Word: mcgraw
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...accident that McGraw, 37, has turned his professional obligation into a campaign whistle-stop. "I love politics," he says on the way back to his dressing room. "I love Bill Clinton. I think we should make him king. I'm talking the red robe, the turkey leg--everything." Then, because such things must be floated carefully and modestly, McGraw adds, "I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since...
Those who would dismiss McGraw out of hand should first remember Arnold Schwarzenegger (or country singer Jimmie Davis, who served two terms as Governor of Louisiana) and then give some thought to the vagaries of country music. Nashville is perhaps the most protocol-obsessed U.S. city outside of Washington, and McGraw is its smoothest operator. He has sold 30 million albums (his latest, Live Like You Were Dying, entered Billboard's album chart at No. 1) without being excessively cornpone or mindlessly pop. In the process, he has done what his predecessor Garth Brooks could not do: reach an audience...
...political terms, McGraw is a master at covering his base. "Country music has a lot of rules," he says. "It can be frustrating, but the key is figuring out which ones matter and which ones don't." The ones that matter are the ones he observes: live in Nashville, rely on the best country songwriters for material, dress the part, and keep your progressive politics (mostly) to yourself. "Onstage, I tell people to go vote," he says. "But what I vote for? Nobody cares. At least not right now." The rules McGraw breaks--by wearing a bad-guy black...
...instincts for what he can get away with, as well as his fairy-tale life with his wife, singer Faith Hill, and their three daughters, have made McGraw Nashville royalty and given him unprecedented freedom to venture outside the country ghetto. "I'm a country singer," he says summarily. "I open my mouth--hell, I couldn't go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't love that kind of music and want that audience." Growing up in Start, La., McGraw was as much a fan of '70s AM radio...
These adventures in being a uniter, not a divider, have raised McGraw's Q rating and brought him new fans--he is particularly popular with women--but they haven't changed the sound of his albums. That's because the people he counts on to vote with their wallets are diehard country centrists. On Live Like You Were Dying, there are traces of McGraw's love for the Eagles, James Taylor and even Robert Johnson, but they are faint traces. Most of the material has an edgeless, generic quality, both musically and thematically. Like most other country artists, McGraw sometimes...