The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jpjameshansen for the Best Album of 1991 tournament.  I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!

I was pretty sad to see Hal get this year’s Choking Victim award, though not totally surprised. I know you’re going to vote for Nirvana. Hal is…past the point of rescue. That’s okay. Nevermind was a huge album for me personally, as it was for so many others. But Hal getting 13 nomination votes when we had over 300 voters is absurd. You clearly haven’t listened to this album yet. This is a plea for you to do so.

10 tracks, 30 minutes. That’s the stuff. Oh, also, it is the best country album in this tournament.

Starts off amazing with “Small Town Saturday Night,” one of the great country songs of the 90s. A really energetic classic country hook (one of many of the album), matched with the simultaneously strong and tender voice of Hal, and lyrics that perfectly encapsulate the sensibility of a place that tells Lucy “you know the world must be flat / cause when people leave town, they never come back.” 

But, like 1991’s other best country album (Suzy Bogguss’s Aces – sadly missing from the bracket), Hal rarely plays directly into male country type. Or, when he does, there is a soft melancholy note in his voice that re-directs boot-scooting energy into something that you don’t find in perhaps more popular country voices of that moment.

Take, for instance, “I Know Where Love Lives” giving us “You keep your mansions of gold, buddy, I don’t care / cause I know where love lives” or “Somebody’s Love” with “I know she’s more than some damn fool deserves / I know she’s somebody’s love.” This isn’t a Garth or Alan Jackson lyric – or, again, if it is, there’s just something unique and beautiful about Hal that moves it out of cliché. It is soft and thoughtful with intelligent and great hooks, top to bottom.

Even “Past the Point of Rescue” – maybe the most swingy of songs on here (and another one of the best) – here’s a guy basically upset with himself for blowing it and getting shut out of his lover’s life (“Is no word from you at all the best that you can do?”) But what’s the tone? There’s something really intricate going on here that can’t be pinned down by genre.

I could go on about pretty much every track on this perfect album. I’ve returned to it so much since Hal passed away last year. And I’ll keep returning to it now and in the future. 

Do you know how much I love you? Well, you didn’t. Now you do.

-- @jpjameshansen