It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Dan Seals, Alabama, Brooks & Dunn, Shania Twain.

By Jonny Brick

1990 Dan Seals – Love On Arrival

Seals was the ‘England Dan’ of the duo who had an Adult Contemporary smash with I’d Really Love to See You Tonight; he wrote this number, a cross between Bruce Springsteen’s mid-1980s work and rockabilly, by himself. It’s full of acronyms, such as the LOA of the title, as well as TLC, TGIF and PDQ, the latter an American alternative to ASAP and standing for ‘pretty darn quick’.

‘Ooh I love this game,’ Seals coos, unaware what LOA means and having to call his beloved up after quaintly receiving her letter; it turns out she has been ‘countin’ the days’ until his return. Quite unfairly, Kevin John Coyne of Country Universe calls it ‘the first dud of the decade’, but the groove is seductive enough.

1991 Alabama – Down Home

Country’s hottest 1980s band kept having hits into the 1990s, and were still celebrating the joys of coming from ‘a little dot on a state road map’: ‘things move at a slower pace’, ‘a man’s good word and a handshake are all you need’. Plus, when you fall on hard times you can ‘fall back home again’.

The song is preaching to the converted, with listeners surely aware of, or indeed coming from, the kind of place where old folk sit ‘telling lies and crowning kings’ in a game of checkers while kids hit the town square and the Dairy Queen.

The schmaltzy middle section has the realisation that, though you might have wanted to leave as a young kid, it is a great place to raise your children, where ‘they know you by name and treat you like family’. The song would actually be perfect for inclusion in the musical Shucked, which in 2025 is coming to London’s open air theatre in Regent’s Park.

1995 Brooks & Dunn – Little Miss Honky Tonk

A Ronnie Dunn composition which opened the pair’s third album Waitin’ On Sunshine, this portrays Dunn’s narrator as a ‘big cat daddy’ who gets on ‘the redneck side’ with his beloved. When they head to the dancefloor, she is ‘a slick nickel, right on the money’, ‘a looker’ and ‘a showstopper’; the best rhyme comes on ‘way behind us/her highness’, with Dunn in awe of her.

If you’re thinking it sounds a lot like something Garth Brooks might have made, that’s because the musicians on the track were his players, the G-Men.

1998 Shania Twain – You’re Still The One

In fact, the same steel player who was on the Brooks & Dunn song, Bruce Bouton, caresses this evergreen wedding ballad whose narrator has triumphed against the naysayers who said ‘they’ll never make it’: ‘we beat the odds together’, ‘still going strong’.

The chorus is one of fidelity (‘still the one I want for life…the one I kiss goodnight’) and the arrangement is right in the intersection point of country and Adult Contemporary, a song even non-country fans can enjoy. It is surprising that no R&B band covered the song, in a sort of reverse of Piece of My Heart, although Prince cut a version of his own.

Shania performed as part of her Glastonbury set in 2024. To coincide with that appearance, she told the Song Exploder podcast that she wrote the song as a recently married woman. The harmonies in the chorus, which Shania calls ‘corny’, are by her then husband and producer Mutt Lange. After her divorce from Lange, she would be ‘choking down the tears’ when she performed it. These days she sings it ‘for everybody else’.

Chad J Country will be playing one of Jonny’s selections each week in his Wednesday show

Follow Jonny through The Nineties episode by episode.

For more country music evangelism, go to countrywol.com where you can read Monday essays, Friday reviews and Sunday Hymn Sheets. Follow Jonny’s Country Music Calendar at the Country Way of Life Facebook page (facebook.com/acountrywayoflife).

Any Given Songday and Stuck at Two, the pair of series which celebrate the centenary of the Grand Ole Opry, can be found at CountryWOL.com