They Said Cut the “Fat”—George Strait Made It a Hit Instead

Anna Lisa Graham refused to trim the fat from her song “You Know Me Better Than That. Everyone hated it — until George Strait loved it. Then the King of Country turned her porch-written punchline into pure chart-topping gold.

Decades later, Graham, who co-wrote the song with Tony Haselden, remembers how it happened.
Graham had written the first verse and the chorus of “You Know Me Better Than That” in her notebook.

The lyrics included: Oh, you know me better than that/ You know the me that gets lazy and fat/ How moody I can be, all my insecurities/You’ve seen me lose all my charm/ You know I was raised on a farm/ Oh, she tells her friends I’m perfect/ And that I love her cat/ But you know me better than that

She had run her lyrics by multiple reputable writers. They called them cute or said they’d write it with her if she removed the word fat.

Videos by American Songwriter

George Strait Validated the Songwriter’s Gut

“My heart was sinking,” Graham told NSAI’s Bart Herbison. “I was thinking, ‘God, is nobody hearing this but me?’ It taught me at a very early stage about sticking to my gut feeling.”

Graham was working with Russ Zavitson at Harold Shedd’s publishing company. She read the lyric to Zavitson, and he knew songwriter Tony Haselden would connect with its simplicity and uniqueness. Graham and Haselden met in a songwriting room and got to work.

“The brilliance of Tony’s melody, and which after that, it didn’t take long,” she said. “Once he heard it, he knew exactly where to go with it, melodically. I was hearing something, and I shared it with him. He expanded on that, and I think we had it finished in that first writing session.”

Graham said it was “thrilling” because the words had been in her notebook for so long, and that if not for Haselden, the title never would have been written. After they got a solid start on finishing the song – she could hear Strait singing it in her head. She knew he had a sense of humor and loved surprise lines and cleverness.

You Know Me Better Than That

But everyone wasn’t as sure that Strait would love it. Graham said some people refused to pitch him “You Know Me Better Than That.”

“They said, ‘Oh, George will never say fat,” she recalled. Then Strait told her, “I never know what I’m going to say half the time.”

 Graham even got to see Strait sing the song live at his New Year’s Eve show in 1991. She heard 25,000 people sing a song she wrote on her front porch along with Strait. Graham called the moment “surreal,” but again said the credit goes back to her co-writer. She remembers that as soon as she and Haselden got the song demoed, they started pitching it. She took “You Know Me Better Than That” to Strait’s manager’s office, dropped it off, and forgot about it.

“I didn’t want to obsess on it, so I just let it go,” Graham said. “Then I walked into this building one day and they said, ‘George is cutting that song. They called for copyright.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”

Strait released “You Know Me Better Than That” as the second single from his album Chill of an Early Fall in 1991. It peaked at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart.

(Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images)