5/11/2006 5 Stars
MAVERICK
Zachary Hunter
In Your Dreams
Wolf/Aspirion Records-0036
* * * * *
Co-produced by legendary rock producer Ed Stasium, Hunter has released a real peach of an album.
With influences like Vince Gill, Clint Black and Steve Wariner, you just know that this album by Zachary Hunter will be a mix of traditional and modern country with some great guitar solos. The first of those solos from the very talented fingers of Pat Buchanan appears in the rocking Place In The Heart, which has a sound not unlike Eric Heatherly’s 2000 hit Flowers On The Wall. On the country rocker Two Lonely Hearts it is the turn of Brent Mason to add a blistering guitar solo, alongside some rocking and rolling accompaniment from fiddle player Stuart Duncan, Howard Duck on piano and Ed Stasium on lap steel.
Zachary has a quite wonderful voice which can rock with the best on faster tracks, plus he can sing a mean ballad better than most, this is proved on tracks such as the wonderful As Long As We Believe and the thought-provoking Until Our Dying Day, both tracks also feature the beautiful harmony vocals of Kathie Baillie (watch out for her new solo release in early 2007).
Hunter’s music could also quite easily be compared to that of George Strait at times, as in the very easy on the ear In The Moonlight, with Zach himself adding the guitar solo this time. The title song In Your Dreams is another uncomplicated ditty very much in the same vein as Strait’s Check Yes Or No.
Hopefully with the right luck, and some good consistent radio play in America, Hunter could soon have his name mentioned alongside top stars such as Alan Jackson and George Strait. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why he wrote the song Something Big (The George Strait Song), plus the fact that it is stone-dead country.
This is an excellent country album by a singer/songwriter with a real country voice. He has also used some of the finest country A-list session musicians, with instruments such as fiddle and pedal steel featuring on a high percentage of the songs, a good example being the wonderful country two-stepper Those Aren’t Tears (In My Eyes).
Zachary Hunter sums this tremendous album up in one sentence in the CD liner notes; ‘Long live country music, old and new!’ DK