100 Proof

Editors’ Notes While the modern era has turned a number of country singers into pop stars, fewer country artists represent working-class women. Not the type who cooks in high heels and a skirt; the kind who sits up at night waiting for her hapless husband, scanning the radio as she nurses a bottle of wine. That’s the woman Kellie Pickler describes on “Where’s Tammy Wynette,” and those are the women that this former American Idol contestant is looking to reach with her third album, 100 Proof. With songs like “Unlock That Honky Tonk,” “Stop Cheatin’ on Me,” and “Tough,” Pickler plants her bootheel in the kind of traditional, backwoods country music usually dominated by alpha males. While Pickler has the sand to compete in a male-dominated world, her album is more than a series of country clichés. Her songs are clever and honest, with a lot of original touches. Take, for instance, the melting melody of “Long As I Never See You Again,” which could have been drawn from a Neil Young track, or “100 Proof,” which puts a sensitive spin on the old conceit of the drinking song.