Songoftheday 9/18/22 - I pulled into the shopping center and saw a little boy wrapped around the legs of his mother...
"Grown Men Don't Cry" - Tim McGraw
from the album Set This Circus Down (2001)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #25 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 10
Today's song comes from country music artist Tim McGraw, whose fifth album A Place In The Sun released in 1999 had spun off five top ten country radio hits, with four of them - "Please Remember Me", "Something Like That", "My Best Friend", and "My Next Thirty Years" - topping that list and placing in the top-40 of Billboard magazine's all-genre Hot 100 chart. At the end of 2000, McGraw and Curb Records released his first Greatest Hits album, which include all four of those songs. That collection went to #4 on the Billboard 200, and topped the Country Albums for nine weeks, despite not having any new tracks on it (well, besides his Grammy-winning duet with wife Faith Hill, "Let's Make Love", from her album). It sold over six million copies, as much as his red-hot debut. A "buzz track" that was released to radio in its live form from the CMA Awards but would appear on his next album, "Things Change", spent 20 weeks on the country radio chart, with a high of #32 at the turn of the year.
So expectations were high for Tim's next album, Set This Circus Down, which came out the following spring. Like his last record, the lead single from the set was a mournful ballad, "Grown Men Don't Cry". Written by Nashville hired hands Tom Douglas and Steve Seskin, the song starts out bleakly from the get-go, with Tim recounting a homeless woman and her child at the grocery store. For a moment, he feels bad about feeling bad about his own life, but just as soon as you'd think there'd be a sign of compassion (I mean, maybe paying for her groceries), he "wanted to tell them it would be okbut I just got in my Suburban, and I drove away". Man, if that isn't the "thoughts and prayers" movement in a damn nutshell. Sad thing is, as beautiful as the song is that verse just sours it a bit for me. He then recounts his absentee dad who's dead now, and the final verse has him putting his daughter to bed, and her "I love you" wiping away the sadness (and the guilt) from him. Oofdah. On the surface it's a moving record music-wise, and Tim emotes his damn most, but god if this is supposed to be a moral parable it sure isn't the way to go about it. Nevertheless his fans and radio ate it up, and returned McGraw to the top of the charts yet again...
"Grown Men Don't Cry" became Tim's tenth single to reach the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart in June of 2001. The song topped the Country Singles chart for a week. The Set This Circus Down album, released in April of 2001, spent a week at #2 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, while topping the Country Albums list for six weeks, going on to sell over three million albums. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, McGraw earned his third nomination for Best Male Country Vocal Performance for the song, losing to veteran Ralph Stanley's "O Death" from the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack. The Set This Circus Down record was also up for Best Country Album (his first in that category), which went to the multi-artist covers album Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute. Both Tim and the album will be back to the series.
(4/10)
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Earlier this year, one of the song's writers, Tom Douglas, released his own stripped down version of the song, with Tim providing the vocals...
Up tomorrow: This numerical R&B group has dessert.
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