Carrying Your Love with Me - George Strait (1997)
My theme when it comes to 90s music is often that of mixing and bending and transgressing genres and tropes. Country music definitely changed in the 90s, but the mainstream is built on the very idea that the older ways of doing things are the better ways of doing things.
Say what you like about caricatured good ol’ boy characters like Strait, but he has a straight-shooting and clean-cut sort of aesthetic that stood as a comfort in a frenetic time (and didn’t include much of the kneejerk red-state political nonsense that crept into the music post 9/11).
George Strait is the definition of “neo-traditionalist” country, turning “doing things the old way” into a cottage industry.
In my limited experience with his catalog, he’s often better emphasizing the “traditionalist” part rather than the “neo-“ part. The album directly before this, Blue Clear Sky, was a triumph of old school Hank Sr country balladry. This one tries to be a little more clever. It’s still full of old style instrumentation and attitude, but still sounds like it was cooked up in a studio in a way that his best outings don’t.
Still, his humor and honesty shine through and make him a country icon.
