dimestore

They may well have plucked certain strings in the national psyche – played us like a dimestore ukulele – but we were keen to be plucked.

At an event in Oklahoma on Sunday, Beck went full dimestore preacher, telling audiences that “our guy has the best chance of winning, because we have the Almighty God on our side!”

They contain dimestore novelties and junkshop tchotchkes, mostly collected on rambling trips to Manhattan.

There is nothing as cutting as “Merry Go ’Round” here, and in fact with “Dimestore Cowgirl” the singer from tiny Golden, Texas, seems to be slipping a subtle mea culpa to anyone who thought she had been too harsh on small-town life, offering her own version of a timeworn, near-mandatory genre mantra with the line “you can take me out of the country but you can’t take the country out of me.”

“This all-out attack on the sense of smell,” complained the New York Times, “assaults the nose as a mixture of paint thinner and dimestore perfume, and leaves a sweet, cloying scent reminiscent of an undertaker’s parlour.”