A quick review of Danny Gokey's "My Best Days Are Ahead Of Me"

Dear Danny Gokey,

On your song, "My Best Days Are Ahead Of Me", you waste three precious minutes of my time to whine empty platitudes at me about how awesome it is that you are getting older. Every line seems to thrill at the prospect of using your "American Idol" experience to insinuate your way into households that only a year ago did not even know you were alive. The breathless way in which you eagerly chatter about absolutely nothing in the brightest, most chipper manner possible while assaulting poor unsuspecting listeners with a barrage of banal guitar riffs too pedestrian for Don McLean and just enough pedal steel guitar to further tarnish the legacy of country music reinforces two overriding things in a tortured, unfortunate listener:

1. As someone who was a former youth minister, you have a penchant for delivering entirely content-free messages that should make any halfway thoughtful or introspective person worry tremendously about the spiritual well-being of the children who were under your charge.
2. While, as you so fondly tell us over and over, your best days may be in front of you, our best days are most certainly behind us, because they are all of the days of our lives that occurred before we heard your awful, awful song.

Presumably this tepid offering is a harbinger of an album full of similarly vapid nonsense evoking lazy images of comfort and home with all of the originality of the Transformers movie, the passion of a wet paper bag and the musical introspection of a raucous rendition of "The Farmer in the Dell". Before inflicting this upon a public that, despite its flaws, never did anything to deserve this (aside, possibly, from slavery), I feel it is my duty as someone who has watched your transformation from the approachable blue-eyed soul singer at the original "AI" auditions into a self-important, abrasive charisma sponge to give you some long-overdue feedback:

Just stop.

Go home to your family, who loves you no matter what, and perform your wholly anonymous, embarrassing songs for them. They will give you the positive reinforcement you so desperately crave. The rest of us don't like you enough not to hurt your feelings.

Sincerely, someone about to gouge out his ears with blunt sticks.