I Listened to Every Country No. 1 From 1990, These Are the Songs I Still Can’t Get Enough Of

The 90s were quite a time for country music. Here are some of the country songs that caught our attention at the very beginning of the decade in 1990 and still stick with us years later.

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“The Dance” by Garth Brooks

For Garth Brooks, it was the success of “The Dance” and “Friends In Low Places” that truly solidified him as a country star. However, if you listen to both songs, you’ll see that they’re honestly quite different.

“To a lot of people, I guess ‘The Dance’ is a love gone bad song,” Brooks explained of the song. “Which, you know, that it is. But to me it’s always been a song about life. Or maybe the loss of those people that have given the ultimate sacrifice for a dream that they believed in, like the John F. Kennedy’s or the Martin Luther King’s. John Wayne’s or the Keith Whitley’s. And if they could come back, I think they would say to us what the lyrics of ‘The Dance’ say.”

“Nobody’s Home” by Clint Black

“Nobody’s Home” gave Clint Black his third No. 1 hit in 1990, quite a feat at the time for a song about mental health. Ironically, Black would later share that he himself was physically unwell when he penned the tune.

“It was one that I wrote in a fever,” Black shared at one point. “I was really sick, I was barely able to get out of bed. I stopped off at my desk, which was right by the bed, and I would write these ideas down on a piece of paper, which would be almost a complete version of the lyrics to ‘Nobody’s Home’.”

He even admitted, “The idea for the hook came from something that Albert Einstein said, most people only utilize about 10% of their brain’s full capacity.”

“Love Without End, Amen” by George Strait

When songwriter Aaron Barker wrote “Love Without End, Amen”, he had his 16-year-old son in mind, who was going through an independent streak at the time. Although George Strait famously made the song his own, it will always be about a father trying to navigate tough love.

“My son was born when I was 17. I was a kid, too. And I saw him in the hospital, and I thought, ‘This’ll be great. We’ll grow up together,’” Barker shared with The Tennessean. “And that worked for a while. And when he was 16, kids start finding their own independence. He got this car, and he went some places he shouldn’t, and on this particular day, it was bad.”

Barker realized that, even though he was upset with his son, he still had so much love for him, which made disciplining him difficult.

He admitted, “But that was the night it really came to the reality that I had to be the dad. I couldn’t just be his friend.”

Photo by: David Redfern/Redferns