By: Tessa Monroe
New York has never needed a cowboy hat to understand a great country song. This is, after all, a city built on people chasing things: careers, relationships, rent money, recognition, the last train home, and occasionally somebody who probably isn’t worth all the trouble. So when Robert Ross sings about running a race he knows he cannot win, and about following someone to the ends of the earth and back again, on his single “For You Girl,” the sentiment feels surprisingly at home beneath the lights of Manhattan.
Ross may be working from Nashville’s musical vocabulary, but “For You Girl” speaks the language of anyone who has ever pursued love through a city that rarely slows down long enough to accommodate it.
The Canadian-born singer-songwriter isn’t selling sophistication here. He’s offering something New Yorkers can sometimes be suspicious of: complete sincerity.
And that’s precisely why the record works.
“For You Girl” begins with the moment everything changes. Ross catches sight of someone lighting up a night out, and suddenly the rest of the world disappears. In another song, that setup might become a pickup line. Ross treats it instead as a minor emotional catastrophe, the pleasant kind, perhaps, but a catastrophe nonetheless. This guy is finished before the first verse is over.
It’s easy to imagine the New York version. Someone catches your attention across a crowded Lower East Side bar. A stranger steps onto the subway at Union Square. Two people make eye contact in a Brooklyn coffee shop before one disappears onto Bedford Avenue.
Then you spend the next three days wondering what just happened.
Ross understands the feeling.
Co-written with producer Gil Grand, “For You Girl” doesn’t attempt to reinvent romantic songwriting. Its strength comes from how enthusiastically it embraces the tradition. Ross isn’t embarrassed by devotion. He’s prepared to crawl a million miles to see somebody smile. He’ll brave pouring rain. He’ll chase this woman to the ends of the earth.
That’s a lot of commitment in an era of unanswered texts.
Musically, the record gives Ross exactly the surroundings he needs. Recorded at Station West Nashville, “For You Girl” features a formidable collection of players, including Troy Lancaster on lead guitar, Joe Spivey on acoustic guitar, Matt King on drums, Dan Dugmore on pedal steel and Mike Rojas on piano.
Dugmore’s steel is especially important. It gives the track that unmistakable country ache, a sound that can somehow suggest both possibility and disappointment in the same bent note. Lancaster provides crisp guitar accents while Rojas’ piano quietly widens the song’s emotional range. Grand’s production keeps everything polished without sterilizing it.
The result could work just as effectively coming through the speakers of a Nashville honky-tonk as it could on a late-night drive down the West Side Highway.
Ross’s voice makes that crossover believable. There’s experience in it without affectation. He doesn’t manufacture a caricature of country masculinity or push his vocal into unnecessary theatrics. He sings like someone telling you what happened.
That makes sense when you consider the road that brought him here.
Ross grew up in New Brunswick, Canada, served more than eleven years in the Canadian Army, spent three and a half years overseas, relocated to Australia and eventually made Nashville the center of the next phase of his career. His music has traveled nearly as far as he has.
His debut album, It’s Never Too Late, produced international indie-chart successes including “Jack Daniels,” “Driving Me Insane” and “Don’t You Cry.” He has received international awards and industry recognition, while “Drink ’Em Down” scored the kind of placement independent artists dream about when it appeared in Tulsa King.
Now “For You Girl” is giving Ross another reason to pay attention to the numbers, climbing the MusicRow CountryBreakout Radio Chart.
Yet the most interesting thing about the single isn’t its chart position. It’s that Ross continues succeeding without abandoning the emotional straightforwardness that defines his music.
That brings us to the song’s wonderfully peculiar centerpiece, an image of love as a carnival ride spinning wildly beyond anyone’s control.
It’s not a fashionable metaphor. That’s why it’s memorable.
You can practically see the carnival lights and feel the ground disappear beneath your feet. Ross takes the universal disorientation of falling hard for somebody and gives it a physical location. Love becomes a midway ride you probably shouldn’t have boarded after eating, but you’re already spinning, so you might as well enjoy it.
New York understands that, too.
This city has always had its own complicated relationship with country music. The geography might be wrong, but the emotions aren’t. Patsy Cline sounds just as devastating at 2 a.m. in Queens. Johnny Cash doesn’t suddenly lose his authority when you cross the George Washington Bridge. A well-written country song doesn’t require dirt roads because loneliness, desire and obsession don’t observe ZIP codes.
Neither does “For You Girl.”
Robert Ross has made a record about surrendering to the ridiculousness of wanting somebody so badly that reasonable behavior becomes impossible. Beneath the Nashville musicianship and traditional country architecture is something considerably more universal. A grown man is admitting that another person has completely wrecked his equilibrium.
In New York, we might call that Tuesday.
Ross calls it love.
Either way, “For You Girl” makes the chase sound worth it.
