easterners and Westerners share the same fundamental concerns and struggles: “It don’t matter where you’re at, any old dot on any old map, beer is beer and whiskey’s whiskey.”
Swindell has written numerous beer-centric songs for Luke Bryan and others, but the singer often uses his suds-soaked songs as a way to address love, sadness and family. After working as a writer for several years, Swindell released his self-titled solo debut in 2014. Swindell is aiming to be in the big arenas, and he’s trying to make music that appeals to everyone. It helps if you dig beer, driving in trucks, romanticizing small-town life and drowning your sorrows.
Cole Swindell plays the Toyota Presents Oakdale Theater, 95 S. Turnpike Road, Wallingford, on Thursday, Oct. 11, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $50. 203-265-1501, livenation.com.
