Flashback: Tracy Byrd, Big Love

I guess the time is right to shine a light on Tracy Byrd’s 1996 MCA Album Big Love.

For starters, Flashback has been featuring “minor” projects produced by Tony Brown, while the County Universe series featuring every No. 1 single of the 2000s recently celebrated Byrd’s third and final chart-topper “Ten Rounds with José Cuervo.”

I first became aware of Tracy Byrd with the single “Why Don’t that Telephone Ring?” from his 1993 eponymous debut, co-produced by Keith Stegall and Tony Brown. His second album No Ordinary Man was produced by Jerry Crutchfield in 1994. In 1995, album number three, Love Lessons, would see Tony Brown return as Byrd’s producer, but it wasn’t until Big Love that Byrd fully arrived as an artist with Brown still in the producer’s chair with full creative control and a clear vision for Byrd’s career.

Despite not producing a number one hit, this album was by far Byrd’s most consistent and cohesive one to date and a clear stepping stone to even better albums further down the line.

In the 1996 holiday issue of Twang, a short-lived magazine dedicated to country music and style, Merle Haggard wrote a review of Big Love. Haggard said, “ I think Tracy Byrd is a singer understands the responsibility he has to his audience and to country music in general.”

Haggard also talks about “the elusive listener connection” which Byrd capably makes throughout this collection of ten surprisingly strong songs and diverse styles.

Four albums into his young career, Byrd settled into a more confident and comfortable place understanding the weight of that responsibility, especially as a vocalist.

As always, Brown provides Byrd access to some of Nashville’s top songwriters such as Shawn Camp, Harley Allen, Mark Nesler, Tony Martin, Dean Dillon, Craig Wiseman, Kostas, and even Harlan Howard. Byrd is a co-writer with Mark Nesler on my favourite track “Tucson Too Soon.” Even Merle commented, “I would like to have heard Tracy sing a couple more of his own songs. He’s a fine writer.”

Brown also made sure Nashville’s top session players backed Byrd here as well.

“I Love You That’s All” is written by Chris Crawford and Tom Kimmel. A wonderfully concise and to-the-point song about goodbye, is noteworthy if for nothing more than the stickiness of its chorus: “Now I don’t have one thing against you/ You are breaking my heart, not the law/ The angel I made you into had to fall/I’ll miss you, I love you, That’s all.”

The Kostas/Harlan Howard co-write “I Don’t Believe That’s How You Feel” beautifully swings and is evidence of Haggard’s observation that “I’ll bet if he had his druthers, he’d be singing Bob Wills, Jimmie Rodgers, and Hank Williams.” Across his discography, Byrd always demonstrated a facility with Texas dance music which was so much more warm and interesting to listen to than his mainstream line-dance numbers.

Byrd is also a fine vocalist. He absolutely nails the breezy emotional urgency of a man recognizing he cannot find himself if he stays in a doomed relationship. I have always loved the line, “I’ve given you the best of me and now the rest of me/ Is gonna take a ride.”

Byrd released four singles from Big Love. Both the title track and the excellent Johnny Paycheck cover “Don’t Take Her She’s All I’ve Got” went top ten on Billboard. “Don’t Love Make a Diamond Shine” reached #17 while “Good Ole’ Fashioned Love” barely cracked the top fifty.

He is more than up to the task of tackling the quirkiness of Shawn Camp’s and Harley Allen’s “Cowgirl.” Its a charming song about a fellow with car problems who cuts across a cattle pasture to get to a farm house. He gets thrown by a bull and comes to staring at a woman’s knees, which leads to the opening line of the chorus “With calves like that/You must be a cowgirl.” The love song is fun and silly in the best of ways.

The opening of the title track punches like a cross between peak Brooks & Dunn and Tim McGraw while staying firmly in Byrd’s wheelhouse. This effect might be Brown’s doing. Of the producer, Vince Gill said. “ If Tony has a secret as a producer, it’s that he is smart enough to let the artists be the artists and not attempt to dictate his own production values so that it comes out sounding like a Tony Brown album.”

Big Love sounds like Tracy Byrd making good on the promise of his debut album. It is both contemporary and country, rooted while reaching for the sun.

Unfortunately, Byrd has been unfairly cast as a singer of novelty songs. The big hat, tight jeans, and belt buckle also scream he is just a George Strait clone as well.

Tony Brown himself said, “I do think this explosion in country music has created that same kind of virus that so often hits pop music. A lot of A & R guys in Nashville right now are signing acts on some cool song they’ve found and thrown an album and video around it. And it’s often with an artist who, you know, is sort of generic. Sort of looks just like somebody else… All the guys are copying each other, song-wise-look-wise.”

The cynical and quick take is that this applies to Brown’s own artist here. A closer listen to Big Love, however, tells a different story, or as Haggard observed in the closing paragraph of his album review, “One of these days the young Mr. Byrd will have the ability to make whatever kind of music he wants to.”

Byrd would do that with later albums like 1999’s It’s About Time and 2006’s Different Things.

Sometimes I may get sentimental about ’90’s artists, but the joy of Big Love is you can hear Tracy Byrd beginning to do that right here.

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