Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s: Tim McGraw, “Grown Men Don’t Cry”

“Grown Men Don’t Cry”

Tim McGraw

Written by Tom Douglas and Steve Seskin

Radio & Records

#1 (2 weeks)

June 8 – June 15, 2001

Billboard

#1 (1 week)

June 16, 2001

I remember reading a review in New Country magazine in the nineties that observed the following: “Nothing ages worse than yesterday’s sentimentality.”

The writer was evaluating The Essential Dottie West, which focused on West’s work for RCA and included the astonishingly cloying divorce songs “Mommy Can I Still Call Him Daddy” and “Six Weeks Every Summer (Christmas Every Other Year.)” Even as a teenager, I had enough self-awareness to wonder how I’d feel about “Don’t Take the Girl” and “How Can I Help You Say Goodbye” when I was older.

Lord, can I tell the difference between those two records now, and I’ll throw “Grown Men Don’t Cry” in there for good measure. I don’t think this song is as cloying as the West hits or McGraw’s first big ballad hit, but the songwriters take a big swing and a miss with their poverty voyeurism, as a gorgeous metaphor for a hugging, struggling mother and son hits a harsh wall of judgment: “Like ice cream melting they embraced, years of bad decisions running down her face.”

It’s amazing to me that the songwriters who were able to write a genuinely heartbreaking second verse of an absentee father emotionally abandoning his son wrote something so disconnected from the realities of poverty in the first verse, but that might be an unavoidable side effect of having those who haven’t experienced poverty try to write about it. The songwriters would’ve been better served building an entire song around that graveside moment.

In recent years, new singer-songwriters like Jason Isbell, Ashley McBryde, and Kane Brown have all written much better songs that come from an authentic understanding of socioeconomic struggle. If Tim wants to go back to this well, he should check out those publishing catalogs.

“Grown Men Don’t Cry” gets a B-.

Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s

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