It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Reba, Reba with Linda Davis, David Lee Murphy, Dixie Chicks.

By Jonny Brick

1990 Reba – You Lie

This song joins the dozens which outline a woman’s heartache at not being loved. Reba’s voice swoops and soars as she complains how her man seeks to ‘lie until you can find a way to say goodbye’.

Reba’s narrator tells him to ‘let go’ and leave her, even though she adds ‘you know how much I love you’; such devotion is redundant when it is clear he does not want to be with her. In the chorus she holds the note on ‘lie’ to emphasise her predicament.

1993 Reba with Linda Davis – Does He Love You

Linda Davis, mother of Hillary Scott from Lady A, was Reba’s backing singer on tour, and she was given joint billing on this duet, which was written in 1982 and was intended for Barbara Mandrell and Liza Minnelli.

The lyric outlines a love triangle where Reba asks ‘is he deceiving me or am I deceiving myself’ by letting her man spend time with Davis. In the chorus, which is sung several keys higher than the verses, the singers echo one another’s lines, including ‘does he whisper all his fantasies?’ Both women sound tormented, Reba with ‘everything to lose’ and Davis with ‘nothing to gain’. There is no resolution, either.

1995 David Lee Murphy – Dust on the Bottle

Murphy claims he wrote this song in 15 minutes. Set to a catchy chugging rhythm, he runs with the axiom ‘good love is like a fine wine’: he picks up some homemade hooch from a friend and he seals the deal with a woman.

Murphy might be of an older vintage but he ‘gets sweeter with time’ so, when it comes to age, his advice is to not ‘let it fool ya’. There’s some fine verbal scene-painting too: his friend ‘reached through the cobwebs’ to grab the bottle, the couple ‘watched the sun fade in that big red sky’ and he sees the object of his affection ‘sittin’ in the porch swing’.

1998 Dixie Chicks – Wide Open Spaces

A classic from the moment it came out, this song outlines how people need to spread their wings and fly, with ‘room to make…big mistakes’. The song also underlines the circular nature of life as the girl’s mum recalls how she had struck out on her own too.

As well as the extraordinary chorus harmonies, there is a strong rhyme scheme: ‘follow/hollow’, ‘west/guessed’ and ‘child/tired’.