Gwyneth Paltrow's new country single offers passable synthesis of what you humans call "emotions"

By Sean O'Neal | July 27, 2010 | 5:59pm

Aux Features Music

Gwyneth Paltrow's new country single offers passable synthesis of what you humans call "emotions"

Gwyneth Paltrow—is there anything she can’t do? Besides break down complex carbohydrates, that is? The actress turned lifestyle dictator turned “Queen of the Kitchen” (according to the slogan ironically adjoining her food-eschewing frame on my wife’s current issue of Vogue) is also something of an amateur songbird. Paltrow previously proved her musical mettle opposite Huey Lewis in the karaoke dramedy Duets and opposite Jay-Z in "The Concert That Jay-Z Will Spend The Rest Of His Career Living Down," and most recently delighted visitors to her vanilla-scented salon by politely feigning interest in the bourgeois melodies of William Joel.

Now she’s dipping a featherweight, alabaster toe into the waters of country music with her new single “Country Strong,” taken from the movie of the same name where Paltrow plays a gunslinger for hire or something. Like everything Paltrow does, it’s a spotless imitation of actual human behavior, this time casting Paltrow as a poor country girl who’s “hard to break, like the ground I grew up on”—and while we can scoff all day about the idea that Gwyneth Paltrow ever grew up on anything harder than 600 thread-count Egyptian cotton (SCOFF SCOFF SCOFF), she’s obviously got the affected twang and pandering-to-the-heartland imagery down as pat as anyone else in the industry.