I DON'T DANCE is the 2014 follow-up to Lee Brice's 2012 Gold-selling HARD 2 LOVE, which yielded three #1 singles & the CMA/ACM Song of the Year 'I Drive Your Truck.' This album was recorded in Nashville, with Brice writing ten of the album's thirteen songs, & taking the reigns as producer yet again. 'I wanted to have control over every drumbeat, every lick,' Brice says of his meticulous approach in the studio. 'It was a lot of really sitting down and thinking about every little piece that goes into a song.' the result is a hybrid of fresh country sounds with a touch of digital flair, beats underlying banjos, pulses over top of piano. Brice played every instrument on the summer anthem 'Girls in Bikinis,' building the track from the ground up. 'Sirens' was cut live in the studio with a full band (including Brice on banjo for the first time), & other songs grew out of beats, loops and studio experiments, a nod to his love of artists ranging from Bruno Mars to Eminem. A personal highlight for Brice is the title track, originally written as the song for his own wedding dance with wife Sara. 'An evocative, rough-edged singer with a penchant for songs that celebrate frailty' (NY Times), Brice moved to Nashville to chase his songwriting dreams after playing football for Clemson in his native South Carolina. He wrote for artists such as Jason Aldean, Tim McGraw and Garth Brooks, whose recording of 'More Than a Memory' launched Brice's stock sky-high. He's toured with Luke Bryan & Braid Paisley and headlined his own House of Blues tour.
Lee Brice performed a rare feat in 2012: he became a star on the back of ballads, not party songs. Country has a long history of gentle, masculine crooners but the 2010s were rife with suburban dudes in tight jeans who sang slow songs only as a change of pace. Brice specialized in an assured delivery, taking such reflective songs as "Hard to Love" and "I Drive Your Truck" to the upper reaches of the country charts, and this success has led him to double down on deliberation on 2014's I Don't Dance. There is some volume to the record and a considerable amount of sly electronic textures -- this especially surfaces in the rhythms, which are sometimes looped, although there's some playful Auto-Tune; the three bonus tracks on the deluxe edition emphasize this side -- but the defining characteristic of I Don't Dance is how unhurried Brice seems, lending the same casual authority to the faster or grittier numbers ("No Better Than This," "Drinking Class," or "Girls in Bikinis," which is just plain silly) as he does on the ballads. This relaxed confidence is beguiling and also suits the songs, which Brice largely had a hand in composing (only three of the 13 songs don't bear a songwriting credit from him). Without the liner notes, it's hard to tell which songs come from Brice's pen and which don't, but that only signals how cohesive the album is. As skilled and commercially savvy a writer as he is -- and he is, that's his background -- he keeps the focus on his performance, letting the album come on smooth and strong. I Don't Dance may sink its teeth in slightly slowly, but that's Brice's style: he lets the listener come to him and, once they're there, he offers a warm seduction that lasts not just for a night but for a relationship. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi
