Charlie McGettigan has a fine track record in supplying quality material to Irish artists of an MOR bent (Ray Lynam, Mary Black and Maura O’Connell), as well as enjoying Eurovision supremacy with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Kids’ alongside Paul Harrington and Brendan Graham. For Stolen Moments he’s taken a bunch of new songs, two of which were written in tandem with RTE newsman Conor Mark Kavanagh, to Nashville, and teamed up with that city’s conveyor-belt musicians.
‘Giving Away My Money’, ‘Heartstrings’ and ‘Keepin’ Up The Payments’ are all chirpy country ditties made to get your feet wearing out your shoes. The title is a pleasant love song about struggling to fit relationships in between busy lifestyle demands, there’s a tasty bluegrass feel to ‘A Bird Can Sing’, and ‘Just A Little Bit Longer’ is as sturdy a ballad as Charlie’s ever written.
Aubrey Hainie adds fine fiddle to several tracks, and Randy Kohrs regularly spices up the mix with his slick dobro. McGettigan brings his confident and polished vocals to songs that are put together according to tried and tested formulae. It’s all fine and dandy if you require no more than a bundle of cleanly-produced tracks caged inside the narrowest confines of country pop and played by musicians with little sense of adventure. But you can’t help wondering if the air miles were really necessary.