George Strait's 31st studio album, the feel-good “Cowboys and Dreamers,” marks five decades of record releases; a titanic career for a Texas troubadour whose greatest ambition seems to have always been the same: Make pretty, plain-spoken songs about life's true pains and pleasures, and listeners will find their own resonance within them.
Across 13 songs in 47 minutes — his first collection since 2019's “Honky Tonk Time Machine” — Strait plays to his traditionalist country style without ever sounding derivative of his former records. That's the beauty of his particular songwriting: The songs on “Cowboys and Dreamers” could exist at any point in time across his career, not in a lazy atavistic fashion, but utilizing nostalgia as an effective art medium.
There are standouts for every mood across “Cowboys and Dreamers,” best heard through an old truck's speakers while driving down an empty back road: The joyful single “Honky Tonk Hall of Fame,” featuring Chris Stapleton, a cover of Waylon Jennings’ “Waymore’s Blues,” and the Jimmy Buffet-informed vacation stomper, “MIA Down in MIA.”
Privacy is required for the tear-jerking ballads with pedal steel that sounds like crying: Like on “The Little Things,” “People Get Hurt Sometimes,” “The Journey Of Your Life” or, most severely, “Rent,” written by Guy Clark and Keith Gattis, that begins with Strait offering a spoken-word 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 its striking chorus. "Until that roll is called up yonder/All I can do is wonder/If I even did enough to make a dent/But I made a few good friends/And I always paid my rent.”
Over the last two years, Strait has been on tour with Stapleton and Little Big Town. He's filled stadiums in states maybe not stereotypically associated with country music, but deep appreciators of the stuff, nonetheless. In June, at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium not far from New York City, Strait turned a space of tens of thousands across many demographics into something resembling the intimacy of those honky tonks he's always singing about. Strait performed with a big band and a lot of heart, in a Western shirt and stiff, straight-starched jeans. (The closest a person can get to levitation is singing along to “Amarillo by Morning” in a stadium of tens of thousands, anyway.) 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 makes it classic.
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Maria Sherman, The Associated Press