CMT Blog: Archive

When you have a career as long and well-documented as George Strait's, there's really no real news. It's always the same, right? Singles shoot straight to the top of the charts, concerts sell out, awards are bestowed ... blah, blah, blah.

Plus, Strait has never been too big on interviews. He's like the anti-overexposure kind of celeb. That's why this long, long, long story in Cowboys & Indians (the magazine, not the little-boy game) is so impressive.

It's not all about the music. There's plenty of talk about growing up in Pearsall, Texas, spending summers on the ranch and how you never ask a rancher how much land he owns or how many cattle he has. Strait then said, "I'll just say I've got enough to keep us busy."

When the talk turns to Strait's son, Bubba, though, that's when you get to hear about the music that keeps the family going. The Q&A portion of the story gets into Bubba's new love: songwriting. Since Bubba worked with his dad and longtime Strait hit machine Dean Dillon on the new album, Twang, he told the magazine what it was like. "Dean's a songwriting genius. It would be any songwriter's dream to write with one of them, much less both. I haven't been writing long, either, so I consider myself very lucky to have that chance," he said. But when they asked him if he'd ever consider singing himself he said, "Not unless I learn to sing. I got my mom's singing voice!"

But my favorite quote of the whole story comes from Dillon. When Dillon describes Strait's arrival onto the country scene, he says, "Like just about everyone else in Nashville at the time, I'd never heard of the guy. So I asked Blake [Mevis, Strait's first producer], 'Well, who's he sound like?' Because back then, everybody sounded like somebody. Everybody imitated Merle Haggard or George Jones or somebody. And Blake said, 'Well, he really doesn't sound like anybody else. He's kind of got his own thing going on.'"