“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.
Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s
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Next: Jo Dee Messina featuring Tim McGraw, “Bring On the Rain”
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.
Definitely a song to be appreciated more as you get older and can relate to the lyrics more. Tim’s delivery always sold me on this, along with the fiddle work.
As an aside, didn’t Cowboy In Me replace Jo Dee Messina’s Bring on the Rain (featuring Tim) at the top of the charts, making Tim one of the first artists in country to dethrone himself? Or was Bring On The Rain one of those songs that technically hit #2 and not #1?
I heard this one for the first time when Tim performed it at the 2001 CMA awards, and I quite enjoyed it, mainly because it was the most traditional sounding song I’d heard him do in quite a while. I always loved it too when I started hearing it during the Fall and Winter in late 2001. The fiddle, along with the song’s traditional sounding melody, plus the sort of “dark” theme about not liking what he sees in the mirror all made it a great song to hear during those colder months. I especially always loved the way Tim sung the soaring choruses, and you could hear the frustration and anger in his performance. And as Bobby mentioned above, I love how after the second chorus, the song pivots from the narrator’s self disappointment to him appreciating that his romantic partner has stuck with him and realizing that it hasn’t been easy for her, either. It really helps give an otherwise downbeat record some needed warmth. I’ve always loved the “We ride and never worry about the fall” line at the end, as well.
One thing I noticed the first couple of times hearing the studio version of “The Cowboy In Me” on the radio that I didn’t hear live on the CMA’s, was how the percussion was still pop sounding, no matter how traditional sounding the rest of the song may be. I especially noticed right away when in the first verse Tim starts singing “I’ve got a life that most would love to have…,” that the percussion heard throughout had that “popping” sound that I normally associated with the pop country of the time. I later realized that it was a part of Byron Gallimore’s new production style at the time in 2001, and that same “popping” percussion sound can be heard all over Jessica Andrews’ Who I Am album from the same year, as well. Strangely enough, the “popping” sound in the drums and percussion in “The Cowboy In Me” actually adds muscle to the sound of the record, and it makes that rough and rugged cowboy image come to life even more. Same goes for the electric guitar solos which add to the song’s toughness. And when McGraw does that quick little yell right before it launches into the first electric guitar solo, I can picture a bull rider trying to hold on for dear life during those eight seconds. Heck, I can picture McGraw himself dressed as a bull rider the whole time he’s singing this.
The song’s music video mainly being footage from his live shows was also a perfect choice, since the song’s muscular production style, especially the guitar solos, lends very well to Tim’s high energy stage shows. I had also forgotten that this was when Tim started sporting that “plastic” hat (or perhaps it’s leather). Strangely, him sporting the new shiny leather looking hat also fits the new modern style of this cowboy song, especially with the “poppy” sounding drums and percussion. I love it when the crowd goes wild after Tim sings “I guess that’s just the cowboy in us all” at the end.
Unfortunately, this song, like most of the Set This Circus Down singles, didn’t seem to have much recurrent life on our stations once it got to the mid 2000s. Once I got the album in 2012, though, it once again became a song I especially always loved hearing throughout the Fall and Winter, especially. I remember “The Cowboy In Me” coming on one Fall night while my parents and I were on the way back home from one of our more recent trips to Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax, VA around 2016. I was playing my late 90s/early 2000s Fall/Winter playlist from my ipod in my dad’s car while we were driving, and both of them seemed to also enjoy the song, with my dad saying he had not heard it in a long time. It was then followed by Sonya Isaacs’ “I’ve Forgotten How You Feel,” which I felt was such a perfect way to follow “The Cowboy In Me” sonically. Both songs really jumped out of the speakers with their drumming style, especially. Both my parents seemed to enjoy that one, as well. :)
Overall, “The Cowboy In Me,” is a song that I still really enjoy and appreciate today, and it’s another one of my favorite Set This Circus Down singles. While I haven’t had quite the same kind of progression and development in maturity as many of you due to autism, I can also identify with some of the sentiments such as not liking what I see when I look back on some choices I made, the restlessness, and me being “my own worst enemy,” since I often feel like I’m my own worst critic. I’ve also come to appreciate the “We ride and never worry about the fall” line more as time goes by, as I’ve always interpreted it as us just trying our best to enjoy the one life we have to live while staying true to ourselves.
What Tom T. Hall did for “country” as a signifier in 1975, Tim McGraw does for the “cowboy” in 2002. The song is inclusive and dynamic, keeping the cowboy mystique alive and accessible to us all.
I am no Tim McGraw fan, but I love this song.
While Tim Mcgraw’s output will always be hit or miss to me, this series has made me realize how many strong songs he actually recorded. This is one of them. Great fiddle work and message that gets better with age.