Tim Mcgraw All I Want CD

If you're always throwing hard, the danger is your arm's going to get tired rather quickly. In baseball, that means it's nice to learn another pitch besides the fastball. In Nashville, it means ya gotta have ballads.

Tim McGraw, son of baseball player Tug, started his career with rocked-up, honky-tonk fastballs; but now, as if realizing there's a full season ahead, he settles in and sets out to make a name for himself as a balladeer. ALL I WANT, his third album, starts and ends with country-rock anthems, but the pitch he keeps going back to is a softer, more plaintive one. The songs here, including "Can't Be Really Gone," a string-bathed ballad in which a guy sifts through every tangible reason why the woman who just left him couldn't have actually left ("Her book is lying on the bed/The two of hearts to mark her page/Now, who would ever walk away/At chapter twenty-one"), and "I Didn't Ask And She Didn't Say," about an awkward meeting of old lovers, are truly affecting. McGraw sings them with just enough of a catch in his voice to suggest the romantic pain they evoke, without going overboard toward melodrama.

Yet, rock and roll still courses through McGraw's veins. "She Never Lets It Go To Her Heart" has an electric guitar jangle that suggests a middle-ground between John Hiatt, Jim Lauderdale and Marshall Crenshaw, and "Renegade" has a southern rock chorus the Outlaws would've loved. You can almost feel the twitch in his hips when he sings "I Like It, I Love It." You may also remember those songs some day as gimmicks. The ballads you're likely to just plain remember.

Personnel: Tim McGraw (vocals); Larry Byrom (acoustic guitar); Dan Huff, Brent Rowan (electric guitar); Sonny Garrish (steel guitar, dobro); Glen Duncan (fiddle); Matt Rollings (piano, Hammond organ, keyboards); Steve Nathan (Hammond organ, keyboards); Mike Brignardello, Glenn Worf (bass); Lonnie Wilson (drums); Terry McMillan (percussion); Curtis Wright, Curtis Young (background vocals).

Strings: Steve Dorff (conductor); The Nashville String Machine.

Entertainment Weekly (10/06/95, p.65) - "...McGraw makes an astonishing leap to fully realized performer. His superlative song choice...emotional embodiment of a lyric, and persona--the loser with a heart of gold--make him this year's most deserving underdog." - Rating: A