George Strait’s 31st studio album, the feel-good “Cowboys and Dreamers,” marks five decades of record releases; a gigantic career for a troubadour from Texas whose greatest ambition seems to have always been the same: to make beautiful, clear songs about the true pains and pleasures of life, and listeners will find their own resonance in them.
With thirteen songs in 47 minutes – his first collection since 2019’s ‘Honky Tonk Time Machine’ – Strait plays his traditionalist country style without ever sounding derivative of his previous records. That’s the beauty of his particular songwriting: the songs on “Cowboys and Dreamers” could exist at any point in his career, not in a lazy atavistic way, but using nostalgia as an effective art medium.
There are highlights for every mood in “Cowboys and Dreamers,” best heard through the speakers of an old truck as you drive down an empty back road: the upbeat single “Honky Tonk Hall of Fame,” featuring Chris Stapleton, a cover of Waylon Jennings’ “ Waymore’s Blues,” and the Jimmy Buffet-informed holiday stomper, “MIA Down in MIA.”
Privacy is required for the tear-jerking ballads with pedal steel that sound like crying: like on ‘The Little Things’, ‘People Get Hurt Sometimes’, ‘The Journey Of Your Life’ or, at worst, ‘Rent’, written by Guy Clark and Keith Gattis, which begins with Strait delivering a spoken tribute to the late Gattis.
“The war took my brother/The good Lord took my mother/And the years, well, I don’t know where they all went,” he later sings in the striking chorus. “Until that role gets called out over there/All I can do is wonder/If I’ve done enough to make a dent/But I’ve made some good friends/And I’ve always paid my rent.”
For the past two years, Strait has toured with Stapleton and Little Big Town. He’s filled stadiums in states that may not be stereotypically associated with country music, but still deeply appreciate the stuff. In June at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, not far from New York City, Strait turned a room of tens of thousands of people from many demographics into something akin to the intimacy of those honky tonks he always sings about. Strait performed with a big band and a lot of heart, wearing a Western shirt and stiff, straight starched jeans. (In any case, the closest anyone can come to levitation is singing along to “Amarillo by Morning” in a stadium of tens of thousands.) There, as on “Cowboys and Dreamers,” Strait’s powers were in full force: familiar sounds in a modern context. If you love Strait, you love him – and that’s what makes it classic.
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