It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Collin Raye, Vince Gill, Ty Herndon, Tim McGraw

By Jonny Brick

1992 Collin Raye – In This Life

On this piano ballad, which is ideal for weddings, Raye sings of how ‘without your love I would be lost’. Should this love ever end, it would have been ‘the only dream that mattered’.

Ronan Keating would go on to record the song, which was written by the same pair who wrote I Can’t Make You Love Me, Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin.

1993 Vince Gill – One More Last Chance

Gill’s narrator is reduced to begging for mercy, apologising to his lady about how he drives her ‘crazy’ by going out drinking with the fellas. When he mentions driving into town on a John Deere tractor after she takes his car keys away, he is referring to an infamous story about George Jones doing the same.

The arrangement is superb, with fiddle, piano and Gill’s guitar being joined in places by a harmonica.

1996 Ty Herndon – Living in a Moment

Here’s a power ballad where Herndon sings ‘I’ll live to love you, I’d die to keep you’. It looks forward to the day he is buried when the headstone should read that he was ‘a man who got all he ever wanted’.

The fiddle is prominent throughout the song, whose lyrics Herndon sings with warmth.

1998 Tim McGraw – Where the Green Grass Grows

Here’s another timeless McGraw classic full of fiddle and comfort, where the singer’s early twang shines through; he softened it after his songs started to cross over to pop audiences. Incredibly, it was picked as the fifth single from his album Everywhere, where it sits as the opening track thanks to the introductory fiddle solo.

It opens with an image of six lanes of traffic like ‘red ants marching into the night’ and McGraw’s narrator eating ‘supper from a sack, a 99-cent heart attack’. He dreams of a place where ‘the peaceful river flows’, where he and his family can ‘watch my corn pop up in rows’.

The song is all the more bittersweet because the narrator once left such a place, ‘a map dot, a stop sign on a blacktop’. Having been in the city for so long, he wants the comfort of knowing his neighbours again. There’s a nice image of ‘bars on the corner and bars on my heart’, suggesting that he is trapped in a place where ‘all of this glitter is getting dark’.

In the final few bars, the melody becomes syncopated and there’s a small rest before the final, resolved chord.