It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Garth, Travis Tritt, Shania Twain, Collin Raye.

By Jonny Brick

1990 Garth – The Dance

The story has often been told that Garth Brooks heard Tony Arata perform this ballad at the Bluebird Café and was determined to cut it. With a quavering vocal, he sells the heartache and comes to terms with how he can only miss the pain having enjoyed that dance.

‘Our lives are better left to chance’ is his conclusion, even though he ‘held everything’ and felt like ‘a king’ as he embraced the lady, when ‘all the world was right’. The long piano outro, more Adult Contemporary than country, positioned Garth as a star beyond the genre he dominated.

1994 Travis Tritt – Foolish Pride

Tritt narrates this song, which he wrote by himself, painting portraits of a couple who have had the kind of argument that ends a relationship. The woman feels it would show ‘weakness’ if she called the man, so she continues to cry, while the man ‘punches out the wall’ and refuses to ‘crawl’ back to her with an apology.

The pair of them are ‘stubborn souls’, a sibilant line matched by how ‘in the ashes passion slowly dies’. It’s the type of song that provides lovers with the opportunity to say sorry, lest they end up in a similar situation.

1996 Shania Twain – No One Needs to Know

Shania keeps a crush secret on this acoustic harmonica-speckled toe-tapper, which she wrote with Mutt Lange, the man who became her husband.

Her voice flutters as she celebrates being ‘not lonely any more’, having been ‘hit by Cupid’ by the sight of a ‘tall, dark and handsome man’. The wedding cake, white dress and children can wait a while, though.

1998 Collin Raye – I Can Still Feel You

Here’s some poppy country in the vein of This Kiss by Faith Hill, on which Raye sings of ‘the sensation that someone just whispered’ behind him. He surmises it to be the woman he used to love, who haunts him ‘in everything that moves’.

It’s rare for such a dispiriting lyric to have such a bouncy melody, but it counters the singer’s heartbreak. It is as if Raye is content to hold her memory dear to him, where ‘no one gets close’ to places she had touched.