Last Dollar
- The song mentions, "I don't have to worry about things I don't have, because if I don't have nothing, I have nothing to hold me back". McGraw is the number one singer in the states on pure volume, so this line sounds deluded. Same thing when he talks about having nothing to tie him down, and how he is glad that the subject of the song "is here today" because "tomorrow he has to fly away" For someone who has been married for a decade to a super star, and who has made a career with her, things obviously hold him back. That said, voluntary simplicity, rejection of capital, rich men and camels and eyes of the needle, pleasure before all: however you want to phrase it, it's the story of the rambler whose first priority is to his own autonomy.
- The song is produced to the hilt, it has a children's choir and a section where the slick edges drop off into something resembling Carter Family era noise. It is an excellent example of studio craft, but it seems raw and half put together, and kind of rambling. The same thing with the video. It begins with a test pattern, then the brackets of a film, scratched out frames, dusty frames, sections that are heavily polarized, black and white bits that look like a redneck Cocksucker's Blues. The video looks like the song sounds, i.e. like shit on purpose, purposefully decayed to match the ambiguity of the songs call to pleasure. It's an excellent introduction.
I'm Workin'
- The next song is a refuting of the first. A working class anthem, serious and exhausting, from the first melancholy notes. A strum of an acoustic guitar, then his voice—and the first line: "damn I hope no one dies on this night shift tonight, always light up like a roman candle". After that, the music opens up a bit, subtly.
- He has the audacity to rhyme heaven and seven eleven without sounding forced. When he sings about how working to take a spouse, is a necessary evil the most obvious lines are under sung, and the most haunting are over sung. It almost seems too intimate and we feel like voyeurs for listening.
Let it Go
- A Pattern emerges. Another song about the exhaustion of working for a living, and this one is pushed a little harder, and it does mention escaping. He talks about letting the rain "wash it all away".
- Paranoia and a fear of the past almost prevent this from happening, but the hope is there.
- One of the best-written songs, but the production is pure music row and the lyrics are a bit manipulative, with a large dollop of middle American optimistic Protestantism. When he talks about knowing he will be forgiven, and how the rain becomes a kind of baptism, there is legitimacy to that, but its also a sop to the audience, kind of cynical fake hope that sells albums.
- Last Dollar provided a way for the audience to give up on the life that is holding them back. This provides little but solipsism.
Whiskey and You
- A fantastic drinking song, one of several on the album. The song could have rested on a punch line: the difference between whiskey and women is that you can always get another bottle of whiskey, and heartaches last longer then hangovers but his emoting take all that away.
- He is broken, "I drink cause I'm Lonesome and I'm lonesome because I drink", is a paradox of alcoholism, the way he sings it, with a sloppy over emoting, sounds like a drunk, at the end of the bar.
- I wish that the instrumentation didn't get into its groove quickly. McGraw's vocalization is almost sloppy, and the track should have been as well.
Suspicious
- Almost rockabilly, with sinewy guitars, the instrumentation snakes around his vocals, and he extrudes them into something dangerous. When he makes the phrase deep suspicions last 15 bars or so, there is a menacing lure to his desire to control the women in question.
- I like the narrator hates himself—she is good looking, she will be stolen, it is his fault. It is Dolly Parton's sung by the boyfriend. Except Jolene was so desperate in begging. There is something resigned here, instead of please don't take my man, it becomes I am not enough man to keep you. To admit being emasculated in this context has unrecoverable tension.
Kristofferson
- Tim doesn't write his own songs. He doesn't need to. The point here is kind of relevant, because the song is about a woman leaving, and to explain her absence, she leaves a half page note. He finishes the note off, getting drunk, and writing a song "like Kristofferson would do"
- The song doesn't "need to rhyme, even be in time, it just needs to be real". This is unfair to Kristofferson, whose songs are sophisticated creations that only seem to be free floating feelings. The song then, is an apologetic for country's purpose in writing. The song is so tightly contained, that a spurious mention of Kristofferson is almost gilding the lily. But it also suggests a willingness to live with the history of his genre.
Put Your Lovin' On Me
- What exactly does put your lovin: on me mean, or take this weight off me. Is it a Jesus song, a sex song, a song about friends or about wives and husbands. The purposefully ambiguous reciting of the same 12 words over four minutes has the energy of a prayer of intention and it almost works.
Nothin' To Die For
- He lists things to die for, and it's the usual red state list: wives, country, children, friends, and Christ. Except he says your Jesus, like Christ is this personal force and we each have our Christ open to interpretation.
- The point isn't about what you are willing to die for, because the list is long and kind of boring. The problem is one of priorities. When he sings the second list in the song "The Inbox and Outbox You in, the money you make isn't worth the time you spend, the graveyard's full of folks who don't have time to die," and the song goes from soft to loud, ever so subtly. It's Last Dollar again. He understands the need to feed and clothe those you love, but the accumulation of things for the sake of things is not like your wife or kids or faith or even country. There is no point in working to death for material objects.
Between the River and Me
- It's a song about Patricide, well-hidden, well-deserved patricide, and the song swings.
- The Chorus runs quick and fast, swings like a man at the end of a hangmen's noose.
- It's a really nasty song, with plausible deniability; the narrator is a 14-year-old boy who kills his abusive stepfather, with an instrumental break that is harsh and angular, and a voice that is frightening in its self-possession.
Train No. 10
- IT reminds me of Josh Turners break through hit, Long Black Train which was a song about religious salvation intended for those who are saved. This song is being not sure that salvation is not even possible. Turner has the propulsive, mechanical energy of all good train songs. Train No. 10's flows around the central metaphor, languidly. There is almost no energy to a song about missing the last train out of town on purpose.
I Need You
- The duets between Hill and McGraw move decadently towards pleasure as opposed to obliteration and heartbreak. They are convinced that the obliteration will come. This song consists of McGraw and Hill singing the same lists of metaphors for desire, both secular and sacred. The lists become intimate acts between two partners. Hill almost whispering her sexual longing for McGraw, and McGraw rambles through his unsettled, devotion he has to his sexual partner. It's a love song, but not the love song that one expects from a married couple.
Coming Home
- I wonder if this track was intended as a corrective to the one previously, because it is as much about fidelity as the other song was destructive. A song based on marriage, and the home front, it will be the bigger hit, and there is something touching in its simple call towards the hearth.
Shotgun Rider
- And the last song sounds a lot like, with the phrasing and instrumentation of Mama's Don't Let your Babies Grow up…and talks about being a shotgun rider to Faith Hill. Three duets to end the album, a trinity. Two of them are about rambling thorough wide swoops from West Virginia to Texas, finally letting the words subside into a virtuoso coda that recalls Waylon, Willie and the Boys.
Going through this listening one thing came to the forefront. Tim McGraw knows how to construct or curate an album. He chooses the writers for an emotional and thematic breakdown, as opposed to a strong narrative sense. He makes sure that the music has enough history to be called country, and enough of the current marketplace to be called pop. His voice croons when it needs to croon and shouts when it needs to shout, and can be called organic as much as it can be called a construction of the studio. The album is intense, moving, delicate, and important, but refuses initially to play the games expected or at least he's clever enough to play the games so the rules change to his talents and gifts. This might be his strongest work yet.
