“Living and Living Well”
George Strait
Written by Tony Martin, Mark Nesler, and Tom Shapiro
Radio & Records
#1 (3 weeks)
June 14 – June 28, 2002
Billboard
#1 (2 weeks)
June 22 – June 29, 2002
This is as well produced a nineties country hit as one could hope for by 2002.
It wouldn’t have mattered what Strait was singing over this backing track. The fiddle and steel are in perfect harmony, and this was going to sound great on the radio no matter what.
But once you start listening closely, it falls short of the Strait standard. The melody is weak and the lyric relies on overly familiar imagery about the beauty of nature and the need for companionship.
“Living and Living Well” continues the trend that started in the mid-nineties, where Strait’s strongest singles usually fell short of the top while his more conventional ones parked there for weeks.
Check out “Don’t Make Me Come Over There and Love You” and “Run” to hear how Strait was still pushing the envelope artistically. But no need to turn this one off early. It still sounds great.
“Living and Living Well” gets a B-.
Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s
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Just boring. “C” at best. Typical of the majority of his songs. Decent and safe. It will always amaze me that he has the most #1 songs and was crowned “King George”.
Maybe it’s just my age, but I look at the list so far (including the next #1) and I vividly remember each song, hearing it on the radio, and seeing the video on CMT. If you showed me a list of #1s of the last ten years I’m not sure I’d recognize half the songs or even the artists. Will be interesting when you get to the 2010s and 2020s.
As my decades of country music consumption have progressed, I’ve noticed a pattern with veteran artists. The longer their resume of hits extends, the more likely everything starts to run together. The vocals in tandem with the production recorded in the same studios with the same musicians all just sounds too familiar to capture my attention. I was definitely at that place with George Strait by the time the 2000s came around. He still took a few risks, like on “Run” which you cited, and it helped that song stand out among his 2000s output even if it wasn’t a particularly spectacular song. But by the third decade of his career, most of his stuff just kind of lurked out there indistinguishably on my radio dial.
“Living and Living Well” certainly fell into this category for me. I always found it bland to the point of near invisibility. Giving it a listen for the first time in at least a decade for this review, I found the lyrics weren’t bad, if fairly predictable. And yet, I still got the same vibe I had 20 years ago of legacy-era George Strait on autopilot. As a thought experiment, I tried to imagine how I’d have felt about this song if it had come from an up-and-coming hitmaker back in 2002 rather than King George. If Brad Paisley or Keith Urban had recorded “Living and Living Well” with their respective stylistic flourishes, would it have been more than elevator music for me? The verdict: I’d have probably found it at least a little more fresh-sounding and certainly would have remembered its chronology in the summer of 2002 more clearly. On the other hand, if Paisley or Urban hit the charts with it two decades later, it would probably suffer from the same issue of it running together with the rest of their expansion-pack discographies which I’ve kind of burned out on. Unless I’m very unique on this matter, it certainly explains why just about every artist, even the most talented and popular, has a life cycle before radio and mainstream audiences tend to move on.
Grade: C+
…the comfort of three strips of bacon, two eggs sunny side up, hash browns, white toast and coffee at a howard johnson’s, this george strait hit. couldn’t remember it for my life but enjoyed hearing it today.
I like that both of the verses use beachy imagery. It gives it a bit more momentum.
I was just talking with my mom about George Strait yesterday and she said he’s “often good but rarely great”. And that’s where a lot of his stuff is for me. I do agree “Run” was a highlight.
Also the video link is still for “My List”.