Invictus (Means) Unconquered
Invictus (Means) Unconquered is an album released by country musician David Allan Coe. It was released in 1981 on Columbia. Recording. With its radio-friendly sound and guest duets, Coe's previous album "I've Got Something to Say" was an attempt to reach a wider country audience, and this process is continued on "Invictus (Means) Unconquered", with producer Billy Sherrill couching the songs in tasteful instrumentation that put the spotlight squarely on Coe's voice. In his AllMusic review of the album, Thom Jurek calls the LP "arguably the finest album of his career" and singles  out Coe's vocals for particular praise: "Invitus" is also noteworthy in that Coe only had a hand in writing just four of its ten songs, although considering the songwriter had produced ten albums of nearly all original material for Columbia in seven years, a creative dry spell was understandable. "A Boy Named Sue" songwriter Shel Silverstein contributes three songs, including "Someplace to Come When It Rains", which gets a sensitive reading from Coe, and the parting-of-the-ways tune "If You Ever Think of Me", which the pair composed together. They also collaborated with Karen Brooks on the  lustful “The Best Game in Town,” and this song, along with the hopeful “As Far as This Feeling Will Take Us,” is sung by Coe and Brooks as duets in the classic George Jones-Tammy Wynette tradition. Coe wrote "Ain't It Funny the Way Love Can Do Ya" with songwriting couple Guy and Susanna Clark, and wrote the John Dillinger-inspired outlaw anthem “I Love Robbing Banks" with Guy Clark. Whether prompted by commercial aspirations or not, the covers that Coe and Sherrill chose to fill out the album were inspired. The opener, "Rose Knows", is the classic cheating  tale filled with the paranoia of a man dreading that his wife is suspicious of his trysts, while the Bobby David-Ray Kennedy tune "The Purple Heart", which Sherrill infuses with the classic "Ray Price shuffle", uses war as a metaphor to show the bitterness and heartbreak of a love gone sour. ("You put me out of action so many times before and left me on the battlefield to bleed...") Coe also covers the outlaw classic "London Homesick Blues", popularised by Jerry Jeff Walker, and, more curiously, the Tammy Wynette classic "Stand by Your Man". Coe plays it straight on  the song, which was written by Wynette and Sherrill, and is heartfelt and moving, taking on a new meaning in a man's voice - more of a plea than a declaration. (This would be taken to the extreme the following year when the heavy metal band Motörhead and Wendy O. Williams would also cover the song.) Released as the album's single, Coe's "Stand by Your Man" reached No. 88 on the charts. Reception. Like his previous albums in recent years, "Invictus (Means) Unconquered" was not a commercial success, making it to No. 67 on the country albums chart . AllMusic said "From top to bottom, "Invictus Means Unconquered" towers above most country records not only of the era, but of all time. It's a quintessential example of everything country music can achieve when it is honest, true, and from the center of a broken heart."