In My Housedress, Don’t You Know Who I Am? In Defense of Chart-Topping Country Covers by Kristine Langley Mahler

Ain’t nothin’ like the Real Thing, says Marvin Gaye and Burger King. Can’t beat the Real Thing, says Randy Travis and Coca-Cola. I wish I had a third commercial jingle to complete this paragraph but instead I’ll ask you to consider George Jones, one of the putative kings of Real Country, because if you’re lookin for the real deal, what are you doin looking at him, a man who seldom wrote his own songs and whose first #1 was a cover?
Country singer/songwriters are the backbone of the industry, sweating out the jingles and snatching slang and making sure the words can trip on twang so listeners will easily identify the genre (it gets hard when you’ve got Walker Hayes’ “Fancy Like” getting played on both pop and country stations). But they haven’t always handed over their hard work to other performers right away. Sometimes singer/songwriters give their own fame a trial spin by recording and releasing EPs, though, as is the wont of CMT (which has privileged young, “hot” dudes and dudettes ever since outlaw country locked themselves behind bars simply by growing older), if they don’t have the looks, their albums don’t make the books. A good country song can be recorded but it will wither and die on the original album, unless. UNLESS! This is the genesis of this essay—sometimes, someone with more clout decides to cover that song for their own industry-supported album.
The solid songwriting still stands in both the original and the cover, but there are singers who alchemized songwriter gold into RIAA Gold, and it is those Famous Person Covers, heard by millions, that I intend to defend. Since #godbless, this is not a tournament essay but something adjacent, I have the privilege to make the argument that these chart-topping covers are transformative primarily BECAUSE of the cover artists’ fame.
I do love a challenge, but I’ve really picked an uphill battle: it’s hard to talk down a singer/songwriter’s performance in favor of a Nashstablishment rendition, presumably phoned in from Music Row. How can I say that pop country queen Faith Hill sounds more honest than working-class singer/songwriter Lori McKenna? That rural Ontarian Fred Eaglesmith has been truly bested by one of the worst villains of country radio (FUTK!!), Toby Keith? That slick Californian Gary Allan stole The True Meaning of relationship heartache from Vertical Horizon (the progenitors of HE’S EVERYTHING YOU WANT! HE’S EVERYTHING YOU NEED!)?
I’ll give you my background so you can mull it over as you pop a can of Bud—and it better be a can of Bud; I need you to set aside your IPAs or White Claws and remove any temptation to think you’re being “Real Country” by preferring a shot of whiskey. Meet me in Mainstream Country America, where the trucks are Ford F-150s and the jeans are Wranglers (or at least you’re supposed to believe they are). I’ve lived in Mainstream Country America most of my life, but honestly, I’ve lived in suburban Mainstream Country America; I suppose I’m a poser as much as anyone. I abhorred country music for nearly two decades until I came to it by my own choice as a college student in one of the most precious “rural” homes possible, that most-written-about liberal enclave in the heart of Mainstream Country America: Iowa City. I’d just left Terre Haute, Indiana, a town where farmers drove in from the surrounding counties to shop at our mall, where Boot City and its Boot City Opry reigned over the southside, where I learned to drive amid semis down Deadman’s-Curve backroads past the penitentiary where Timothy McVeigh would be killed. I’d moved to Iowa City for my undergrad, and it was there that I was onboarded with the music of George Jones.
My college boyfriend, always a good student of musical references, had read an interview in 2001 where Leonard Cohen said he was listening to George Jones’ new album (that would be the 1999 release of Cold Hard Truth—the album with “The Real Deal” on it, for those of you paying attention). Having discovered Leonard Cohen himself only through a reference in Nirvana’s “Pennyroyal Tea,” my boyfriend bought George’s Super Hits. I remember sitting in a car in the Walmart parking lot outside Coralville, Iowa (back when there was nothing up there but the Walmart), listening to “The Grand Tour” and being appalled at my own sentimentality as I started crying at the way George hushed himself after belting out “She left me without mercy” to deliver the second half of the final line, “taking nothing but our baby and my heart.” I had mocked my boyfriend’s interest in country music because I was trained to mock country music; that was for the rednecks over in West TH. Not for me, who would readily announce that most tiresome of musical preferences, “Well, I like anything except country.” Yet here I was, pulled in by an old man singing someone else’s lyrics, carefully designed to pull on the heartstrings of susceptible women, pulled in like a susceptible woman.
I was in. And with my attachment to George Jones fixed, I began listening to the only “acceptable” kind of country music to listen to if you were a liberal white college kid at Iowa in 2002: old country, Real Country, “Johnny Cash” country (though I have always been bored. to. tears. by Johnny Cash and his fellow outlaws, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard). But the problem was that, Jones aside, I quickly pivoted to the pop country music on the Quad Cities radio stations my boyfriend and I could pick up on our drives through the surrounding Iowa City countryside, US 93.3 and WLLR 103.7.
I loved bro country before it had fully turned into bro country—well, before I realized it was bro country. They called it “pop country” on the radio bumpers and I was obsessed with how clever every pop country song was, how the lyrics always had to have a twist or a double meaning. How the tropes were like formal structures that had to be erected: here this romance on the rocks, here this memory of romance when it was good, here this paragon exemplifying the Virtues of Country Girls, here this reference to drinking beer, here this preference for John Deere, here this mom’s home cooking, here this understanding that the appeals of the Big City could never beat where you came from. There was a rote composition to the songs’ logic that I appreciated.
It was only after I’d exhausted pop country (ah, those Rascal Flatts days when I would lunge for the dial upon hearing those corny talk show “na na nas” moving us inexorably toward the 14th daily play of “Mayberry”) that I became interested in less-pop-country, or singer/songwriter country. I wasn’t looking for something more “authentic” as much as I was wondering what else I might have missed about this whole country genre. All three of the songs I will dissemble in this essay, “Stealing Kisses” by Lori McKenna, “White Rose” by Fred Eaglesmith, and “Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning)” by Vertical Horizon, were songs I first learned from the singers/songwriters themselves before I heard them re-sung by three pop country titans of the mid-00s, Faith Hill, Toby Keith, and Gary Allan. I’m used to a good old sell-out-guilting as much as the next Gen X-er, but I’m also used to subverting expectations. I know I am supposed to prefer the originals—the ones I came to love first and foremost!—but I also love SHOCK’N Y’ALL.
I guess I still need to tell you why I prefer the pop country versions. Here I am, some ten paragraphs into explaining how I came to pop country and I’m still trying to make you believe in my personal cred, which has probably just undermined it. So here’s my thesis statement: I believe in the power of the Nashville stars’ covers because a Nashville star can choose to sing anything. They can be the kingmakers of a hundred songwriters (and they often are). But the songs I’m about to present were already recorded by songwriters who had their own personal recording contracts; these songs were floating in the residuals ether when the NashStars snatched them out. The original records had been purchased (if by a few as opposed to a million) and these songs had a life already. Yet the aforementioned Nashstablishment singers simply COULD NOT let the songs live their quiet lives; they had to smash their own stamp atop them.
Why do a cover? A country star doesn’t need to go to karaoke night when they’re making an album. I am a sentimentalist, admittedly, but I’ll posit that these songs hit nerves the stars couldn’t shake, like when you hit your elbow on a corner and it reverberates through the bone up the arm and you have to stop in your tracks, hold your elbow until the buzzing dissipates. These songs thonked the stars and the only way they could manage the discomfort was to re-record these songs themselves. That power—because surely a Nashville star has power when they can decide to “handle their emotions” through flexing their situational ability to jump in a studio—JUST JUMPING INTO A STUDIO! IMAGINE!—and rerecord these songs—is half of what makes the Nashville versions so overwhelming. Not because I believe anyone with power deserves respect, but more because…powerful people are known. These country stars’ life stories—carefully leaked and managed, but nevertheless—were known and disseminated and discussed by the outdoor ashtray pillar on the north side of UIHC back in the mid-00s (ask me how I know). While the original songwriters wrote from their hearts, the specific scars on their hearts remained elegant lyrical allusions simply because those songwriters were not so famous that you knew who they meant.
The Nashville Stars were on the pages of Country Music People magazine (a subscription my brother-in-law got me for Christmas in 2006); they were in the National Enquirer; they were on the CMT Music Awards; they were in TMZ when they did something really bad (because TMZ has largely never cared about country musicians, like the rest of non-Mainstream Country America). When viewed through the context of the NashStars’ lives—the details of which were fairly accessible—the emotion in these covers is staggering. You “know” what it means when the stars sing certain lyrics, or when they hover on a word, or drag out a syllable—they can’t let the emotion go quite yet.
I was absolutely devastated witnessing Faith Hill—Queen Heir Apparent in 2005, along with her husband Tim McGraw, to the Married Nashville Supercouple title—sing about how she felt trapped by the commonplace fears of middle-class America in a song originally sung by Lori McKenna, an artist whose version had felt like the woman next door talking about a life I knew. I was astonished to see how subdued and emotional Toby Keith was—only a few years after being the fury-red face of Ignorant Patriotism—when he adopted the heartache of home-loss from one of My Personal Faves, the rural king of Ontario, Fred Eaglesmith. I still get chills up my arms when I hear Gary Allan ask was it what you wanted? to his dead wife while singing “Best I’ve Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning),” subverting everything I ever thought I knew about Vertical Horizon’s run-of-the-mill relationship loss song and deepening it into a pain I can barely stand to witness.
You don’t have to agree that these covers are “better”; you don’t have to agree that a singer’s fame might actually make a record more emotionally available. As a nonfiction writer constantly revealing bits of my non-famous life, you’d think I’d align with the more-obscure songwriters—my fellow undistinguished compatriots!—and yet I’m fixated on how invasive it must feel to know 20-year-olds in Iowa City were nodding and pressing their lips together at a quavered line on the radio because they thought they understood. I can’t help myself; I spent years with CD booklets spread over my lap as I tried to connect the lyrical threads, and the advent of increased famous-person-accessibility with Pink is the New Blog and Perez Hilton and the archives of all those random internet-magazine interviews gave me additional layers of “fact” to weave into the braid. Stars—They’re Just Like Us!, co-opting someone else’s heartache because it sounds like ours.

Note: it’ll be easiest if you listen to the song before reading; your choice on which one you do first, but I’d suggest original-followed-by-cover.

STEALING KISSES

written and recorded by Lori McKenna, released on Bittertown in May 2004:

rerecorded by Faith Hill between May-November 2004 and released on Fireflies in August 2005:

“Stealing Kisses” is a song about a woman remembering when life’s possibilities stretched out in front of her. In the chorus, the narrator remembers she was “stealing kisses from a boy, now I’m begging affection from a man.” She goes about her household chores, unacknowledged and ignored by her husband, who comes home late (again), and even though she is standing in the kitchen in her housedress, asking him “Don’t you know who I am?” she doesn’t even know herself.
Lori McKenna, the singer/songwriter who penned “Stealing Kisses,” is the Nashville Machine’s wet dream, a blue-collar woman from a blue-collar town, housewiving the needs of both the plumber husband she’s known since third grade as well as their five kids, and songwriting a little on the side—but just on the side. In 2012, the Boston Globe dared to title their story about Lori McKenna “Fifteen years after she broke into the Boston folk scene with honesty and grit, Lori McKenna is becoming one of Nashville’s most in-demand country songwriters. But the Stoughton mother of five is still home for dinner.”
But you can shove Lori McKenna in front of a casserole dish all you want—the woman is flat-out talented. Lori has written and recorded eleven albums of her own in the past twenty-one years while simultaneously sharing songs with NashStars who have rerecorded covers of her work. And Lori’s also written major, major country radio hits for major country radio stars who then spun her work into award-winning gold (Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush,” and Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind,” scoring back-to-back Grammys for Best Country Song).
Yet Lori herself has said “I’ve got a sixth grade vocabulary and I only know three chords. This is who I am.”
Faith Hill moved from rural Mississippi to Nashville in 1987 at age 20 and married a music publishing executive a year later. Faith released two hugely successful albums and had three Number Ones by 1995. Faith and her music exec husband divorced after six years together, and Faith was engaged to a new man in the spring of 1996 when she went on tour with Tim McGraw. Faith got pregnant with her and Tim’s first daughter, then Faith broke her engagement with the new dude, and finally the country power couple—Tim and Faith—married in October 1996. That’s all the Faith Hill bio you need for the purposes of this essay.
Wait, I forgot one important thing: the album on which Faith covers “Stealing Kisses,” 2005’s Fireflies, was Faith’s last solo album to date. Faith released a collaborative album with Tim in 2017, but has released nothing new, wholly of her own, since 2005.
When Faith met Tim, Faith was engaged to another man—technically, stealing kisses from a boy. When Faith sings “Stealing Kisses,” here the audience finds her, years later. In Lori’s version of “Stealing Kisses,” Lori sounds resigned to her fate, unlike Faith, who seems like she can’t believe what has happened to her. Put another way: when Lori wears the housedress, it is not the same sort of housedress Faith’s wearing. Faith seems crushed that she is not recognizable to her husband (Tim; I’m sorry, we can’t forget she is singing this to Tim McGraw) when she is in a housedress, which is to say NOT A CONCERT PERFORMANCE DRESS. Faith has done everything “right”—look at her in the video, her highlighted, salon-blowout hair and her fashionable dresses—and yet she still has to beg for affection from her man. When Lori asks, “Don’t you know who I am?” I hear it as the existential question us laypeople all wonder about our partners: do you know who I am at my core? But when Faith says over and over, “Don’t you know who I am?” it is because we are all aware of who she is—she is Faith Hill, Capital Letters.
In Faith’s version of “Stealing Kisses,” I feel like the descriptions of the narrator’s housewife life are alluding to how Faith sacrificed her career for Tim’s. Faith and Tim’s 2006 duet tour, which was ostensibly to promote Faith’s Fireflies, wound up being Faith’s swan song before she stepped out of the limelight. Faith sang “Stealing Kisses” as part of her set the first year of the Soul2Soul II Tour; she dropped it during the second round.
In Lori’s delivery of the final line, she sneers at what she is stealing—“kisses”—like she can’t believe she has to steal something so minor. But Faith doesn’t seem to sneer at the kiss she is stealing because a kiss is validation; a kiss keeps you tied to your husband.
Faith, being Faith, got a music video out of the song. In the video, Faith is alone but gorgeous, sitting on a bench and sitting at a dining table before crawling across it to no one and only realizing she is alone halfway through. In the video, Faith goes to pick up groceries but can’t even complete the order at the meat counter. Do the people at the store know she is Faith Hill and can’t believe she has been dragged this low? The video is meant to show off how obviously beautiful Faith is, but also how obviously alone. Every scene feels melodramatic, but the video fits the persona of Capital Letters Faith Hill.
In the music video, when Faith “stands outside the high school doors, the ones [she] walked through twenty years before and whispers to all the girls: RUN,” they are oblivious to her presence. The girls run away from Faith because they’re going to have different lives; they won’t be like her; they’ll know how to manage their men.
“Stealing Kisses” was released as a single in September 2006, one month before I was married. I was living in my husband’s home state so he could go to grad school while I did housewifely work like trying to “fix” the unattractive kitchen cabinets by taping IKEA fabric on them to alter what lay beneath—cheap golden oak, a cookie-cutter existence in a cookie-cutter apartment—and guess what? It all drooped off by the next morning.
So I went to community college even though I already had a bachelor’s degree. I met a woman there who was my age and freshly wived as well. Her husband was a graduate student at the law school and she was learning to be a paralegal so she could be his helpmeet. I was learning to be a paralegal because it was something to do. The woman made copious references to all the newly-married sex she and her husband were having, but I’d been with my husband for five years when we got married; married-sex didn’t excite me quite the same way it did her. I knew I loved him and I knew I wanted to build my future with him, but I was not thrilled to be a wife. I hated the word “husband.” I hated the word “wife.” I loved being married, but I did not want to be so old. I was 24 and married to a 24-year old man, but when he would come home from class and I was standing there amid the golden oak cabinets, the groceries he would need to make our dinner on the laminate countertop, he did not come for me in the kitchen. I stood there drinking the glass of wine I’d waited for all day, frightening myself with how much I looked forward to feeling something. I was 24. I know that. But how could I still be the girl who had lotioned her legs before wearing pleather pants on a date, so slick and hot that when we returned to his apartment I begged him to take them off, the pleather pulling off slippery as a snakeskin? I had transformed into someone different such a short handful of years later, a Wife. I thought I would need to learn Redbook tricks like meeting him at the front door with nothing on but an apron. But I wasn’t even the one who cooked. Faith’s version of “Stealing Kisses” destroyed me because if she couldn’t keep her man interested, who among us could?
The story goes that, when Faith Hill heard Lori McKenna’s album Bittertown, Faith ripped up a nearly-done record and returned to the studio to record a handful of Lori’s songs, one of which was “Stealing Kisses.” Maybe that’s the part I can’t get over. Faith Hill had a complete record and when she heard “Stealing Kisses,” she screeched to a halt because she had to record it in her own voice.

There are only a couple of live versions of Faith singing “Stealing Kisses” that you can find on the internet nowadays.  One is an October 2006 performance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show—about as housewife a demographic as you can get. The other is a highly produced December 2005 NBC special.

I don’t care if it wasn’t Faith’s intent to have us reading something into her song choice. I am still wrecked like an old building at the sight of the Country Queen Faith Hill singing the words “I’m begging affection from a man.” Lori I could tolerate, my sister in middle-class marriage expectations. Faith Hill was a bridge I didn’t want to cross.

WHITE ROSE

written and recorded by Fred Eaglesmith, released on Drive-In Movie in January 1996:

rerecorded by Toby Keith and released on Big Dog Daddy in June 2007: 

“White Rose” is a song about a gas station (owned by a company which has been defunct since May 1963) as representative of the simple satisfactions of rural life which were destroyed when the gas station closed. Fred Eaglesmith, the songwriter and a gifted narrator who loves to tell the story around the lyrical content before nearly every song he performs, tells the crowd that his childhood was centered around the Saturday trip to the general store and the feed mill and the White Rose, clustered together near the rural Ontario farm on which Fred was raised. The White Rose filling station, in the song, closes when an overpass is built and the gas station becomes irrelevant. The loss of the White Rose kills the general store and the feed mill, and the song deftly conveys the toll of “progress.”
Toby Keith is also a singer/songwriter—I know, not what you may have expected. Toby wrote or co-wrote nine of the 11 songs on Big Dog Daddy (and yes, Toby wrote “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” back in late 2001 all on his own. Sigh.). The man respects the work that goes into an album and he wants his fans to have HIS words. Toby Keith hasn’t recorded many covers (notable, however, is Toby’s cover of Sting’s “I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying,” released one year after Sting himself released the song—and astonishingly, Sting guests on Toby’s version).
Toby Keith is a Cancer, born on July 8, 1961 (twenty-one years and a day before me). Nostalgia comes for you if you’re a Cancer; there’s no getting around it. I’m not going to argue astrology with you. Toby was born and raised near Oklahoma City during the 1960s and 1970s. I’ve been reading Boom Town by Sam Anderson and so I have an idea what OKC looked like back then—a ripped-up, Pei Plan, wrecking-ball bulldozed blank space where architectural masterpieces from Oklahoma City’s heyday growth in the 1920s were being obliterated to make space for an urban renewal project which was not materializing.
Toby left Oklahoma for Nashville in the early 1990s, promising himself “he’d have a career by the time he was 30 or bust” (spake the uncited Wikipedia entry). Toby had spent his youth and early adulthood staring out at the prairie skies of Oklahoma and had seen more towns go under than any slick Nashville homebody.
Toby knows longing, which is why he buried the emotion he felt for the circumstances described in “White Rose” inside his performance of someone else’s words, a softness perhaps Toby could not write himself. He is impassioned during the song, I believe, because he is remembering a world he once knew, one he cannot reinhabit ever again. Maybe Fred can go back to rural Ontario and fit right back in, but Toby lost his anonymity in the country (and loses that anonymity, over and over, with each new hit).
I can’t help how sympathetic I feel toward Toby Keith, a man with the same large skull and blonde beard as my uncle and cousins. Yes, I said “sympathetic” and “Toby Keith” in the same sentence. I took the Chicks’ side back in ’05, but I have a soft spot for a man who works so hard to keep his eyes closed while he sings a song about loss even though his eyes are clearly shadowed by the carefully-shaped hat brim; the audience couldn’t tell if his eyes were open either way. Eyes are the windows to the soul and during performances of “White Rose,” Toby can’t handle others seeing his.
Toby can build Honkytonk University and I Love This Bar…and Grill, but they are approximations of a world he cannot reoccupy. Toby has the power of Nashville behind him but he can’t make the old days repopulate, can’t make them come back. Toby is subdued during his delivery of “White Rose,” mourning the simplicity of the life that is gone. Toby Keith came for this song because nearly 20 years after he left Oklahoma for the fame of Nashville, nostalgia still trapped the Big Dog Daddy.
In Fred’s version, on the other hand, “White Rose” is performed by a singer/songwriter who vocally sounds like an old man already. Fred doesn’t sound like a man in his prime (though he was only 39 in 1996 when he recorded “White Rose”); he sounds like an elder reflecting on ye olde days. Rural Ontario doesn’t pull on heartstrings the same way as Heartland America, which is why I’d like to point out that Fred clearly wrote “White Rose” for the Nashville circuit: Fred wrote “fifty cents a gallon” when Canada is on the metric system and gas is measured by the liter.
I saw Fred in Ann Arbor in 2007, about three months after Toby’s album had been released, and Fred cussed the crowd, saying that he was happy to sell the song to Toby. There’s a 2019 performance online where Fred plays “White Rose” and still references selling the song to Toby Keith. The preface about the content of “White Rose” is the same in 2019 as it was in 2005, nearly to the word. I’m most fascinated by this reversal: Fred and Toby have changed their archetypical roles. Fred, the rural songwriter, is actually the shellacked shill and Toby, the Nashville star, is the earnest performer.
I am writing this out in the country, a few miles away from a small town about as dead as Fred’s, about twenty miles off the interstate. The past has either disintegrated or been preciously preserved out of a desire to keep things the same. The White Rose filling station is a stand-in for innocence, I know, but a gas station is also a glittering facet on the diamond-sharp American symbolism of highways. Our highways are our lifeblood, our veins, our limbic systems, and one sure way to see the America we’re destroying ourselves is to drive across our prairies, irrigated into monster ag corps by the depleting Ogallala. The small farms are gone or going.
As late as May 2020, Toby was still arguing that “White Rose” should have been a single. His eyes are still hidden.

BEST I EVER HAD (GREY SKY MORNING)

written and recorded by Vertical Horizon, released on Everything You Want in June 1999:

rerecorded by Gary Allan and released in advance of Tough All Over in March 2005 (album in October 2005):

In case you missed both the 1999 Adult Contemporary Top 40 as well as the 2005 Country Billboard charts, “Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning)” is a song about the ending of a relationship—an ending that was inevitable, but one which the narrator notes was still the best relationship he ever had. I am being deliberately vague and obtuse because the song itself allows the listener to pour their own experience inside pretty relatable lines like “love can be so boring.”
The original song was written by Matt Scannell, the lead singer of Vertical Horizon, a band you might know from its monster hit  “Everything You Want” if you were also a teenager in the late 90s/early 00s. Surprisingly, “Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning)” was actually Vertical Horizon’s fourth single off the album (I mean, I own this CD and I def listened to “Best I Ever Had” way more than “We Are” so I don’t know what they were thinking releasing “We Are” as their lead single—before BOTH “Everything You Want” and “BIEH,” but alackaday, things seem to have turned out fine for Vertical Horizon).
There is a video on YouTube with Vertical Horizon performing “Best I Ever Had” on the first afternoon of Woodstock 1999. The crowd is barely a crowd, they’re not moving or swaying (much less breaking shit like they will later this weekend); the Peace Patrol is overstaffed and bored. But “Best I Ever Had” isn’t the sort of song you’re supposed to hear in a crush of people; it’s a song you listen to in your room, or in your car while driving the rural backroads of Indiana, weeping after your long-distance boyfriend broke up with you. Ahem. In the concert footage, the dudes in the audience are stymied and don’t seem to know how to receive the song. There is polite applause at the close.
(CW: suicide) Gary Allan’s wife, Angela, killed herself on October 25, 2004. Gary is extremely open about the incident, discussing it in an interview with Oprah in 2006, sharing that Angela had been suffering from migraines and what he later recognized as depression. On the night of Angela’s suicide, Gary came to check on Angela and she asked him to leave and get her a Coke. He was on his way to the kitchen when Angela killed herself with a gun, and Gary returned to find her dead. In the interview, Gary tells Oprah, “We never got to treat the depression, it was always treating a migraine,” and that he didn’t understand what depression looked like until it was too late.
In the aftermath of Angela’s suicide, Gary began recording songs for his next album, Tough All Over, and Gary’s version of “Best I Ever Had” was released as the album’s lead single on May 23, 2005, seven months after Angela’s death. Covering alternative rock band (don’t fight me on the classification) Vertical Horizon as a country artist is a bold choice, especially since the song wasn’t exactly a non-hit—Vertical Horizon’s version made it to #7 on the Adult Top 40.
The music video for Gary’s version of “Best I Ever Had” finds Gary alone in the middle of a lake on an unmoored dock. Gary writes a note and puts it in a bottle, a message into the otherworld, throwing it into the lake, but his wife does not want him back because she is in the darkness of eternity. He sends a ship off into the blankness and it returns, filled with flowers like a goddamn coffin, but with no woman. Gary dismisses the ship, pushing it away, rejecting her invitation into the unknown and remaining behind, “just a phony remembering the girl.” It’s heartbreaking to watch him call himself a phony, making eye contact with the camera as he says the line because he knows he is selling his pain. Gary’s wife sailed away into a grey sky morning, the one of oblivion, but he is here to stay.
Matt Scannell’s performance of “Best I Ever Had” with Vertical Horizon is smooth: he holds the notes, there is no grit or waver. But the problem is that the lines flow into each other too effortlessly. When Matt sings, the notes and emotions blur. Matt’s “now I’m just a phony” is delivered without any self-recrimination. There are no gaps, no words that trip Matt. Matt’s delivery of “so you sailed away” sounds angelic, particular when contrasted with the quaver in Gary’s voice while singing the same words.
But bigger still are the lyrical alterations Gary Allan makes. Vertical Horizon’s original lyric asked “What was it you wanted?” Gary takes the line, however, and seeks confirmation, “Was it what you wanted?” [emphasis mine] Of course she cannot answer. Vertical Horizon deviates from the choral line “You don’t want me back” to declare, in the final chorus, “I don’t want you back” but Gary hangs his head and can’t bring himself to perform the switch in his cover, instead repeating the same line to himself, “You don’t want me back.”
Gary does not invite the audience to sing along to “Best I Ever Had” during concerts the way Matt Scannell repeatedly does—Matt lets the audience begin the song, but in the live concert videos on YouTube of Gary, he doesn’t let the audience get involved until the very end of the song, until Gary has already established his claim. Gary doesn’t back down from hitting the same elongated notes he holds in the original recordings, unlike Matt who shortens them the way you’d expect during a concert—it’s a performance after all, not a controlled recording booth. But Gary still pours everything he has into the song, concert or not.
I cannot go into Gary’s mind; I can only pull from the internet and whatever interviews he has given. Gary himself includes an article about making Tough All Over on his own website.
“This next song got me through a lot of tough times, and you guys were kind enough to make it a hit for me,” says Gary in 2007.
During pandemic quarantine in May 2020, Gary Allan reflects on the video for “Best I Ever Had”:

This was released at a time where I had just lost my wife and I couldn’t really write, and everything I was writing was just so sad, and my producer’s son brought this and said ‘Man, what about redoing this?’ and it was perfect because I didn’t want to ignore it, but I couldn’t write it myself at the time.

Gary says nothing about the content of the video other than reflecting on how hot it was during filming. Nothing about the girl, or the symbolism of being stranded in the middle of the water. At the end, Gary just quietly says, “Best I ever had,” which I hear as an ambiguous statement, like a sigh—is he just saying the name of the song, or is he remembering what made him want to cover the song? I don’t know; I want it to be; I don’t know what I want it to be.

I’ve waited until the end of this essay to rip it open like an underdone chicken breast to expose the pink inside. I know very well that Tim and Faith have been (seemingly?) happily married for years and years and have three children together and a successful marriage and Faith seems super content with her lot in life and who am I to say she ever needed to steal kisses from a man who seems ultra-devoted to the point that they famously never spend more than three consecutive days apart from each other?
I also know that Toby Keith has enough money to buy whatever life he wants.
I also ALSO know that Gary Allan doesn’t owe us shit when it comes to processing his grief or letting us know when it’s been thoroughly processed and the song becomes just a performance.
And you know what else I know? I know that Lori McKenna is probably living a pretty damn comfortable life in Stoughton teaching her kids how to write hit songs, and that Fred Eaglesmith was just on the damn Grand Ole Opry in 2019, and that Matt Scannell is out there writing hits with Richard Marx.
I also know what you also know, which is that this whole essay is me convincing myself, as much as you, that the covers of these songs hold Extra Meaning. I heard these cover songs during a time when I was discovering that the narratives I’d told myself were immutable parts of my past were, actually, something I could reconstruct and recast. I saw my self-definitions in a different light, at a different angle, and discovered they were not as final as I’d thought. I began experimenting with collage essays during the same time period (2005-2007) when Faith and Toby and Gary were claiming other people’s words as their own—a parallel I didn’t even realize until I started writing this essay. I own that I’ve been predisposed to seek Deeper Meanings. But I choose to believe the covers truly reveal the emotions these songs have always held, even costumed in a housedress or hiding beneath a hat brim. The night George Jones died, Leonard Cohen performed a cover of George’s “Choices.” The cold hard truth is that celebrity illuminates Nashville’s darlings like the Opry spotlight on a Nudie suit, but when the glitter is scratched off, the heart can still be gold.

Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, where Ford F-150s and old-person sedans peacefully coexist. Author of Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, October 2022) and director of Split/Lip Press, Kristine did watch the 2021 CMA Music Awards and would like to see the season of Blake Shelton’s career become an artifact. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.