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In Nashville, a record deal might get you through the door. It doesn't guarantee anyone will stick around to hear what you have to say.
By the spring of 1993, Tim McGraw had his chance. Curb Records released his self-titled debut album, the culmination of years spent chasing a country music career and the first real opportunity to introduce himself to the world. The world barely noticed.
Four singles were sent to country radio. ‘What Room Was the Holiday In,’ ‘Welcome to the Club,’ ‘Two Steppin' Mind’ and ‘Memory Lane’ all failed to enter the Top 40. The album itself never entered the Top Country Albums chart and would become the only studio album of McGraw's career to never earn a sales certification.
For an artist whose name would eventually become almost synonymous with country superstardom, the beginning was remarkably quiet. And Nashville is not a town known for unlimited second chances.
By the time McGraw began preparing his sophomore album, the stakes had changed. He wasn't the exciting new singer getting his first shot anymore. He was a young artist whose first shot had missed. Another album meant another chance, but also another opportunity for the industry to decide whether Tim McGraw was someone worth betting on.
He didn't simply need a better record. Tim McGraw needed a hit. What he got was a fight.
‘Indian Outlaw’ wasn't necessarily the safe choice to lead Not a Moment Too Soon. In fact, McGraw reportedly had to battle to get the song onto the record at all. Written by Tommy Barnes and Jumpin' Gene Simmons, the song had already shown McGraw something no chart position or Nashville executive could. He had watched its writers perform it in front of live audiences and seen the reaction for himself. People connected with it.
McGraw understood there was risk in recording it. Built around a narrator declaring himself a "half-breed Cherokee and Choctaw," the song barrelled through a collection of Native American references and imagery that could easily invite questions about where homage ended and caricature began. But McGraw had also experienced what happened when he played things safe enough for nobody to notice.
So he trusted the room. ‘Indian Outlaw’ became the first single from Not a Moment Too Soon, and almost immediately, the fight McGraw had waged inside the label spilled outside of it.
Critics condemned the song's portrayal of Native Americans as patronizing and stereotypical. Some radio stations refused to play it altogether. For an artist desperately in need of airplay, having programmers actively reject your new single should have been disastrous.
Instead, something unexpected happened. People wanted to hear the song they were being told they couldn't hear. Controversy created curiosity. Curiosity created attention. And for perhaps the first time in his young career, everyone seemed to have an opinion about Tim McGraw. ‘Indian Outlaw’ climbed to No. 8 on the country chart, giving McGraw his first Top 10 hit. It even crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100, where it reached No. 15.
The singer whose first four singles couldn't enter country's Top 40 suddenly had one of the most talked-about songs in America. Controversy can get someone's attention, but it can't build a career by itself. McGraw still needed to prove there was something of substance behind it.
Then came ‘Don't Take the Girl.’ The second single stripped away much of the swagger and provocation that had introduced millions to McGraw and revealed something entirely different. The rugged young singer at the center of country music's latest argument could also deliver a devastating story through song. ‘Don't Take the Girl’ became his first No. 1 country hit.
Then ‘Down on the Farm’ reached No. 2. ‘Not a Moment Too Soon’ gave him another No. 1. ‘Refried Dreams’ followed into the Top 5.
Within the span of a single album, the question was no longer whether Nashville should keep betting on Tim McGraw. It was how big he could possibly become. Not a Moment Too Soon sold more than six million copies, topped both the Billboard 200 and country albums chart, and became the best-selling country album of 1994.
But perhaps more importantly, Not a Moment Too Soon revealed McGraw's uncanny ability to understand the breadth of his audience and the multitudes he could contain as an artist. He could be the rabble-rouser one minute and the gentle spirit the next. Rather than retreat into the rugged image that ‘Indian Outlaw’ might have easily carved out for him, McGraw immediately complicated it.
‘Don't Take the Girl’ asked the same listeners to see something softer. Vulnerability. Fear. Devotion. A man begging for the life of the woman he loves. McGraw wasn't afraid to let tenderness sit beside swagger, or sensitivity beside masculinity. It would become one of the defining tensions of his career.
Tim McGraw could be the cowboy and the family man. The troublemaker and the romantic. The guy raising hell on Saturday night and taking stock of his life on Sunday morning. His greatest records would rarely ask him to choose between those identities. Instead, he spent a career proving a country singer could contain multitudes.
