Originally published at Writer's Blog. Please leave any comments there.

My wife unintentionally reawakened my enjoyment of country music recently. Until a few days ago, radio has been our only option for music in the car. I think we'd both grown bored with the popular rock stations playing the same songs over and over again, so we ended up on a country station, a country station that now resides on one of my radio's presets.

We have a CD player in our car now - a birthday gift from me to my wife - and this morning I found one of my Garth Brooks albums and popped it in the player on the way to work. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy his music. Garth displays a high level of creativity and artistry with the music itself, and his lyrics always contain a delightful brand of poetry.

I don't have a lot of country music in my collection - just a couple of Garth albums and a double of Alabama's greatest hits. I simply don't collect much "popular" music since my tastes tend to run more toward Big Band, classical, swing, jazz, etc. But I do enjoy revisiting country from time to time, though I doubt I'll ever love the genre - I'm too much of a melancholic personality to want to reside there for any length of time. Country music sometimes recalls for me painful memories from the past, and being creatures of the past I see little need to dwell on them, as they have no effect on today. So, by necessity, country music remains a style of music that I tend to steer clear of.

Right now, I've got "Fit for a King" running through my head. It reminds me a bit of a Southern Gospel song you might hear or sing at a tent revival meeting. If all country music was like this all the time, I think I could listen to a lot more of it.

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