YMMV / Randy Travis

• Audience-Alienating Era: His Wind in the Wire (1992) album, for a TV movie of the same name. The singles went nowhere (although "Cowboy Boogie" cracked the top ten in Canada), and the album got poor reviews. Warner Bros. staff even referred to it as an "angst period".
• Award Snub: He is one of the biggest names never to have won the highly coveted "Entertainer of the Year" award.
• Awesome Music:
  • His 1986 debut album (under the name Randy Travis, at least), Storms of Life, is widely celebrated as one of the greatest and most influential albums in country music history, the success of which is credited with being a driving force behind the brief revival of traditional country music in the mainstream.
  • Always & Forever (1987) achieved even bigger success and established Travis as a solid country performer, with many considering it his finest album. All four singles topped the Billboard Coutry charts, and it's also his best-selling album with five million copies sold in the United States.
• Covered Up:
  • "Spirit of a Boy, Wisdom of a Man" is a cover of Mark Collie.
  • It's Just a Matter of Time" had already been a big pop hit for Brook Benton, a #1 country hit for Sonny James and a #7 country hit for Glen Campbell.
  • "What'll You Do About Me", an album cut from Always & Forever. Steve Earle, The Forester Sisters, and Doug Supernaw all charted with their own versions of the song, with Supernaw's being the most successful; even so, the song is still associated mainly with Travis.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "Forever And Ever, Amen" may be considered this now that he and and wife divorced.
  • "Storms of Life" and "Smokin' the Hive" reference drunk driving. If only Randy himself took his own advice from the latter early in The New '10s...
• Padding: The last two songs on Wind in the Wire, a cowboy album, are Hawaiian-themed.
• Signature Song: "Forever and Ever, Amen", "I Told You So".
• Special Effects Failure: The music video for "Before You Kill Us All", which has Randy against an animated background, has really bad chroma-key.
• Tear Dryer: "No Place Like Home" is about a husband on the verge of being kicked out of his house. It steers towards a hopeful ending when the husband suggests talking things over, and he notices that she's smiling.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "He Walked on Water", where the narrator reminisces about his great-grandfather who was a cowboy.
  • "The Box" is about a father who clearly loved his children, but never seemed to show it outwardly until the narrator finds a box of artifacts after the father's death.
  • "Angels", to anyone who is close to their mother.
• Unintentional Period Piece: "Point of Light" was written in response to George H. W. Bush's "thousand points of light" campaign, and its pro-volunteerism message has early-1990s written all over it.
• Values Dissonance: The title track on Storms of Life implies drunk driving ("A six pack on the front seat") which wasn't as much a hot-button issue in The '80s as it is today.
• Values Resonance: "The Human Race" from Heroes & Friends paints a grim future with world hunger coming from farmers being paid not to grow crops and pollutants contributing to acid rain. Both are still as problematic today as they were in 1990.

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