Tim McGraw finds his heaven with new ‘Here on Earth’
The singer’s 16th album was culled from 26 songs he wrote over two years.
The idiom says you can either “go big or go home.” Tim McGraw prefers to do both.
Even with his 2020 tour sidelined by the pandemic, the country singer has his hands full. He’s torn through seven books on his summer reading list, including “The Pope and Mussolini” and a Babe Ruth biography.
He’s picked up several truck beds’ worth of flowers to spruce up the entrance of his Nashville, Tennessee, home. His wife, fellow superstar Faith Hill, wanted to “go all out” for their daughters – the youngest just graduated from high school, and the older two returned home for the summer.
And then, of course, there’s new music. A lot of it. On Friday, McGraw released “Here on Earth,” a 16-track album culled from 26 songs he recorded over the last two years. And somehow, it’s unlike any of the 15 albums that came before it, with a range of songs that are keen to build atmospheres for listeners to soar through.
“It wasn’t a concept album, but I wanted to create a tapestry of life in a lot of ways,” McGraw says. “And each song would be these little vignettes of life as you go along.”
It kicks off with a track that he says is already one of his all-time favorites. “L.A.,” a swirl of violins and laid-back guitar, is not only an ode to the West Coast, but the iconic sound of Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb.
“Chevy Spaceship” speaks to all of us looking to break from reality with a nighttime drive, though this song blasts off with “a cooler of floatin’ cans,” some cigarillos in the glove box and that special someone.
But for all its escapism, “Here on Earth” is emotionally grounded. At
53, McGraw relates to a song such as the standout “Hold You Tonight” as a husband, a father and soon-to-be empty nester, vowing to wait while a loved one goes out in search of “the match that lit the fire that made you wild.”
He also is singing as a son: “I Called Mama” is the album’s first single and is one of several songs that have found new resonance in the age of social distancing. In fact, “Mama” and other songs that were finished before the pandemic were revisited and remixed to reflect how McGraw and his collaborators were feeling now.
“They pop your eyes open a little bit more than they did originally,” he says. “The meanings are a little deeper.”
‘I’m not Pavarotti’
McGraw announced “Here on Earth” (and a return to Big Machine Records) in February, which feels like a lifetime ago. But the roots of the album were planted long before when he and his wife were on their 2017-2018 “Soul2Soul” tour.
“I elevate my game because of her, having to sing with her every night,” he says. “I can emotionally tell you a story, and I can sing OK, but I’m not Pavarotti. But Faith, to me, is one of the greatest singers in the world.”
As on past tours with Hill, McGraw says it lit a creative spark. As lasers danced around the couple on stage each night, he began thinking of visual and sonic concepts. At the same time, a bunch of “really great songs,” including “L.A.” and “Chevy,” started coming his way. Soon enough, he was zigzagging from the stage to the studio.
“I spent the night at the studio a couple of times, trying to get work done, and then we’d go back out and hit the tour the next week,” he recalls. “Creativity, for me, comes in bursts. It’s not something that just lives there all the time, and you can just wake up in the morning and go record a song. I have to be inspired, and I was really inspired during that process.”
Fourteen years ago, McGraw became the namesake of what’s probably the most famous song named after a famous singer. “Tim McGraw” was the debut single by a precocious 16-year-old named Taylor Swift, and the rest is history. Now he’s doing the same, as “Here on Earth” includes a song called “Sheryl Crow.”
“You’re like the first time I heard Sheryl Crow on the radio,” he sings. “One song, had to have the whole record/ Gonna be stuck in my head forever.”
McGraw says Crow has heard the song and “sent me the sweetest email about how much she loved the song and appreciated the sentiment.”
“I Called Mama” also was an instant favorite of his mom’s, especially when he decided to use a photo of her for the single art.
“It was (taken) right before she found out about me. She got pregnant with me her senior year of high school. That was sort of poignant in a lot of ways. I texted her, I told her I was using her (photo) in the artwork, and she said, ‘Send me what picture you’re gonna use.’ We had already finished it, but I sent her the picture, and she goes, ‘Does this mean I’m a movie star now?’ “
‘We miss it terribly right now’
Before the coronavirus changed everything, the “Here on Earth” tour was scheduled to be traveling through amphitheaters on the West Coast this weekend. Instead, fans have bought tickets to Friday’s “Here on Earth Experience,” a streaming interactive event complete with performances from Ingrid Andress and Midland, who were to be his opening acts. McGraw has been seen performing at home throughout the pandemic, whether it’s for a TV special, charity event or to surprise and thank front-line workers.
“I can’t tell you how many times I thought, ‘Man, I wish I would just take a year off and recharge my artistic batteries,’ that sort of thing. And here it is, it’s fallen in my lap. But I don’t like it. Now I miss (working) like crazy.”
The penultimate track on “Here on Earth” is “War of Art,” sung from the perspective of a fledgling musician, who’s singing in a bar and longing to hear his own songs on a jukebox. McGraw hasn’t been in that position in nearly 30 years, but says he continues to relate to it.