Three-time Grammy® Award winning country superstar Tim McGraw is set to release his highly anticipated new album ‘Standing Room Only‘ on Friday August 25, 2023 via Big Machine Records. ‘Standing Room Only’ features 13 brand new tracks and was produced by McGraw and his longtime producing partner Byron Gallimore.
When an artist, like McGraw, transcends a genre and achieves the type of career longevity he has achieved it is sometimes hard to review a body of work in the context of everything that they have released before. Age plays into the creative spark for any artist whilst trends, sounds and styles come and go too, making it difficult to say that songs on new projects measure up to the classics of yesteryear but it has to be said that ‘Standing Room Only’ is one of Tim McGraw’s strongest ever releases.
Speaking on the album, McGraw says, “As an artist, I always want to dig deeper and get better every time I make a new record – it’s a big part of what drives me, and I really believe this is one of the best projects we’ve made. I’ve been working on this album since 2020, and this collection of songs are some of the most emotional, thought-provoking, and life-affirming music I’ve ever recorded.” And he’s not wrong. There’s a depth and emotional impact to many of the songs on ‘Standing Room Only’ that really hits home hard. The melodies are there too and in an age when Country songs are getting shorter and shorter to appease the ‘attention span of a gnat’ Spotify listener, it’s great to see so many well-crafted, elongated songs, with terrific outros you can get lost in, on the album too.
Album opener, ‘Hold On To It’ explodes out of the traps in classic ‘Everywhere’ or ‘Set This Circus Down’ McGraw style and it’s not the only song on the album that feels like it could have come from that period either. ‘Hold On To It’ barrels along in a blaze of banjos and twangy guitars until it reaches a delightfully melodic chorus about love and how to hold on to it, so the meaning is there, right alongside the melody, something that is a huge feature of this album.
Similar ‘Classic McGraw’ sounding songs include the title track, which is a huge ballad that evokes memories of songs like ‘Live Like You Were Dying’ and ‘Humble and Kind’ as McGraw sings about being ‘somebody worth remembering.’ He aims to ‘stop judging my life by my possessions,’ on a song with a clear message that’s replete with huge piano flourishes and soaring electric guitars. ‘Small Town King’, meanwhile, co-written by the Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnston, sees McGraw paying tribute to blue-collar, small town workers all over America in typical Country music fashion. In the wrong hands a song like this could feel cliched and mawkish but a deft touch in the writing and some upbeat, uplifting melodies leave the song feeling like a dyed-in-the-wool McGraw classic.
If it’s classic 90’s McGraw that floats your boat you need to check out ‘Cowboy Junkie’ too. This track evokes a kind of ‘Where the Green Grass Grows’ meets ‘Shotgun Rider’ type of feeling on a song that espouses the joys of long term love whilst ‘Letter From Heaven’, one of two Lori McKenna writes on ‘Standing Room Only’ is the album’s ‘Humble and Kind’ moment. It closes down the album with a huge emotional gut-punch as McGraw ruminates on finding a letter from his grandma as he is cleaning out her house after he death. ‘I love you, god is real and now I get it,’ He sings, on a song about families, parenting and forgiveness that will be very personal and poignant to McGraw, given the complicated nature of his relationship with his own biological father.
The emotions don’t stop there though, oh no, this album has got feelings coming out of every orifice, in every which way it can! ‘Nashville CA / LA California’, the other co-write with Lori McKenna and the only song on the album to feature McGraw as a writer, is a tender, wistful look at two people kept apart by geography as McGraw dreams about a place ‘where the dreamers go and the stars hang low.’ ‘Her,’ meanwhile, is a straight down the line, redemptive love song in which McGraw pays tribute to ‘her’ for setting him on, and keeping him on, the right path in life. This track is typical of all the ones on this heavyweight album: it’s engaging, personal and meaningful whilst being melodic and jam-packed with electric guitars at the same time. ‘Her’, ‘Cowboy Junkie’ and the radio-hit-in-waiting ‘Some Songs Change the World’ all have elongated outros that clock in at up to two minutes in length which round off these well-crafted, mature songs in some style.
Since we’ve mentioned ‘Some Songs Changed the World’ we ought to look at the two big potential hit singles on this album, beyond the title track, which has already been released to radio. The aforementioned ‘Some Songs….’ alongside ‘Paper Umbrellas’ should be the tracks that provide Tim McGraw with the hits from this album: but what do I know? After all I thought ‘Neon Church’ from the ‘Here on Earth’ album was the best song Tim McGraw had released in years at that point and it didn’t seem to do what the label and the artist expected of it! ‘Paper Umbrellas’ is a wonderful, laid back Texan-tinged song about recovering from a break up. It benefits from the writing talents of Drake Milligan which give it that real George Strait-esque overtone – a sound and style that suits Tim McGraw really well. ‘Some Songs Change the World’, meanwhile, is THE big hit from this album. It’s a very commercial anthem that builds slowly as McGraw puts forward the hypothesis that it’s not the song that changes your world, but the girl you are with when you first hear it. Clever, nuanced lyrics and a big, impactful melody give ‘Some Songs….’ real gravitas and the kind of heft that McGraw seems to be able to do in his sleep: something most artists just never come close to capturing. A near two minute outro makes ‘Some Songs Change the World’ the most ‘musical’ track on the album as you get lost in the uplifting swirl of drums and electric guitars. Conversely, this last section, as good as it is, could also be cut for a ‘radio edit’ if needs be, meaning the song will work in a live arena setting full length but can be edited for the radio too.
‘Standing Room Only’ is a triumph of meaning and melody. For an artist of McGraw’s longevity it must be hard to keep motivating yourself to produce music of the highest quality but he’s gone and done it again. This album exists at that wonderful intersection where meaning and melody meet in a swirling morass of impactful, relatable lyrics and anthemic choruses that make you want to sing your heart out. It’s not a flashy, brash or showy album, it’s not an in-your-face project and it doesn’t shout or yell or demand attention like a noisy child: instead it works a quiet kind of magic with a chorus here or a bridge there. A lyric will grab you from nowhere one listen and then a different one will leap out on the next time round. It’s mature, grown-up Country music for people who have lived a little life and who are still trying to find the wisdom that dances just out of reach of us all as we stumble along the journey. It feels like Tim McGraw is searching for all the same things that we are in life and that is reflected on ‘Standing Room Only’, an album that must rank alongside his 90s classics as one of the strongest of his career.
Tracklist: 1. Hold on to It 2. Standing Room Only 3. Paper Umbrellas 4. Remember Me Well 5. Hey Whiskey 6. Her 7. Fool Me Again 8. Small Town King 9. Beautiful Hurricane 10. Cowboy Junkie 11. Nashville CA / LA California 12. Some Songs Change Your World 13. Letter From Heaven Release Date: August 25th Record Label: Big Machine Buy ‘Standing Room Only’ right now.
