Album Review: Teea Goans — That’s Just Me

With her 2010 debut, The Way I Remember It, Teea Goans quickly established herself as heir to country music royalty. On that album of covers of classic country songs, Goans demonstrated a canny ability to select the tunes that showed off her incredible vocal range, recalling Patty Loveless, Loretta Lynn, and Suzy Boggus, among others. More important, her powerful, yet intimate, interpretations of songs from Willie Nelson’s “I’m Still Not Over You” to Bill Anderson’s “Walk Out Backwards” revealed her deep passion for keeping alive the themes, shuffles, swing, and honky-tonk of traditional country music.

Goans’ sophomore effort, That’s Just Me, picks up where her debut left off, with Goans exploring country’s roots in bluegrass, blues, and gospel. At the same time she introduces country idioms into languorously performed torch songs, like the album’s opener, “Love’s in the Here and Now,” a slow, simmering jazz ballad reveling in the seize-the-moment headiness of love.

Tipping her hat to her country roots, Goans covers four classic songs on That’s Just Me, but for the most part, these are the least effective on the album. With her smoky voice, she delivers a straightforward but unremarkable version of Bob Montgomery’s “Misty Blue,” a hit for Eddy Arnold and Billie Jo Spears, among many others, and Goans’ supper club cover of Larry Gatlin’s “I’ve Done Enough Dying Today” breathes no life into that maudlin ballad. On Kris Kristofferson’s “Nobody Wins,” however, Goans’ tone of hopeless resignation captures in pitch perfect manner the frustration, pain, and urgent despair of this tale of doomed love.

Goans shines brightest on newer material. In the honky-tonkin’, George Strait-like “World’s Biggest Fool” (recorded by Rhonda Vincent for her 2008 album Good Thing Going), Goans’ takes on being stuck in a dead-end relationship. She stokes the flames of a hot love affair in the Western swinging “Pour a Little Love on It,” and in the blues-tinged “Overboard,” Goans urgently implores her lover either to immerse himself in love or get out of the boat: “you can go under or you can go overboard,” while on the beautifully haunting bluegrass duet with Jamie Dailey, “That’s Just Me Loving You,” she and Dailey weave harmony in a manner that’s reminiscent of the powerful duets of Patty Loveless and Vince Gill.

That’s Just Me leaves no doubt that Teea Goans has arrived, bringing her energetic, soaring vocals, and her straight-on ability to choose songs, into the smoky kingdom of country music.

Preview or purchase That’s Just Me