It’s The Nineties Episode 4: Number Ones from Tim McGraw and Faith Hill

By Jonny Brick

1994 Faith Hill – Wild One

Faith’s first single seized the top spot on January 1 itself and kept it for four whole weeks; a country star was born. Faith’s narrator delivers a vocal with a twang that would, like her husband’s, be airbrushed from her delivery as she became a capital-a Artist. Here, she sounds like her audience: Southern ladies who listen to Wynonna and Reba and Dolly, who love rock’n’roll and have the face of an angel, ‘running free’.

The major key setting supports her confident narration: she won’t change her clothes or comb her hair, and will go out with whomever she ruddy well pleases. ‘She’s on a roll and it’s all uphill,’ Faith sings, but she remembers how her daddy told her she could ‘be anything you wanna be’. Among the song’s writers is Jaime Kyle, who wrote the song Stranded that was taken into the Hot 100 by Heart; due to the ghettoisation of country music across the decade, this song never even had a sniff of the pop charts. Faith would have to wait for crossover success with This Kiss, Breathe and There You’ll Be to make a mark on the Hot 100…

1995 Tim McGraw – Not a Moment Too Soon

…And, indeed, It’s Your Love, which hit the top 10 of the pop charts in 1997 to mark the marriage of Faith and Tim McGraw. They will celebrate 30 years together in October 2026.

The fourth single and title track of McGraw’s second album, this followed his career song Don’t Take the Girl to the top. It’s a hugely banal song with a vanilla arrangement and plodding drums that recall 1980s soft rock. As with much early McGraw material, it sounds like Curb Records have listened to Garth’s first four albums, copied vast chunks of them, then stuck a bloke from Tennessee in a cowboy hat and got him to sing them.

‘Your sweet loved saved me’ is the key line of a chorus which is surrounded by verses of despair and doom. The narrator had been ‘at the end of my rainbow…no pot of gold in sight’ but Lord Almighty ‘when I saw you I knew I’d seen the light’. It sounds like a Jelly Roll lyric: ‘when I didn’t have a prayer’, ‘in my darkest hour’, ‘you rescued me just before I crossed the line’. The song fades out with a guitar solo; its B-side was album cut Refried Dreams.

1996 Faith Hill – It Matters To Me

Faith had vocal surgery after completing the promotion of her debut album, and ironically this is a song about a woman given the silent treatment: ‘where’d you ever learn to fight without saying a word then waltz back into my life?’

The chorus is morose, singalongable and suitably empowering for the era: it matters to the woman ‘when we don’t talk, when we don’t touch, when it doesn’t feel like we’re even in love’. Faith’s narrator asks ‘how can I make you see’, a line fraught with emotion which will chime with her target audience of mature women who might well be used to the silent treatment. Let us hope her own husband, whoever he may be(!), was listening. Dann Huff plays the guitar solo.

1998 Tim McGraw – Just to See You Smile

This sentimental ditty stayed on top for six weeks and was the third of five number ones from the album Everywhere. Again, McGraw overdoes the Southern accent as he compares his own status with that of his beloved: ‘You always had an eye for things that glittered but I was far from being made of gold’.

The narrator leaves his job to follow the lady from Amarillo to Tennessee, recalling how she looked at him and smiled. ‘It’s worth all that’s lost,’ he adds emphatically in the chorus over an unexpected G-sharp chord. After that chorus, however, we understand what’s lost: he ‘walked away and let you have your space’ and ‘yesterday’ brought the catharsis of poor McGraw bumping into her ‘with him. So I told you that I was happy for you’. But that was just a lie that he tells so he can get another one of those winning smiles.

Then the song fades out with fiddle and pedal steel crying out. Mark Wills didn’t want to record this, and he must be kicking himself to this day.

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