Tinsley makes even Young sound bad

This bastard actually wrote a song with the lines "What a time for love/love makes it alright." Hurrah, hooray, the man with such an impressive background (has played/is playing with BOTH Hootie and the Blowfish and the Dave Matthews Band) has made a solo album. Fiddle player-gone singer/songwriter (yeah, surprise) Boyd Tinsley's True Reflections is a pile of pacifying, suburban, push-no-limits crap. The only way it could have been released is because RCA's focus group figured trapped 40-year-old housewives with nothing better to do while cooking dinner might put it on in the background. Before, I always wanted to give Tinsley a chance, he almost seemed the most unique of the Matthews bunch -- scrawny and electrified. But as the awful cover art of Tinsley walking down railroad tracks implies (it's an overused metaphor, as anyone in an entry-level photo class knows if you want to try and seem prophetic and are extremely uncreative, head to the tracks) the man is just wandering down a lost path and has nothing striking to say about it. It's an album full of boring "love" songs. The worst thing about Reflections is Tinsley covered Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl," and made the king of isolation and disgruntled respect sound like an easy-listening version of a long-haired frat boy playing acoustic guitar on his front stoop. Tinsley makes bad songs sound like worse stereotypes. There's no excuse for music like this.