He Sang Like A Man Standing Inside It Rather Than A Man Who Had Solved Grief
Gary Allan found his wife dead in their Tennessee home and a year later he put the grief into an album called Tough All Over
The most expensive therapy he ever had
By 2004 Gary Allan had built a country career on songs that already sounded bruised and he was not the cleanest voice on radio and he had a rough California edge and a honky tonk ache and the kind of delivery that made pain feel close to the skin
Away from the stage he and his wife Angela Herzberg were trying to hold together a large blended family and they had married in 2001 and she had three children from a previous marriage and he had three daughters of his own
Then the house became the wound and on October 25 2004 Angela died by suicide at thirty six in their Tennessee home and reports later described her struggles with depression and migraines
For Allan the loss was not an old country song idea about heartbreak and it was the kitchen and the bedrooms and the children and the silence after police and family had gone
The Album Gave The Grief Somewhere To Sit
He stepped back from the road but the grief did not stay quiet and when Allan returned to the studio he did not make a record that tried to sound healed
Tough All Over came out in 2005 less than a year after the death of Angela and it carried the weight plainly and Puttinβ Memories Away and I Just Got Back from Hell and Life Ainβt Always Beautiful and Best I Ever Had did not feel like songs chosen to decorate a tragedy and they felt like rooms he had to walk through because there was no other way out
Country music had always known sad songs but this was not a breakup and not a barroom regret and not a man missing someone who simply left and this was a husband left with questions and children and a public life that still expected him to stand under lights
Even Best I Ever Had first known from Vertical Horizon changed shape in the voice of Allan and it became less like lost romance and more like someone saying goodbye while still trying to breathe
The Darkness Stayed In The Music
Tough All Over did not turn the death of Angela into closure and nothing could and it gave the grief somewhere to sit and Allan later called the album the most expensive therapy he ever had and the line fit because the record never sounded like recovery polished for radio
It sounded like work with one take and one show and one morning and one child and one day at a time
Sometimes a record is not escape and sometimes it is the only place pain can be put without lying about it
Gary Allan kept recording and he kept touring and he kept carrying that darker weight into the years after and from then on some part of his music felt changed not louder and not explained and just deeper like a closed room in the house where the air never quite went back to normal