Shon Aguero says his voice can run between soft and beautiful at one end and rough and edgy at the other, which is a big thing to promise of yourself. The test is easy to find. Put on Words You Say, the fourth song on the EP Old Haunts, which is out now. Let the bright intro run its course, with its mid-tempo groove and melodic electric guitar licks, and then wait for the first verse to give way to the first chorus.
The verse is the soft end. The band steps back as he starts singing, and what is left is his voice, dry and close, with a few light electric guitar fills curling around it. He sings low here, a gravelly baritone carrying a Southern drawl, and the closeness of it does a lot of the work. It sounds like a man talking to you over a kitchen table, unhurried and a little worn, and the guitar answers him in short phrases rather than crowding in.
Then the pre-chorus lifts the drums, and you can feel something coming. When the chorus arrives he does not ease into it. He jumps. The baritone gives way to a tenor belt, strained and raspy, with vibrato shaking the high notes. The guitars widen, and his voice is doubled with a harmony a third above, so the rough edge of the lead gets a brighter shadow running alongside it. The distance between the two halves is the whole point. You have just been leaning in to hear him, and now he is singing as if the room has filled up.
What I like most is that the shift never sounds like a trick. The grain that sat quietly under the verse is the same grain that tears open in the chorus. It is one voice pushed harder, and the strain at the top feels earned by the restraint before it. For a song about the people you leave and what they told you before you went, that move from murmur to full cry makes sense on its own terms.
The similar artists he lists are Dierks Bentley, Jon Pardi and Garth Brooks. I take those as the records he reaches for and the rooms he would like these songs to stand in, rather than anything to be measured against. Still, it is easy to hear why that shelf appeals to him. It belongs to country singers who can sound like a neighbour one minute and fill an arena the next, who trust a plain melody and let the voice carry the feeling. Words You Say is built for that kind of singer, with the band holding a steady country groove and leaving the space up front for him.
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