“She’ll Leave You With a Smile”
George Strait
Written by Odie Blackmon and Jay Knowles
Radio & Records
#1 (3 weeks)
December 20, 2002 – January 3, 2003
Billboard
#1 (3 weeks)
December 28, 2002 – January 4, 2003
Is this a mediocre song elevated by George Strait’s peerless vocal talent?
Or is this a sneakily great song discovered by George Strait’s legendary song sense?
Does it matter? Because goodness, is this an enjoyable record. We’re getting elbow deep into the era of unimpressive singers, making Strait stand out more as a singer than he ever did in the eighties and nineties.
He knows it, too, and it’s really on this album where his looser approach at the mic starts to surface. His albums were always good to great, but he takes more time in this decade to choose material and there’s less of an assembly line approach to his work.
All of this is to say that if he’d recorded this in say, 1998, I would probably lump it in with “True” as one of his lesser efforts.
But he sings this too damn well here, and that piano and fiddle instrumental break is the icing on the cake.
King George does a great job closing out the last year of the decade that will leave me with a smile.
“She’ll Leave You With a Smile” gets a B+.
Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s
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Not bad but just average for me. “C+”. Not really much else to say. These songs are good when listening to full albums, but we should be demanding a bit more for singles.
I said in my previous George Strait review that his output really started running together for me by the 2000s. Part of this was undoubtedly my slow-building general disconnect with most of what Nashville was putting out by now, but it’s still weird to look back at Strait’s two #1 hits from 2002 and realize I had no sense of where these songs fit on Strait’s timeline. I had presumed this one was from 2005, for instance, but that was apparently the similarly titled “She Let Herself Go”.
Anyway, this one falls short of most of Strait’s hits during his late 80s and early 90s heyday, but it lands with more charisma than “Living and Living Well”. It feels a bit derivative of Tim McGraw’s “Just to See You Smile”, but the lyrics and concept are still above-average and his vocal delivery works.
Grade: B
Another example of Crown Prince George the very good (King George will always be George Jones as far as I’m concerned). Worth something in the B to B+ range. The song itself is nothing special; however, George always delivers the goods vocally. Enjoyable but not especially memorable.
Early-noughts George feels a bit looser and more relaxed. It might not be a mind-blowing lyric, but it’s extremely engaging to me with just how chill and un-processed it is.
I still think “Run” and “You’ll Be There” are his best from the first half of the noughties, but at the same time, there isn’t a single dud in the bunch for me. The wheels started coming off around the “Troubadour” album for me.
This album also has a great cover of Rodney Crowell via Jimmy Buffett’s “Stars on the Water”. I get that one is polarizing for the Auto-Tune, but Strait’s blatantly used pitch correction since the 90s, and that song does it in a more stylistic way that I find appealing.
What I want to know is how in the hell George recorded two different songs both titled “She’ll Leave You with a Smile”, the former an album track from “Carrying Your Love with Me” (and B-side to “Round About Way”). I can get duplicating a more generic title like how Collin Raye has two different songs titled “If I Were You”, but “She’ll Leave You with a Smile” feels like too specific a title to duplicate accidentally. It even threw off Bob Kingsley at least once, but to his credit, he corrected it on a later show.
To my ears, this is one of Strait’s poppier melodies he sings on record. As always, he has the goods to elevate the material, though I agree this isn’t one of his most memorable hits. I do think that with time, I find that Strait’s 2000s output is better than his 90s output, but his 80s work is his best.