You Were Warned ...

We all make mistakes. And for the rest of our lives we will continue to make mistakes. Name me the human who hasn’t made mistakes and I will provide them with the next available unicorn. Yet as inevitable as making wrong decisions is, the mistakes we make when we’ve been alerted beforehand may be the most painful. Sometimes the warnings of approaching storm clouds are put before us and yet we dismiss them, denying the injunctions that are being shoved right into our mugs. Eyes wide open or shut in willful delusion, we step, feet first, into the pig plop.

Speaking of mistakes, no one sang about the torments of self-indulgent drinking quite like the great George Jones. In his time this legendary tippler raised quite a few and then sang from the heart and liver about the bumpy road that the bottle led him down. (“With the blood from my body I could start my own still,” as he moaned on his 1981 signature hit, “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will).” Honestly, has there ever been a more perfect title for a country song?)

Nearly twenty years later, Jones was still singing about the pull of the bottle on the gut-wrenching “Choices.” Composed by Billy Yates and Mike Curtis, “Choices” is a song about admitting grievous mistakes, recognizing that you were given straightforward, heartfelt warnings and then acknowledging that you proceeded to kick all that well-meaning advice to the curb. You screwed up royally, and most likely you’ll do it again.

What makes the performance so powerful is the absence of self-pity and self-recrimination in Jones’s vocal. There’s a bleak honesty to it; no coincidence that the song can be found on an album titled Cold Hard Truth. Even if overindulging isn’t your problem, Jones’s frank disclosure can set you to contemplating, and regretting, all those times you listened hard to warnings and then listened harder to your own dumb self.