I read a quite amazing stat in last week’s Billboard Country Update: if you add up the top 10 hits that Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban and Jason Aldean have had, you get to 200. That’s a double century of melodic lyrics about life, love and, in Aldean’s case, being a good ol’ boy from Macon, Georgia.
I thought it would be a fun experiment, which might be quite subjective, to look at how many of those 200 songs would still be heard with any regularity in 2050, when all four of those men, having hit their seventies and eighties, have likely retired from the road and, like Brooks & Dunn and George Strait (but not Garth Brooks, strangely), become reference points for contemporary artists.
Indeed, three of the four have inspired other acts and have been namechecked in their songs: there’s obviously the one where Tim gives his name to the title of one of Taylor Swift’s many, many songs about heartbreak, while Lily Rose remembers being in the parking lot at a Keith Urban show in 2009.
Walker Hayes, meanwhile, complained on Shut Up Kenny that ‘every time I turn the ignition you’re on the radio again!’, and Steve Moakler hymned Chesney too on a reminiscin’ song about a Midwest girl who gave him a ‘cracked CD’ full of songs by the man who sang Trip Around the Sun and I Go Back, both of which are namechecked.
Will anyone quote any of Aldean’s 38 top 10s, just like Aldean remembered Joe Diffie on his own song 1994 or Johnny Cash on his fourth hit back in 2007 or the ‘old Alabama’ on the chorus of Burnin’ It Down? There are precious few evergreens among his three dozen hits, although Big Green Tractor is good fun and Take a Little Ride is the perfect manifestation of why commercial country music is made for stations that people who are ‘ready to ride this Chevy’ turn on.
Aldean’s duet from 2010 with Kelly Clarkson, Don’t You Wanna Stay, is the kind of song a young performer would reference as one that came on the radio as you were smooching a teenage beloved. The ur-bro country tune Dirt Road Anthem set in motion an entire decade of country music on the radio: a number seven hit on the Hot 100 that remained his biggest song until Try That in a Small Town made headlines for reasons less to do with its lyric and melody than its clickbaity video.
Will either of those be played in 2050? I don’t think so, much as how Ronnie Milsap, Clay Walker or Lady A are trapped in their respective eras, although if they have invested wisely Need You Now will put many of the trio’s kids through college.
Keith Urban is still having hits on country radio in his mid-fifties. His first to reach the top 10 was Your Everything back in 2000, which has the tenor and timbre of an NSYNC song: ‘I’ll be your compass, baby, when you get lost’ is a line not heard in 2024, either live or much on streaming services. Added to his total of 44 top 10 hits are several that were serviced only to Australian country radio: Polaroid, Superman, Shame, Straight Line.
Urban’s live show comprises a mix of tempo tunes like Somebody Like You and Days Go By, and ballads like You’ll Think of Me and Blue Ain’t Your Color. I have always loved Better Life, written with Richard Marx, and Break on Me, which also exhibit two sides of the Urban oeuvre. This half-dozen might last beyond Urban’s career as an active musician but, as befits a former rocker, a lot of his songs are about attitude and emotion.
This may be perfect for stadium singalongs but it tends to create vapid songs with little depth beneath the surface: witness Wild Hearts, Long Hot Summer, You Look Good in My Shirt, Somewhere in My Car, Kiss a Girl and Wasted Time, which closes Keith’s set proper with a chorus of woo-hoos and ganjo licks. Perhaps Highway Don’t Care, the Tim McGraw song that features a hook from Taylor and a guitar solo from Keith, will outlast them all (interestingly, Chris Molanphy thinks that Blank Space, Anti-Hero and possibly All Too Well are her future evergreen copyrights, with none at all from the new album.
Interestingly both Urban and Chesney have had help from Pink, Keith with One Too Many and Kenny on Setting the World on Fire. Chesney came through alongside Garth Brooks and combined the thrust of David Lee Murphy’s rock style with Jimmy Buffett’s coastal country to become a gazillionaire. I wrote about this when I looked at his recent album Born, which contains his record-equalling 61st top 10 hit Take Her Home.
Chesney will soon break the tie he holds with George Strait, who started having hits a decade before the Country Airplay chart launched in 1990. I didn’t know Chesney opened for Strait on a series of festivals in George’s name at the end of the 1990s, by which time had had several hits starting with the chirpy Fall in Love in 1995. His first number one She’s Got It All followed in 1997, one of many uptempo tunes that pepper his catalogue and live show to this day.
As with Keith Urban’s show, it goes long on feelgood and short on depth: Living in Fast Forward (written by David Lee Murphy) includes a line about a poor diet, Beer in Mexico is self-explanatory and Here and Now is a song about itself. Save It for a Rainy Day, written by Old Dominion, is a brilliant bit of hope in the heartache with a strong rhyme scheme and killer chorus, and the teenage romance Never Wanted Nothing More helped its writer Chris Stapleton buy his first house. (I can think of at least six copyrights that will outlast Stapleton, who has recorded the definitive version of Tennessee Whiskey.)
But will any of these songs outlast Chesney’s touring career to become country standards? Will anyone aside from No Shoes Nation sing No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem? I have a feeling The Good Stuff, How Forever Feels and The Boys of Fall, all meaningful and strong songs, will become standards, helped by their top 30 placings on the Hot 100.
Chesney’s biggest pop hit remains a song about a hangover, Out Last Night, written with Brett James and containing a bellowable chorus, while the country anthem to universal brotherhood Get Along is the perfect summation of Kenny’s latter period music.
I hope Down the Road, penned by Buffett’s sideman Mac McAnally, echoes down the ages, because I remember loving it when I heard Mac play it on his UK visit for Country2Country. I also love the message of Live a Little (‘love a lot’) as much as I love the slowburn intro that is a magical live moment; if I were programming a Best of Country Music stage show in the mould of GlasVille, I would include it without hesitation.
I would also have to include Live Like You Were Dying, the Tim McGraw standard which is essentially a montage video with a key change. McGraw started out as a Garth Brooks-modelled crooner singing about being an Indian Outlaw but became a great proponent of serious songs. The best is Red Rag Top about a teenage abortion; writer Jason White built a cabin on his land that he called Tim McGraw Greatest Hits Volume 2.
Don’t Take the Girl, McGraw’s first number one, remains a remarkable song full of pathos and pain, and stopped Stephen Wilson Jr in his tracks and made him want to write country music. That tune is the exact opposite of the honky-tonker I Like It I Love It, which is basically Achy Breaky Heart set to a singalong perfect for bar, arena or stadium. Rodney Crowell gifted McGraw Please Remember Me, while Phil Vassar wrote the good-time heartbreak tune For a Little While.
McGraw took the wedding ballad It’s Your Love to number seven on the Hot 100, while I was surprised Humble and Kind only got to number 30 considering it remains one of the greatest songs from parent to kid. Then, of course, there’s the story of meeting a girl at a county fair in a white t-shirt that was stained by BBQ sauce! A heart, and a listener, don’t forget Something Like That.
At this stage of his career, McGraw is his own tribute act: Standing Room Only is Live Like You Were Dying 2.0; 7500 OBO actually quotes the fiddle part of Where The Green Grass Grows; and Meanwhile Back at Mama’s brought back his It’s Your Love duet partner, wife Faith Hill.
I would love the pair of Felt Good on My Lips, a power-chord meetcute with a señorita, and the carefree Last Dollar (Fly Away), written by Kenny Alphin from Big & Rich, to be heard on Lower Broadway in 2050, because meeting girls and feeling free never go out of style. This also explains why, half a century after its release, Born To Run remains one of the greatest rock’n’roll moments.
As with the other three blokes, plenty of McGraw’s songs are there to be turned up to 11 and heard with a drink in one hand: witness Truck Yeah (written by Chris Janson and the guys from LOCASH), Southern Voice, Real Good Man and Watch the Wind Blow By, which is a song about nothing and sounds just as breezy. Of McGraw’s 60 top 10s on the country side, then, a dozen or so might have durability.
Every generation has its party songs, philosophical meditations and wedding songs. All four of these men, aside from Aldean who doesn’t really do philosophy, have perhaps one of every category: for Urban it’s Better Life, Days Go By (‘better start livin’) and Somebody Like You, along with the ballad Break On Me.
For Chesney, there are more thinkers than the others alongside party anthem Out Last Night and wedding song How Forever Feels. It’s the same for McGraw, who gives us It’s Your Love and Something Like That as well as the one about rocky mountain climbing (Live Like You Were Dying) and holding doors open for others to stay Humble and Kind.
Country music is a rich industry supported by an entire city in the South, but it must avoid becoming like rock’n’roll, a teenage fad which moved the needle and now has its former teens growing old before they die. Aldean, Urban, Chesney and McGraw all parlay rock’n’roll sonics into their country music, and so long as it makes money there is no stopping the presence of electric guitars in the genre.
I hope this has been a useful thought experiment to determine which hits become standards. If you are reading this in 2050 after the chip in your brain dug it up of the Infinitosphere, let me know if I’ve been proven right on this matter: have any Jason Aldean songs been added to the canon of country classics, or is it just Friends In Low Places and a dozen other Garth Brooks songs?