Yes, it’s true, between the years 1982 and 2004, George Strait topped the Country charts an astounding 50 times and this two CD set has them all, plus a new track for fun, adding up to a whopping 51 tracks. And darned if it isn’t extremely good. You’d expect it to feel inflated or bloated, but it doesn’t. The songs are so good and Strait is such a good entertainer that the album just rolls by pleasantly enough, even when it isn’t great. But it is great a good portion of the time; just out of curiosity, I went back through the tracklist to see how many songs I’d pull off of this CD, if I were making the world’s biggest playlist of all the great songs ever. I came up with a solid thirty which is a lot; and I’m not saying the other twenty-one tracks here are bad. I’d say most of them are fine, if unremarkable. There’s not really a bad song on the album, with only a few coming it at “mediocre.” Strait’s never been a writer that I know of, but he or his representatives sure now how to pick a song and he’s just a master at very simple, emotionally based storytelling. He doesn’t have much of a range, but his sincerity just comes across so well that he doesn’t need one. This is a kind of update of countrypolitan music, smoother than the outlaw stuff that I tend to gravitate toward more, but this is as good as this kind of country pop gets and it never loses that traditional feeling. This isn’t really subversive in anyway; at its best, these songs are good old fashioned songs of longing and heartbreak, sometimes wrapped up in a great story, other times just from the perspective of the guy drowning his sorrows. Though I do have to give props to The Chair, probably the weirdest number one country hit, just a song that refuses to do anything you expect it to do, like, you know, have a chorus or a hook or verses or whatever. It’s not a song I love, but the writing is just pretty incredible. Anyway, this is just a pure pleasure of a compilation. Strait just has his own particular kind of warmth and empathy and sweetness and this album right here is all that and more. Side note: believe it or not, Amarillo by Morning, which I kind of consider one of his two or three most iconic songs . . . peaked at number two. I don’t even want to know what stupid bull**** was at number one those weeks. 4 stars.
tl;dr – decade spanning compilation collects an astoundingly excellent body of work; smooth country singer at his absolute best and fifty tracks doesn’t even feel like too many. 4 stars.