Throwback Thursday: Jaida Dreyer can’t lasso ‘Half Broke Horses’
Songwriter Jaida Dreyer recently won USA’s ‘Real Country’ show, and we now revisit one of her best songs.
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.
Could Jaida Dreyer be country music’s best kept secret? Well, it certainly seems that way over the past six years since the release of her debut long-player, I Am Jaida Dreyer. Her voice is as twangy and of-the-earth as many of the genre’s titan torchbearers and one that has gone severely overlooked for far too long. In celebration of her crowning on USA’s Real Country competition showcase, on which she was under the tutelage of mainstream staple Jake Owen, B-Sides & Badlands revisits what should have been an enduring vocal performance from Dreyer’s wholly traditional, evocative first album. “Half Broke Horses,” the third radio single from the record, is a splendid prairie ride around the ole rodeo, and Dreyer’s broken heart tries to heal after a lover gallops away over the horizon like a tumbleweed in the unforgiving breeze.
“And we made love wild and crazy, he wanted me to have his baby / But I should’ve known there’s some things you can’t change,” she sings. She wears her heart on her sleeve as she so often does in her work, and while she bears the heart-shaped burden on her shoulders, there is something surprisingly hopeful and incandescent about her phrasing, as if she’s already come to accept her fate. “I stood on the front porch cryin’ but he just kept on driving / I thought he’d turn around but I know better now,” she pours generously from a tall, cool glass of lonesome.
Back in 2012, Dreyer was the flagship signee of Byron Gallimore’s Streamsound Records, which shuttered in 2015. The Canadian-born singer and songwriter took a necessary reprieve from the spotlight, and through the years, she’s landed cuts by Tim McGraw, Luke Bryan, Eric Church, Sara Evans, Sunny Sweeney and countless others. Her songcraft stretches through the hallowed halls of country music tradition, lusciously dipped in tales of boozing, heartbreak and loss. She’s not a hopeless romantic, but she’s one that cherishes and frequently caresses even the scars on her skin.
Dreyer further plucks the heartstrings on the song’s final verse, “Now I watch that little girl by the window as she plays / Those plastic ponies are a story, she’s gonna have to hear someday.” Heartache always has a way of circling back, and no matter how hard you may try, it’ll return to you one day ⏤ perhaps in a form you probably won’t even recognize. “You can’t fence ’em in / Ooh, they were born to run and then,” she bawls in teary tones on the chorus. “You think you got them where you want ’em / Then they leave you all alone…”
Listen below:
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