Tim McGraw has spent more than 30 years in country music. The 58-year-old had his first Top 20 single in 1994, with “Indian Outlaw”. McGraw has had hit after hit in the years since then. It’s impossible to list all of Tim McGraw’s successful singles. But we picked four of his songs that prove he is a country music icon.
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“Live Like You Were Dying”
By the time McGraw released “Live Like You Were Dying” in 2004, he had made a name for himself with songs like “Something Like That”, “Real Good Man”, and more. But “Live Like You Were Dying” not only shows a softer side of McGraw, but it is also deeply personal. Written by Craig Wiseman and Tim Nichols, McGraw recorded the song while his father, Tug McGraw, was battling terminal cancer.
“‘Live Like You Were Dying’ was one of those songs that came at a very traumatic time in my life,” McGraw says (via Taste of Country). “It showed up and was sent to me in the middle of my father’s diagnosis of glioblastoma brain cancer and going through all of his treatments.”
“Live Like You Were Dying” became a Top 5 hit on the Adult Contemporary charts. It was also the No. 1 country song in 2004.
“The Cowboy In Me”
The beauty of McGraw is his ability to sing a tender song like “Live Like You Were Dying”, along with a rowdy song like “The Cowboy In Me.” Released in 2001 on McGraw’s Set This Circus Down record, “The Cowboy In Me” not only became one of McGraw’s many chart-topping singles, but it also remains part of his setlist to this day.
Written by Wiseman, along with Jeffrey Steele and Al Anderson, the song was inspired not by a real-life cowboy, but a radio station Anderson listened to as a child.
“My mom used to let me go to sleep with the radio on,” Anderson recalls to Songfacts. “And I could get WBBD when I was a kid, in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was a trucker station. … I was glued to that station at night. I fell asleep with it every night.”
“Something Like That”
Few artists are as fortunate as McGraw to have a song as universally known as “Something Like That”. Released in 1999 on McGraw’s A Place In The Sun record, “Something Like That” is still played on the radio today, and still performed by McGraw at nearly all of his shows.
It was McGraw who pushed his label, Curb Records, to release the song, written by Rick Ferrell and Keith Follesé, as a single.
“Tim kind of forced their hand on it,” Ferrell says (via Wide Open Country). “I don’t know, in the record label’s mind at the time, if it was even going to be a single. Tim went on an awards show, I can’t remember which one it was, and I remember Faith [Hill] coming out and saying, ‘Tim has a surprise for everybody.’ And Tim comes out and plays the song.”
“King Rodeo”
“King Rodeo” was just released by McGraw, but it might be among his best songs. The song is also a rarity for McGraw, who penned it with Tom Douglas. McGraw notoriously doesn’t write a lot of his own songs. It’s what makes “King Rodeo,” a tune he wrote ahead of the inaugural Music City Rodeo, even more special.
McGraw hints that the song is from his next album, one that will hopefully feature more songs he helped write.
“We’ve been working on a new record. And we thought that this song was appropriate for the night,” he said when announcing the song (via Backstage Country).
If anyone can keep reinventing himself, it’s McGraw.
Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for iHeartRadio
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