Real Life

Listening to Lincoln Brewster is eerily like listening to Keith Urban, although instead of singing about romantic love, the open road and the secular joys of a new dawn and day, Brewster is singing about God, and that’s a slightly different agenda, although the search and need for love is still at the core of it. Real Life is Brewster's seventh album, and it’s a crisp outing, full of energy and pop dynamics — it sounds, really, like a contemporary country album, which means it has way more Eagles in its DNA than it does Merle Haggard or George Strait. It sounds radio ready, but this is pop music bent to utility — it’s praise and worship stuff (Brewster is, after all, the worship arts pastor at Bayside Church in Sacramento, CA and is a columnist for Worship Musician magazine). Among the highlights here are the upbeat opener, “Best Days,” and the redemption-seeking “Reaching for You.”