The Greatest Oldies Music

Country

For much of the 1980s, Earl Thomas Conley seemed to have another hit ready as soon as the last one left the charts. One album alone produced four No. 1 singles, a first for any artist at the time. Then, in the early 1990s, he stopped making records. His voice had begun giving him trouble. There were rumors of throat cancer, but doctors found severe allergies and a small nodule on a vocal cord. Around the same time, his father died. He was frustrated with his record label, worn out from touring, and, as he later put it, “crispy around the edges.” He felt he had nothing left to give, mentally or emotionally. Conley stepped away from recording for roughly seven years. The restraint that made his singing so distinctive was already an influence on younger artists such as Randy Travis, and it would later be something Blake Shelton pointed to in his own work. But Conley needed time before he could trust his voice in a studio again. Treatment helped, and in 1998 he returned with *Perpetual Emotion*. The album never brought him back to the chart dominance he’d known in the ’80s. What it did give him was a record he could make when he was ready, after years of being expected to have another one on the way.

EARL THOMAS CONLEY HAD BEEN ALMOST UNSTOPPABLE—THEN HE WALKED AWAY FOR SEVEN YEARS

By the end of the 1980s, Earl Thomas Conley had spent so much time at No. 1 that disappearing from country music seemed almost impossible.

Then his voice began failing him.

His father died.

The record business wore him down.

And Conley reached a point where, by his own description, there was almost nothing left emotionally or mentally to give.

So one of country music’s most successful singers simply stopped.

The 1980s Had Belonged to Him

Conley’s success was extraordinary even by the standards of country music’s hit-driven 1980s.

His restrained, wounded vocal style produced a remarkable sequence of chart-topping singles.

With the album Don’t Make It Easy for Me, he became the first artist in any genre to score four No. 1 singles from the same album on a Billboard chart.

Songs such as “Holding Her and Loving You,” “Fire and Smoke” and “What I’d Say” gave him a style that was unmistakably his.

Other singers noticed.

Randy Travis admired him.

Years later, Blake Shelton would speak about Conley as one of his important influences.

Then the Voice Became Unreliable

The first frightening sign was physical.

Conley began having trouble singing.

Rumors circulated that he had throat cancer, but medical examinations instead found severe allergies and a small nodule on his vocal cord.

For a singer whose career depended on a voice capable of delivering quiet emotional tension, uncertainty about that instrument was enough by itself to destabilize everything.

But it was not happening by itself.

His Father Died While Everything Else Was Wearing Him Down

At roughly the same period, Conley lost his father.

Years of touring had accumulated.

Record-label frustrations grew.

His health was uncertain.

And the emotional reserves behind the music were running out.

Conley later described himself as “crispy around the edges.”

It was an unusually plain description of burnout from a man whose records had made emotional restraint an art form.

Rather than keep recording simply because Nashville expected another album, he stopped.

For About Seven Years, There Was Almost Nothing New

The disappearance was striking because Conley had not gradually faded from a marginal career.

He had been one of the dominant hitmakers of the previous decade.

Then he largely stepped away from recording.

No attempt to force the old voice.

No desperate series of releases trying to recreate the 1980s.

He waited while treatment helped his vocal problems and while the rest of his life had room to settle.

He Returned Without Pretending Nothing Had Changed

In 1998, Conley released Perpetual Emotion.

The  country industry around him was different by then.

So was Conley.

He never recreated the astonishing commercial run of his peak years, but the comeback carried another kind of significance.

He had returned because he could sing again—not because he had forced himself to remain visible while he could not.

Walking Away Was Part of the Career Too

Country music usually celebrates endurance as staying on the road, making another record and refusing to stop.

Earl Thomas Conley chose a different version.

At the point when his voice, grief and exhaustion were all telling him something was wrong, he listened.

For seven years, the man who had once seemed permanently attached to the top of the country chart allowed himself to disappear.

The comeback began with a decision Nashville rarely rewards:

sometimes the only way to protect what remains is to stop using it for a while.

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