“The Cowboy in Me”
Tim McGraw
Written by Al Anderson, Jeffrey Steele, and Craig Wiseman
Radio & Records
#1 (3 weeks)
March 1 – March 15, 2002
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
March 16, 2002
I’ll be 46 next month, and it feels like reminders of my age are everywhere. I still wasn’t prepared for the feeling of pulling up a song’s Wikipedia page and seeing my own words from many years ago looking right back at me.
Music is such a personal thing, and it’s tethered to where we are in our lives. The song remembers when, but it’s memory can play tricks on you.
Maybe I was just too young and hadn’t made enough mistakes to truly appreciate “The Cowboy in Me” back in the day. But this is a banger of a song to my middle aged ears.
I took stunning fiddle work like this for granted in 2002, but it’s such a balm on the soul today. McGraw’s vocal is expressive and appropriately remorseful. But more than anything else, it’s the songwriting that I really underestimated. Now that this scene has played out so many times over the years, lines like “The things I’ve done for foolish pride” and “The face that’s in the mirror when I don’t like what I see” just hit different.
Oh, the things I didn’t know back when I knew it all. Consider this my first rediscovery of this decade.
“The Cowboy in Me” gets an A.
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I was so glad when McGraw released this song. A lot of artists would have allowed it to be buried as an album track.
But McGraw was smart enough to see the potential in the song. When I first listened to “Circus”, I fell in love with this. Just a beautiful song with excellent lyrics that most could relate to.
Definitely an A for me.
A very good song. I would give this one a “B+”.
I am similar to you in age and, probably not coincidentally, had a similar journey as you did with this song. I always thought it was clever and sonically satisfying–and never really viewed it as a country lifestyle anthem–but I suspect my biggest grievance at the time was that I was craving something uptempo from McGraw after three years of mellow radio hits, yet I kept getting more ballads and midtempo numbers.
Fast forward a generation and the song absolutely hits harder, both as an anthem of critical self-reflection and a poetic parable for soldiering through a challenging relationship. The song’s neatest narrative trick is the long interlude following the narrator’s opening verse rumination, punctuated by the chorus repeated twice, and then the pivot to the narrator’s recognition of his spouse exhibiting the same qualities, perhaps at her own peril. And another part of the song’s appeal is that the “cowboy” connection is entirely metaphorical. The narrator looking in that mirror may well be a Wall Street day trader rather than someone who works the land under the Western skies, but one who seems symmetry with the romanticized cowboy image for mostly dubious reasons. It’s the dissonant psychological version of a country lifestyle anthem, dwelling on the theoretical and mostly unflattering version of that lifestyle.
“The Cowboy in Me” was easily my favorite of the four singles from “Set This Circus Down”, and I suspect others of my vintage who had a more modest appreciation for it 20 years ago would find much more to like about it if they found it today.
Grade: A
Tim was on a generational run from Everywhere through Live Like You Were Dying. This is one of the best singles of that era and of his career.
…indeed, personally i’d even count “not a moment too soon” and “all i want” to that batch of yours, which would make it a decade full of terrific albums. like so many of his songs, i loved that one from first listen. i don’t envy those, who will have to try and capture the mcgraw-magic on a tribute album one day (that hopefully may still be a long way off).
I’ve never been the biggest of Tim McGraw fans; however, he was good at selecting material. I was month shy of my 50th birthday when this song hit, so my perspective was likely different than most of CU’s readers. This song is borderline B+/A- for me
Much like with you, this is a song that I found I liked more as I grew older. This song didn’t mean much to me in 2002, when I was all of 15. But listening to it more in my 30s, I ended up appreciating it more than enough to give it a spot on my 300 favorite singles of 2000-09. I love how the last verse shifts the perspective to “the cowboy in you” and “the cowboy in us all”, as if he’s realizing late in the song that his personal struggles are common to other people, too. It’s a unique dash of empathy here.
Also, if there’s a Country Universe citation on Wikipedia, there’s probably about a 50-50 chance I was the one who added it.