Billy Ray Cyrus
Sunday Selections: September 11, 2016
It’s Trio Collection release week, y’all!
Single Review: Tim McGraw, "Better Than I Used to Be"
Flipping through an old country magazine, I read a review of Tim McGraw’s then-new album, Everywhere.
The journalist noted his surprise at the title track, which demonstrated more subtlety and gravitas than he’d previously thought McGraw was capable of.
That was so many years ago that it’s hard to remember that McGraw was something of a novelty singer back in the day, a step or two above Billy Ray Cyrus but not quite up there with Joe Diffie.
The 30 Day Song Challenge: Day 14
Today’s category is…
The First Song You Remember Liking.
Here are the staff picks:
Tara Seetharam: “She’s Not Cryin’ Anymore” – Billy Ray Cyrus
Cyrus released “Achy Breaky Heart” when I was seven years old, and I fell for it. The upside? My mom bought me his Some Gave All cassette tape, and I fell in love with “She’s Not Cryin’ Anymore.” It was the first song in my life to grip me with emotion, which would later come to define my bond with music.
400 Greatest Singles of the Nineties: #150-#126
Signature hits, breakthrough hits, and why-weren’t-they-hits abound in this entry.
400 Greatest Singles of the Nineties: #150-#126
#150
Gone Country
Alan Jackson
1994 | Peak: #1
A perfect time capsule of the boom times, as Jackson wryly notes all of those genre-hoppers who saw dollar signs in the growing country music scene. Funny how they didn’t arrive on radio until a decade later. – Kevin Coyne
#149
I Want to Be Loved Like That
Shenandoah
1993 | Peak: #3
Sometimes the deepest understanding of love comes from what you see around you. The narrator in this song won’t settle for anything less than the unwavering love he’s witnessed in his life, and his examples are stunning in the way they slice straight to the core of love, to the bond that can’t be broken by the physical world. This is one of the purest tributes to love I’ve ever heard. – Tara Seetharam
How Very Nineties: George Jones & Friends, and other All Star Jams
New fans of country music in the nineties were hit over the head with the assertion that country music was one big family. Nothing demonstrated this mythos better than the all star jams that cropped up during the boom years.
There were some variants of this approach. A popular one found a veteran star teaming up with one or more of the boom artists to increase their chances of radio airplay. George Jones was big on this approach, with the most high profile attempt being “I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair.” Seventeen years later, it’s amazing to see how young everyone looks – even Jones himself!