Brave

Jamie O'Neal

Product Details

• Audio CD (March 1, 2005)
• Original Release Date: March 1, 2005
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Liberty
• ASIN: B0007GAE08
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #43,993 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Editorial Reviews

From the Artist
Trying to Find Atlantis (Chris Waters/Zach Turner)
"The first time I heard this song, it just spoke to me about my past and how long it takes to find the perfect man and how you have to kiss a lot of toads before you meet the right prince. So many of my songs are serious, and it has that funny sense to it that just appealed to me, that ‘Yeah, if I can laugh at this, then somebody else will."

Naive (Jamie O’Neal/Shaye Smith/Tim Nichols)
"I think everyone has that first love where you felt like you'd be together forever. When you’re young, you think, ‘I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that, then I’m gonna go here, then I’m gonna go there.’ You make all these plans, and you think there’s nothing you can’t do. You feel like you’re invincible. Meanwhile, the adults are laughing, patting you on the back saying, ‘Aw, don’t rush. You’ll find out when you’re older.’ You get so aggravated, but you eventually find out life just doesn’t work out that way. It’s funny to look back on it when you do run into someone from that period in your life."

Somebody's Hero (Jamie O’Neal/Shaye Smith/Ed Hill)
"I had been saying to all my co-writers, ‘I really want to write about family. I really want to write about my little girl.’ And the thing for me was, when you have a baby you start thinking about your own relationship with your mother. And when you were little, how much you looked up to them and then you move to, ‘Gosh, my baby looks up to me so much. I don’t want to let her down. I want to be a hero to her.’ And it’s not just your mother. You start thinking about the other generations of women—my paternal other grandmother - I was so close to her before she passed away, and I think that song is a real tribute to the women in my life."

When Did You Know (Tim Mensy/Monte Criswell)
"When you’re dating someone and you’re falling in love, you think they feel the same way. Then when they tell you they don’t feel that way and you’re not the one, it’s such a knife in the heart. And that question does come to mind—How long have you known this? When did you first know that you felt this way? What a waste of time that is, to sit around and analyze—‘Well, when we went here, did he feel…?’ ‘How could he do this to me?’ But you still do it. You cannot help yourself. I feel like that song is one of those pour-yourself-a-glass-of-red-wine-and-sob-in-it kind of songs."

Devil On The Left (Jamie O’Neal/Lisa Drew/Rivers Rutherford)
"One of my co-writers, Lisa Drew, is a big-time reader. She reads everything she can possibly get her hands on. She never really socializes, just so she can stay home and read. That's where she gets her song ideas. She was on a plane and read this story of a stripper, and the stripper had a tattoo of a devil on the left and an angel on the right. She said, ‘That's me—I’m a little bit this way and a little bit that way.’ And, of course, we made up our own story when it came to writing the song. I wanted to write a kind of swampy song, like ‘Fancy.’ We took the idea to Rivers, and it all came together."

On My Way To You (Jamie O’Neal/Shaye Smith/Tim Nichols)
"When I hear that song now, I think of my baby. There’s a plan for everyone, and you never know what that plan is. But the reason I wanted to write that song, and the reason I had that title, was my husband, and thinking, ‘What are the odds that a girl who’s born in Australia, that’s traveled the world as much as I did, meets up with someone from East Tennessee that stayed in one spot his whole life?’ He moved to Nashville, obviously, but to think that all these turns that I took led me to him, I just thought that was cool. It’s like the song ‘Naïve,’ how you plan things out, and how naïve that is, because you can’t plan your life out. You never know where something’s going to take you and what’s going to come out of your next experience."

Follow Me Home (Jamie O’Neal/Shaye Smith/Brett James)
"We always like to think when we get married that it’s going to be a bed of roses, and the honeymoon period’s going to last forever, but there are times when you just think, ‘I need space, I gotta think, I need to be away from you.’ Then when you leave, or they leave, this huge emotion comes over of ‘I can’t walk away from this. I need this person. I love this person too much. We’ve got to work this out.’ And this song’s about is reaching out and letting pride fall away. When pride gets in the way, it becomes a Mexican stand-off, and you refuse to give in. My husband and I are really like that. We have big blow-up fights, but we always know what’s important in the end."

Girlfriends (Jamie O’Neal/Lisa Drew/Jimmy Murphy)
"After I had the baby, I was emphatic that I don’t become one of those women that has a baby and doesn’t go out with their friends again, and doesn’t know how to have a good time because, ‘Oh, I’m a mom now. I can’t do that.’ So I still manage, when I put her to bed, to go out with my friends, have a good time, have a few drinks, and that’s what we wanted to write about - your girlfriends will always be there for you through thick and thin, no matter what. I wrote it with my dad and Lisa Drew, and it was funny, ‘cause Lisa said, ‘Can we say girlfriends kick ass?’ And my dad was like, ‘Ooooo, I don’t know about that.’ But it was two girls against one male, so he had no chance."

Ready When It Comes (Jamie O’Neal/Annie Roboff/Beth Nielsen Chapman)
"Beth has been through breast cancer, and I lost my grandfather and my aunt to cancer. We wanted to sing about the struggles of life, and we wanted to go from something that’s a little bit more run of the mill, like a nine-to-five job, to someone having to go through the hardest thing that anybody has to go through. And then the bridge obviously is finding the strength you need and realizing you had it all along."

Brave (Jamie O’Neal/Annie Roboff/Tim Nichols)
"I wanted to write a song about going through a hard time, feeling really beaten down, and thinking, ‘How do I come back from this?’ It’s really so hard when you have failure. Annie had been through some very hard trials, just like me. She’s fought a really serious illness for the last 10 years. She’s always trying to bounce back. She plays piano, and sometimes her hands are so sore she can’t play, she’s in and out of the hospital. No matter what happens around you, or to your body, you’re still basically the same person inside. And we wanted to write a song about that, because we could totally relate. We’d already written a verse and half the chorus, and Tim said, ‘What are we gonna call it?’ And I said I thought we should call it ‘Brave,’ because that’s what it’s about—the emotion of being brave enough to get through something."

I Love My Life (Jamie O’Neal/Shaye Smith/Tim Nichols)
"That song, to me, says it all. That’s why I wanted to end the album with it. The song is so me, and basically tells our story. It also means a lot to me because my baby girl's on there counting it off — and my little dog's barking at the end."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars She's back, March 4, 2005

By	Jake Z "holden84" (Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Jamie O'Neal finally returns with a follow up album to her fantastic 2000 debut SHIVER. With a great debut album like that, it's hard to come up with something just as good. In that respect, BRAVE is not as good as SHIVER. It's still got some great tracks though. A lot are leftovers from her unreleased 2003 album for Mercury Records, she was then dropped and signed to Capitol Records, and here we are now. The first single "Trying To Find Atlantis" is a top 20 hit and it's lots of fun, a great uptempo song. Other older songs making the cut are the fantastic ballads "When Did You Know", "On My Way To You", and "Ready When It Comes". The new songs will take more getting used to for me but some highlights include "Follow Me Home", "Girlfriends" (bound to be a big hit), and the title track. Overall, it's good to have her back in the music fold!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Brave" Finds O'Neal on Safe Grounds, March 4, 2005

By	T. Yap "thy4568" (Sydney, NSW, Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Prime Cuts: When Did You Know, Brave, Ready When It Comes

If a picture could paint a thousand words, O'Neal's latest CD cover speaks volumes. With her bronze tan and her platinum blonde locks, O'Neal's new Tara Reid looks compasses the direction of her latest musical venture. Slink, trendy, polished and pop-country savvy, "Brave" is glittered with all the beeps and whistles of modern pyrotechnics and a few sonic surprises (including hand claps, a kids' chorus and dogs barking). Fans of this Australian's debut record "Shiver," will find have much to savor as "Brave" continues the pop-country in-roads already paved by O'Neal's previous effort. Nevertheless, as a Nash-pop record, how does it flare? There is at least a knockout, a few tracks that could pass muster and a few perfunctory fillers.

Nowadays, few tracks have that arresting prowess to stop the listener dead in the tracks as in the Monty Criswell & Tim Mensy composition "When Did You Know." A gorgeous piano-and-strings power ballad punctuated with the penetrating chorus: "When did you know I wasn't the one," the demise of romance has had never been so acerbically captured in song. Fueled by O'Neal's melismatic delivery, this is powerful stuff---a track that has hit written all over it and it absolutely deserves incessant airplay.

Other soul stirring moments abound: the title cut, co-penned by O'Neal, is a little homily about weathering the storms of life. With her heartfelt delivery that resembles a more mature sounding LeAnn Rimes "Brave" is bound to incur "Amens" of ascent. Somehow this theme of strength in the midst of tribulation is carried over to the propulsive "Ready When It Comes." Co-written by O'Neal, Beth Neilsen Chapman and Annie Roboff, "Ready When It Comes" with its inviting melody and its inspirational lyrics are sure to assuage those who had been haggard by life.

The rest of the songs are pretty average: lead single "Trying to Find Atlantis," is a catchy upbeat number whereby the search for Mr. Right is likened to the hunt for the mythical city. However, though "Atlantis" is cute and novel, it's no where near the grandeur of being a musical world wonder. On the hand, with its heavy synth work, "Naïve" sounds like it belongs to a Lindsay Lohan album. The self-indulgent "I Love My Life" starts off with dogs barking and every cliché you can ever find in a country song. The banjo driven backings does not save this song from its ignominy. However, the real dub is the River Rutherford co-penned "Devil on the Left." Somehow someone must believe that more is better, this is why on this swampy blues rocker, almost everything is thrown in: from a "gospel" like choir, to a kids' chorus, to hand claps and soaring (and often deafening) guitars. And the ensuring result is that "Devil on the Left" is a work of chaos with the guitars almost drowning out a breathless O'Neal.

Ironically, "Brave" isn't O'Neal's most courageous album. Very much the songs color very safely within the bounds of current country music coming from Nashville. Though "When Did You Know" is a gem, it is indeed a career record in the making.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jamies BRAVE Return, June 15, 2005

By	D. Martino "musiclover" (Connecticut USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The wait is finally over for Jamie O'Neal's long awaited follow up to the 2000 hit cd Shiver and she delivers the goods. If you want a variety of music and styling this is the cd for you

Top pics; Tryin to find Atlantis, Devil on the left, Brave, When did you know and Naive.

The only downside to this cd in my opinion is the fact that she has a few filler songs that are lighthearted fun songs that celebrate her friends and family ( Girlfriends and I love my life). These songs also would mostly appeal to females ( being a male these are my least favorites)

Overall this is a great cd and Jamie O'Neal is one of the best female country vocalists out there today