YMMV / Tim McGraw

• Awesome Music: Radio's response to "Live Like You Were Dying" in the wake of his father's death. Talk about perfect timing.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "Refried Dreams" is a goofy song even by genre standards, and is an oddity both for his discography and the album it's on, particularly since that album has at least two of his most famous songs on it. Even the other novelty song on that album, "Indian Outlaw," doesn't sound as out of place, which is probably why "Indian Outlaw" is included on most of the greatest hits compilations while "Refried Dreams" isn't, despite "Refried Dreams" peaking higher on the charts.
• Broken Base:
  • His first Big Machine release is "Truck Yeah", one of the most polarizing singles he's ever put out. Within "Truck Yeah," one of the most divisive parts of the song itself is the first line from the first verse:
    "Got Lil Wayne pumpin' on my iPod"
  • "Lookin' for That Girl", another hip hop-influenced song with Auto-Tune aplenty (although it was mostly stripped for the radio edit). Most detractors think that it sounds way too young and "bro"-ish to be credibly sung by a 46-year-old.
• Covered Up:
  • "One of These Days," "Please Remember Me," "Angry All the Time", and "When the Stars Go Blue" were first recorded by their writers (Marcus Hummon, Rodney Crowell, Bruce Robison, and Ryan Adams, respectively). Crowell's version of "Please Remember Me" was also released as a single four years before McGraw's.
  • Also went the other way with "Telluride." McGraw's version was never released as a single, but charted at #52 from unsolicited airplay. Josh Gracin later covered it and released it as a single.
  • "Better Than I Used to Be" is a Sammy Kershaw cover.
  • In another case of going the other way, both "My Next Thirty Years" and "For a Little While" were written by Phil Vassar, who even performed them live for years, until he finally released his studio versions on his greatest hits album.
  • "Don't Make Me Feel at Home", a track on Damn Country Music, was originally recorded in 1995 by a little-known singer named Wesley Dennis.
  • In a bizarre variation, Damn Country Music also features a track called "California", which has Big & Rich on backing vocals. Big & Rich apparently liked the song so much that they re-cut it by themselves and released their version as a single.
  • In a similar variation, "Portland, Maine," from 2014's Sundown Heaven Town, was co-written by folk artist Donovan Woods, who would go on to record it himself and release it as a single the following year.
• Growing the Beard: McGraw started out as a somewhat above-average interpreter of radio-friendly country-pop songs with a tendency toward novelty. Over time, he began taking more and more chances with his music, finding great success with dark, sometimes alternative-sounding mid-tempos such as "Please Remember Me" while concurrently moving away from novelties. Starting with 2001's Set This Circus Down, he began experimenting with a slightly Darker and Edgier sound. From the next album onward, he began recording with his road band, a rarity in country music. Not to say that he didn't continue to release the occasional frivolity. This is also a literal example, as his change in sound coincided with him going from a fu manchu mustache to a full goatee.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Taylor Swift's first song was a tribute to him. In 2013, he released a duet with her titled "Highway Don't Care".
• Sequel Displacement: It's easy to forget that Not a Moment Too Soon was his second album, due to the first disc producing no major hits.
• The Woobie: In the first verse of "Grown Men Don't Cry" describes the protagonist seeing a homeless boy hugging his sobbing mother, and the protagonist noting that they lived in a car and wore everything they owned.

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